Femi Akintunde, Managing Director of Alpha Mead Group speaks to BusinessDay’s Frank Eleanya on the emerging facilities management industry in Nigeria and the role it plays in driving employment in the country. He also speaks on the role government can play to boost local investment in the industry.
What is Alpha Mead all about?
It is a group comprising of three business subsidiaries. The first one which is our bread and butter is facilities management which some people also call facilities maintenance (FM). This focuses on providing safe and functional built environment for people and businesses. The second business line is our real estate development company where we build houses, and sell or rent them to people. The third one is healthcare management. This is a vertical of facilities management. The verticals include residential, offices, malls, religious, sports facilities, recreation facilities, hospitality, and healthcare. There are FM services for hospitals, where you provide very clean and functional hospital spaces for patients to receive care. That is part of our health care management. Beyond that is also providing healthcare management services by running it for a hospital. The primary one we focus on now is diagnostic equipment. We provide diagnostic services for hospitals. There is a saying that the problem rightly diagnosed is more than half solved and this is one of the reasons we added it to our service offerings. One of the challenges that our healthcare has been going through is that our doctors do not have sufficient tools to understand the problems that patients are coming with, and this is part of the frustration that forces many of them to leave the country, apart from the poor remuneration structure.
As we speak we are providing diagnostic services at Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH). We invested about N2 billion to provide state-of-the-art healthcare diagnostic equipment at the hospital, from ultrasound machines to mammography for breast cancer, digital X-Ray, CT Scans for brain and general body systems, and MRI. We are providing similar services at Gbagada General Hospital and we are in the process of launching something for Olabisi Onabanjo Teaching Hospital. We have something for a government hospital in Egbeda which is also being equipped now. We can equip it for you on a lease basis and we can operate it for you to complete your healthcare delivery service.
Those are the three businesses that we run. The one that we have exported now is our facilities management business.
How long have you been in the market and what have been the lessons?
We have been in the market since 2007, which is over 15 years now. There are a couple of lessons but I will touch on the three key ones. The first lesson we have learnt over time is that Nigerians’ approach to maintenance is along the line of break-and-fix. People do not imbibe the habit of preventing breakdown. They will rather wait to experience a breakdown before they fix it. So, when you are trying to pitch the concept of preventive maintenance, an average Nigerian does not believe this is where he should spend his money: if it isn’t broken, why fix it? That’s the general mentality. But multinationals and well-established institutions understand the need to maintain a system to prevent fixing it.
It is not just with equipment and buildings we see this as it is also existent with, healthcare. This is where people will wait until the equipment has completely broken down. That is why we say providing affordable healthcare is not necessarily to make it cheap but to make it cost-effective. For example, when you detect cancer at stage one, it cost you far less to treat it with much higher chances of survival. But when you do not go for a regular checkup and cancer has grown, expanded to very dangerous parts of the body, and grown from stage 1 to 4, at that stage, there is very little that the doctor can do than tell you to live for 1 or 2 years. It is the same thing for every system.
So, part of our approach to the market, based on that lesson is that at every opportunity when we are pitching for a job we make it clear what value proposition we are putting on the table for you.
Secondly, in this market, when it comes to service and customers, an enlightened person is willing to pay for quality service. People often say “they will not pay”, but I have discovered that when you render good service and your brand is strong enough to believe, they will pay for your service. Why is Julius Berger still getting very major construction work and there are several other construction companies that people will never call?
The third lesson is that people like to see transparency and accountability. For every one naira an average Nigerian spends, he wants to know the value it is bringing. So, you have to do the extra work of being able to account for the service that you are rendering appropriately. You cannot take that for granted.
Tell us about the growth of the FM market from where you met it till now
15 years ago when we met the industry, it was pretty much unknown. Today it is still at a very basic level of awareness. It has improved beyond what it used to be. More people are aware of it but they call it different names. Some call it building maintenance, facilities maintenance, or facilities management, and in banks, they call it the admin department. Essentially, what it is doing is creating an enabling physical built environment that is conducive for people to live, work, and play. Although, the awareness is still in its infancy stage.
