Moving on with our transformation plans we have gone from a premium single brand paint company to a more or less white label paint company with over seven brands focused on delivering value for money in each price/quality range .

This process is just about complete we have released successfully into the market 5 different products filling the gap btw ultra premium and down and dirty discounts.

We have tweaked our website and “got out of the building” launched an ad campaign using www.googleadwords.com analytics to track data this was our first iteration and we really wanted to know just who was out there we were pleasantly surprised to find out that it wasn’t who we thought we would find (end-users) but mainly marketers and painter/contractors from out of state

This proved we were on the right track as our ultimate aim is to build a community of buyers and sellers of eagle paints on the web across the nation

We developed a blackberry app call eagle using freelancers from www.elance.com and are updating it taking what we have learnt and making it better , this opened a whole new world of possibilities ....we demo’d it at www.cchubnigeria.com , developersparapo a local tech meet up, got great reviews on www.blackberry.com and shall be doing android versions for its next iteration

We also experimented with a premium 0700 call eagle number and small adverts in the paper these were marginally successful locally but didn’t work nationwide which was the point.

The premium number was pointless. Vanity numbers don’t work on smart phones which our target audience have (duh) and further more in this day and age of mobile phones with infinite memories we have all lost the will to remember a number

We have developed a road map going forward for our online development based on lean start up methodology, customer development, and business model design :- To help us perfectly align our on and offfline roles.

We are rebuilding our online experience which involves building and deploying dummy sites for constant a/b testing of different functionalities ( we have the specs for and have wire framed the final site ) ,we will tweak the site as we build and learn and implement design details from dummy sites .

With the help of www.mailchimp.com and www.surveymonkey.com we are listening to our customers engaging with them and letting them help us be what they want us to be

With what we learnt in Mumbai we have reengineered our whole manufacturing process and are ready to seriously disrupt the industry

We are energised by the prospect of creating jobs

in business you reap what you sow

With the bar for standards so low we found we were shut out of the entry level , we couldn’t possibly compete with such low standards without damaging our hard earned reputation irreversibly, we would have to seek higher ground.

We turned all our efforts into R&D in an effort to distinguish ourselves from the pack. We brought out a series of premium products , while everyone was going cheap, and diluting their brand we concentrated on marketing ourselves on our core principals “good product better price” In the past we had only made standard products ,we now went for high value niche products at huge discounts to the prevailing market prices

This proved very successful in our core decorative niche, we also launched a product “xtra” especially designed to cope with the peculiar hot wet salty coastal conditions. This took us well over 5yrs to develop but would become a market leader

Running with the colored container idea, we brought out different products in different colored containers further differentiating ourselves from the pack

The coloured containers were a cheap and effective way of branding as the eye catching colors and the ubiquitous use of buckets due to water shortages would ensure we were everywhere once again .

Due to the long life span of plastic very soon it became a problem (try explaining to auditors you are not doing as well as it seems...... it’s just plastic is nonbiodegradable )

There was also the added complication of having to hold so much packaging material inventory in order to cope with the various brands

In the mean time we had gotten certified in various categories and with various standard organisations

Once we had all this set up and our reputation was saved and strengthened it was time to give them a taste of their medicine we would launch our own low cost label “Basic” this was better than the rest in terms of quality and we sold it at a premium to the rest .

The reasons were as follows

1, we needed to ensure we were not shut out of any category

2, to act as a spoiler reducing available market share

We would set strict rules to guide us through the murky waters of introducing a “low quality” product

1; Sales target based on a % of total volumes produce ensuring we were just using downtime and not getting distracted from our established lines

2; Establish a different distribution channel for this to reduce confusion in the market place

3; Make education of our customers on the different brands our focus for advertising campaigns .Which created a stronger tie with our customers as it initiated dialogue.

But all this would have been impossible without a united committed work force after the bloodbath of sacks and cuts it was time to start rebuilding we would achieve this by planting a garden .

A garden is a wonderful thing, everyone joins in, no special skills are required. Everyone can follow its progress which is short term enough to give hope but long enough from sowing seeds to flowering to have its full share of doubts and fears

Also a garden is a journey not a destination once you start you can’t stop which is exactly what good business should be.

oops! there goes my cash flow

In a bid to hold onto what remained of our Brand intergrity (the quality we were suppose to stand for)
Once we found out where our lunch was going we slashed our distributors list taking back control and changed the color of our buckets from generic white to green.

Two quick fixes which would expose the under pinning’s of our world.

The first thing noticed was a huge drop in our cash flow: this would cause us to look inside for the first time in years , everything was rotten and antiquated from staff ,to accounting methods to dealings with suppliers

We will take a surgical view to everything wring out savings from our suppliers , fire redundant staff and begin writing custom software to better handle our unique needs
Once we had been stripped bare by this exercise we were able to take a critical look at ourselves and access our strengths:
Good brand , good staff, location, loyal customer base .
And weakness :
narrow range of products , tight distribution network, no certification .

One of the consequences of the adulterators was there was now a whole new product category “crap” which the painters loved, what you saved on paint you spent twice on labour.

Meanwhile the whole of the industry was in the same position , one of the premium players would make redundant their head of R&D , we hired him immediately and began to create a state of the art R&D department .

who is eating our lunch

we were everywhere and no where sales were tanking but every where you looked you saw our "product" being used , We had two large stores in the two largest markets that handled our retail distribution , a brand that was Known all along the west coast of Africa, and stood for a fair price for a high quality product, word of mouth endorsement like the church, and an economic situation that had just shaken off the stifling dust from over a decade of military paralysis and was jittery with democratic hope.
What could possibly be wrong ? a chance meeting with a customer/friend who complained about the quality of the product he bought from the market ,caused us to pause and for once not assume the painters had tampered with the product but question whether their could actually be something amiss.
We had recently lost one of our main Distributors who controlled our biggest market, Mushin, in the heart of lagos mainland , His death would leave us at the mercy of the market the adultrators had free reign as there was no one to effectively replace his oversight functions.
We at that time where copying the brewery/pub model where we developed a site and gave it to a distributor to run , rent free ,dealing exclusively with our product.
on further investigation and a bit of sleuth work we discovered the new freedom , and rule of law had enabled a host of new players to enter the market ,these new players were capitalising on the loop hole provided by the ubiquitous white plastic buckets that where used to package paints and the simple screen printing process .
Many of them had grown up in the markets and had ties to brands like ours which they now exploited .They simply made their low quality paints filled it in to the buckets and printed our name and presto they were in business .
We now knew who was eating our lunch but the battle had just began ,the damage done to our reputation was critical .But once we had our enemy insight the war could begin in earnest ,their have been many battles fought so far but finally the war is over and the process of rebuilding has begun .