Obi, eTranzact Founder Tasks Business Leaders on Creating Unique Value for Customers

Dr. Valentine Obi, founder and group CEO, eTranzact, has called on business leaders to be unique in formulating business strategies in order to deliver valuable products for its customers.

L-r: Dr David Olaniyi Oyedepo, Chancellor, Covenant University, Canaanland, Ogun State and Dr. Valentine Obi, founder and group CEO, eTranzact, after the lecture recently.

Dr. Obi’s eTranzact is Nigeria’s premier payment processing platform boasting of home grown Switch with its processing power which activates its partners’ to drive billions of dollars in transactions yearly through eTranzact card, and direct from bank account gateways.

Delivering a speech at the African Leadership Development Centre, ‘ALDC Leadership Masterclass’, with the topic: Business Strategy and Innovation, held recently at Covenant University, Ogun state, recently, Dr. Obi, urged business leaders to identify set of customers they intend to serve in their respective markets, in order to enable them create unique strategies that will deliver valuable products to these customers.

According to him, “if you’re trying to serve the student community, being the best is different from if you’re trying to serve working class people with families. There is no best way to compete.

“There are lots of good ways to compete depending on who you’re trying to serve.

“So we are not competing to be the best, we are competing to be unique. It is about making choices and the most fundamental choice is, Who am I trying to serve.”

He also described business leaders quest to serve everyone in their sector as one of the mistakes in strategy formulation.

He said, “One of the worst mistakes in strategy is to try to serve everybody.

“You can’t meet the need of every customer, you just can’t do it, it’s impossible.

“You can’t meet all the needs of every customer. Fundamentally, if you have a strategy, you’ve got to decide which needs, of which customers, you’re actually going to seek to meet.

“Secondly, Another tremendous mistake in strategy is to get into a competition with your competitors on the same thing.

“If your competitor is trying to be the lowest cost, it’s pretty unusual to win, if you then try to chase them and be low costs.

“The essence of strategy is to find a unique position in your business that delivers unique value to the customers you choose to serve.

“So, to be truly successful, we really need a strategy and that strategy isn’t about just being the best, but a set of choices we make on a long term to distinguish ourselves from competitors.

“It defines how we are going to compete differently. And it also really articulates the competitive advantages that we will seek to create and use, in order to win.”

He further pointed out that if we’re doing the same thing as our competitor, it means we don’t have a strategy.

“You’re just trying to do the same thing better. That’s not strategy, that is operational excellence.

“Strategy is around choices that you make, versus the choices that your competitors are making

“Simply implementing best practices, buying the latest machine, using the internet to communicate with your customers. There are lots of things that managers do, to actually keep making the company more productive and more efficient. All those things are a necessity, but they’re not strategy.

“Strategy is not about doing the same thing better. Strategy is about finding that different place for the organisation to deliver value.

“What makes it challenging, however is that, you have to do both of these things at the same time .You have to keep adopting best practices, but at the same time having real clarity about what is going to make you different in the marketplace”.

Speaking on the part of businesses craving to be number one or number two in the industry, Dr. Obi said that those are mere goals and aspirations but not strategy, he noted that strategy is the unique positioning that allows us to get to whatever goal we set for ourselves.

He called on businesses not to confuse strategy with goals, noting that the two cannot be mixed together.

He said, We cannot mix goals and strategy together,  we have to separate them, we need to separate the goal we’re trying to achieve, and then the strategy is how we’re going to get there.

“Also, When we think about strategy, we also have to recognize that strategy is holistic. It’s not about any single action that you might want to take. It is not just one thing one steps. Strategy is not to go international, that’s not a strategy. Raising research and development is not a strategy. Strategy is holistic.

“It’s the whole set of choices that you make collectively in order to position the company for success, over time, in the marketplace.

“It’s not just, one step, it’s a set of steps. Strategy involves all the functions of the organisation. It includes marketing, production, finance, everything together to create that unique positioning, that’s what strategy is all about”, he added.