Printing: We are focused on SMEs to drive their business – Printivo CEO
Oluyomi Ojo is a young Nigerian. He is 2008 graduate of Applied Mathematics from Ladoke Akintola University, Ogbomosho. With experience in graphic design and printing gained from family business prior to graduation, he quickly teamed with 2 other friends to translate his dream into reality by establishing Printivo.com, an Online one-stop print shop serving many SMEs and some blue-chip companies. He told BusinessDay in this interview that at Printivo customer does not just comes first but at the center of the business. Excerpts.
Could you let us in the world of Printivo.com?
Let me start by telling you a normal day in the life of a customer that wants to print anything especially for a small scale business. You want to print certain number of business cards; the first thing that comes to your mind is who will design it. Maybe, somebody who doesn’t print designs it. After that comes the question of who will print the cards. At this point you start asking friends who printed their cards. They may connect you to somebody who you will tell you to come back in the next number of days to collect the cards. In all these processes, about three weeks of productive time have been wasted for about 100 or 200 cards. This is where Printivo comes in. We are Online print shop offering SMEs affordable quality prints. We make print easy for SMEs to market their business. We take off the stress for SMEs and other blue chip companies officials from leaving their offices to look for print office. Customers can design their products on our Website as we have many designs that customer can actually customise to his/her taste in real time. We are an online shop with offline face and we began operation last year.
How is the price of printing determined?
In our Website, as you are picking the quantity for printing, it is telling the customer the price. It is 100 percent transparent to customers. After a customer selects his/her design, order for it and pay, it is printed and delivered to the customer anywhere in Nigeria.
How then do you handle offline customers?
When we have customers offline we attend to them but larger base of our customers come online which is convenient. You can sit in Ibadan, Port Harcourt of Kano and order for your print without coming to Lagos. We have a department that addresses that side of the market. We have a team that is dedicated to offline orders. However we are getting customers both online and offline.
Why did you go in to this Online niche market
If you look around you, the internet is changing how to do business. There was a time that the only way to buy anything was to step out of your house. Now, with the world going Online and the way we interact with our phones, using it to find people and information at your finger tips, we realize that we can serve the large SME market operators who actually need small print to drive their business. The operators in this segment of the market are going around so much to find a designer, printer and looking for where to print it cheap and that is why we came on board to serve this market. We print a lot of products including stickers, roll up banners, labels, flyers, handbills, backdrop banners, promotion items such as mugs among others.
Who are the shareholders of Printivo.com and the source of funding for the business?
The founders are three persons – Adeogun, the head of operations; Oloyede who is the head of graphic design and myself, the CEO. Based on our background in graphic designs, we started off with our own funding. For several months of the business, the customers were the only source of funding for other projects. We grew with customers funds and we got a couple of grants for expansion. Recently we also closed an investment from EchoVc which is part of our expansion drive.
Tell me more about the investment by EchoVc
We are partnering with the venture capital EchoVc. This shows that they have confidence in the company. I will not go in to the details of the venture but it is a 6 figure in dollars. EchoVc is Pan African technology venture capital investment firm targeting tech companies across Africa for funding and for growth. It is an investment company with deep knowledge about tech companies and I strongly believe that the partnership will work for both parties. The fund will be used to significantly broaden the company’s product range and scale the business.
About two years in operation, what have been the challenges?
The first challenge any business in Nigeria that uses heavy machinery is electricity. When we started that was our major challenge. Adequate supply of electricity is central in growing business. Another challenge we had was outsourcing larger portion of our production. Then we had issues with managing orders, control in the quality and control in the time of delivery. This challenged our core value we are selling to our customers. We therefore decided to run the business end to end, meaning we control largest portion of our orders. Now we have reduced outsourcing to the barest minimum to uphold our core values. Our USP is pricing, quality and delivery and time frame. We want to build a brand people can trust. We spend about 60 percent on added electricity. If SMEs spend less on electricity they could do more and employ more people. Every generator takes job of two people on average for small businesses of below 15 staff.
What is your assessment of the printing industry in Nigeria
Official figures put the value of Nigerian print industry at $200 million dollars. But I think it is more than that because the number across Africa is $6 billion and Nigeria is the biggest market in Africa. Also the print industry has been growing year on year and innovations have come in and nobody has done what Printivo is doing. We are putting it on the face of customers to sit in the comfort of their house and order for print. There is huge future for printing in Nigeria and we are heavily committed to being part of that future.
There is deep rooted culture of touch and feel in Nigeria, how does Printivo go around it
Print sells itself. People see good print and they are asking questions about it. Year on year we have grown through word of mouth and referral. Today, our customers don’t even bother to see it before printing as they are sure of the top quality print. We also have return policy without cost on the customer and we will reprint for the customer. We have built trust by delivering quality material and when we go wrong we fix it.
Who are your customers?
They include many operators in the SME segment but we have blue chip companies like Etisalat, Konga, Cornerstone Inssurance, Google, Samsung, Sahara Energy, Nigerian Stock Exchange etc.
In addition to electricity, what policies would you expect from government to encourage SMEs
One or the things government needs to do is to make the environment conducive for business. We talked about electricity but also consider logistics and infrastructure. Create rail lines for movement of goods and make the environment investment friendly. There are opportunities and when we get to that point when the environment is enabling enough in terms of infrastructure, security, low interest rate, SMEs will grow on their own.