Tech & Your Small Business with Banke Alawaye

Banke Alawaye is known for being an expert in exploiting digital tools for business growth. With over 20 years of work experience with many businesses, she has been helping personal brands and organizations make the best of digital tools for years. She has a B.Sc in Computer Science, a Masters in Business Administration from Edinburgh Business School, Scotland and a Certificate in Entrepreneurial Management from Pan African University's Enterprise Development Centre. Her work experience spans investment banking, software development, management consulting and digital marketing. Currently Principal Consultant, Innovative Solutions, an emerging digital consultancy based in Lagos Nigeria. She serves as program manager CodeLagos – an initiative to train 1 million Lagos residents to code. She is on the advisory board for Girl Code Academy and co-founder, SheProfitsAfrica – a Digital and Entrepreneurship Fellowship programme designed to assist women entrepreneurs in leveraging ICT tools to grow their businesses profitably. She is a passionate advocate for women in technology and was recognized as Digital Frontier Woman by DecadeOfWomen.

Below is a summary of the Interview Tech & Your Small Business with Banke Alawaye

She recounted her growing up days in Surulere, a suburb in Lagos state saying that it had been fun being that it had been easy moving around at the time as compared to now where the city had become congested. She recalled that she had developed an interest in computers at a very young age even as she had always wondered how they worked.

According to her, she had started learning to compute when it had just been the Ms-DOS operating system at the time before the advent of the Windows Operating System where it was just the black and white screen. At the time, she had a big brother who worked with computers and she had always been fascinated by what he did as she always wanted to know what it was about.

Sequel to studying Computer Science, she recalled that her first job as a programmer was at a direct marketing firm where she often sat down with the more experienced programmers so as to learn from them. Often times she took to dissecting the codes they had written only so that she could recreate them.

On the question of a good product or good service, she chuckled saying that a business needed both as if one could not keep their customers happy without having a great product. She remarked that often times small businesses tend to get excited about their product still it falls on the needs of the market at the time. She further remarked saying that if one’s product is not solving a problem and people don’t find value in it, then it is not a valuable product. Stressing on this, she maintained that no matter how good customer service is, if the product was not solving a problem, the customers would likely not trade with the business again.

Speaking about small businesses keeping up with technology, she advised that they keep it simple even as they use Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp, they are said to be keeping up with what people are using that way keeping up with one’s target market. She however advised against taking more than can be handled as in the case of someone who could only attend to 30 people a day such persons need not be on all social media platforms but should take care to understand the kind of people that their product could appeal to and where they could be found mostly.

She advised small businesses to not be averse to the use of technology as it could be as simple as using a calendar, or the Whatsapp messaging platform and it was just about being deliberate.