Business Relevance in 2019 with Oluyomi Ojo

Oluyomi Ojo is a tech entrepreneur and the Co-Founder / CEO of Printivo, an online printing company that is redefining the printing industry and landscape in Nigeria. He is a graduate of Applied Mathematics from the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), Oyo State. He has received certifications from the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria, Charted Institute of Marketing, Simon Page Business School, University of the Arts London and Digital Marketing Institute in Advertising, Marketing, and Digital Marketing respectively. Our guest has always been an entrepreneur right from his post-secondary education (starting at an early age of 16 years) from selling handmade cards to branding t-shirts and moving on to set up his own start-up enterprise. He has also built an advert agency and is a well-known personality in the print industry in Nigeria.

Below is a summary of the interview Business Relevance in 2019 with Oluyomi Ojo

He recalled that it was a family tradition to start a venture after secondary school and how he had read a lot of books on business, motivation, and how it had all shaped him. He said he welcomed the technology movement that was underway being that it had always been in existence with more industries going mainstream. He said that it was a common phenomenon as humans always tend to look for convenient ways to do things.

He was of the opinion that interaction with technology was in two ways, the creator and the end-user. He was of the opinion that businesses will gradually evolve with technology. Furthermore, he said that it was important for businesses to focus more on their customers and less on their competitors. He also advised that small businesses take into consciousness that irrespective of all the bad news they can always still make progress.

He said a pointer to a successful business is its consistency of paying customers and a strong team doing the job. He said ideation and innovation were very crucial to growth in any economy but when there is no market for such ideas people cannot use it. He spoke about a particular technology brand that had become too confident and was innovative and so lost to their competitors. This he said was a lesson every business owner needed to take note of is that competitors with bigger and better products or services may arise.

Discussing how he had been able to innovate Printivo over the years, he said that the company had started five years ago with the vision to make print super easy for customers. He said the vision had so far been possible as the internet had helped to scale the industry this even coupled with the technological innovations happening in the industry.

He advised that young people should take care when jumping on the entrepreneurial train as the path to entrepreneurship was not cut for every individual. Instead, he spoke on the need for others suited to nine to five careers to stick to that path and not allow the idea that if they work only for others they wouldn’t build their dream. He said such mindsets were skewed because any business one is to build, will be run by the nine to five people and as such it was important to appreciate them.