The reason for it is not farfetched. The industry suffers greatly from underfunding. A lot of people think that facilities management is about cleaning. It is far more advanced than that. There is a system behind it that allows you to run it as a professional service. You can do it at a very basic level, like cleaning, fumigation, and so on. However, when you get to the point where you are looking at how to extend the lifespan of a building and make it safe for people, that is a different level. It requires a lot of diligence on the part of the professionals providing that service and that requires a certain level of tools and a skill set that you must have.
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It also requires investments. Most of the companies in this industry have not invested in many of these tools. They have not invested in their people. One of the things we do here is that we have a training department that takes care of training our people. Before we deploy someone to run a site for us as a facility manager, there are hours of training you must get from the head office. It includes training on how to deal with your artisans because they are human beings and if you don’t have that level of good interpersonal relationship, you cannot manage them successfully. These are some of the things we will have to teach you before we deploy you, which many other companies don’t pay attention to that.
There is also the issue of what customers are willing to pay for our service. When people do not appreciate the value you bring, they cannot on their own pay a commensurate amount for the value of the service. The general feeling is that it is what everybody can do, why should I pay you for this? When companies like us are pitching for jobs, people use the same eye they use to access roadside maintenance or repair companies. But this is a corporate organisation. This is why we work for the type of companies we work for because they understand the value we bring to the table and how it saves them money in the long run and how it adds value to their brand and the quality of life of those who use the facility.
What will it take to get a lot more service providers trained?
It is about capacity building and it can happen at different levels. It starts with individuals voluntarily wanting to learn about a skill. People will only learn a skill if they see the potential for a good return. Why would you learn to plumb if being a plumber doesn’t put food on your table? In London, you can be a plumber and be richer than your manager. This is because the institutional and regulatory framework that should sieve out the quality of people is not in existence in Nigeria. We don’t have sufficient training facilities to breed those artisans.
Secondly, we look down on them so much that nobody will give birth to a child, send him to school and encourage him to be an electrician or a carpenter. Whereas that is what some people live on in some other countries and they are well-to-do. We need to change certain orientations in our environment. Everybody needs to play different roles. We need to have more technical skills centre in our education system to encourage more people. Customers also need to be prepared to pay what is due for professional services. To the extent that we don’t do this, people will not be available to do it. The pool is very shallow for artisans which is why we go to Cotonou, Ghana, and Togo to bring those guys in. Most of the guys used for construction today come from outside the country. You can bring people in and give them certain managerial training to be able to handle the management of infrastructure and buildings like this. We have different training and certification from IFMA, the largest international association of facility managers globally, we have IWFM (International Workplace Facilities Management) and we are licenced training institutions to those two organisations. We train people here and they get licenced there. We subsidised the training by 50 percent which is another incentive for people to come work for us.
Most of the people who have worked with us in the past are heading the top FM in multinationals. We are happy to continue to contribute to the industry. We also need the government to come and support it. In situations where even government buildings need to be made available for local firms to manage, you see them giving it to international firms. That is the situation with Aso Rock and other major government facilities. You see this situation where Nigerian companies are not properly being patronised.
What do you think can be done about the perception of people toward artisans?
I think it will start with orientation. There are a lot of things that have to do with mindset. I have worked away from a major contract that runs into hundreds of millions of naira because somebody assaulted one of my security guards. Those are some of the sacrifices we make for the industry as we are not supposed to be seen as desperate. Alpha Mead will never allow things to get to that stage. I will lose a contract if you do anything to any of my staff. I know what it takes before we recruit a single staff here. So, we treat them with pride. We will not disrespect you but please treat our staff with respect. That is one part.
The other part is that the service providers have to raise their game. You have to be professional. One of our core values is professionalism. You have to show up right. Comport yourself well to the customer because the way you present yourself is the way you will be treated. I am proud of every Alpha Mead staff. People ask us how are we doing it but when you present your staff in a bad way people will take advantage of them.
What is the value of the FM market in Nigeria?
It is difficult but the global standard is that the FM industry is about 5 percent of the GDP. If you look at the multiplier that facilities management covers, it is the biggest industry for manpower. From the cleaner to the security guard, the person sweeping the roads, that is FM. when you look at that the economy it drives it is huge.
