Deepankar Rustagi is the General Manager of Vconnect, Nigeria’s local business search engine. In this interview with MAUREEN AZUH, he talks about challenges of small and medium scale businesses in Nigeria.
How would you describe your experience as a businessman in Nigeria?
It has been wonderful. I can’t compare it with another country because I have been here almost all my life; I was brought up here. I worked in India for a few years but I have been here ever since.
You deal with small businesses. What are the peculiar challenges you think these businesses have and how can they be solved?
There are several problems that small and medium scale businesses in Nigeria face; one is lack of financing at the right rate. A lot of banks will say they give financing to small and medium scale businesses, but at what cost? Can a small business actually take 20 per cent or 30 per cent rate of interest and still be able to pay the bank? Loans should be something beneficial to a businessman.
Secondly, there is a lot of support government and large scale institutions can organise for SMEs but they are not doing it. They should assist in things like organising training in various tools; business education programmes on short and long term which can teach businessmen about taxation; how easily a company can be started; the right format; how copyright violation can be handled; how they can follow all the local rules and regulations and still grow in business.
Those kinds of educational programmes, skills and even training them on things like Microsoft excel, PC tools on stock management, could actually help them at low cost.
What inspired the establishment of Vconnect and what were the challenges you faced at start-up?
The reason was that we felt information was vital. In case of an emergency, when you need an ambulance number, a hospital number or a police station number, you don’t know where to go. I have friends who have suffered because of lack of information.
Vconnect is a local search engine and the reason why we entered into this business was that there was a lack of local content. That means if you want to find a business, you have to physically go there, as there was no other way to find that business. We believe that there could be a centralised place where you could find businesses and learn about them. That was how we started. The major challenge we faced was gathering the data; getting data in Nigeria was not that easy. It was hard work on the field. We actually went from business to business to get the information but now there are so many businesses you can search for and move on.
Some small businesses do not know some options available to them such as this. How do you think they can get to know these options?
We have over 700, 000 businesses on our data base and what we do is to organise business for them in various markets. We have done close to 100 business fora in the last one year where we actually educate the people on how they can make use of all the facilities available to them. This way they get education and all the benefits. We do listing but apart from that, we have a platform where business owners can maintain their online presence, online optimisation and promotion. We have a targeted messaging tool so small businesses don’t have to send messages to various parts of the country. They can focus on the local government areas; for instance, laundry can focus on the ladies and viewing centres can focus on the males during match times so that they can attract the right viewing audience without spending much and at the right time.
How do you cope with interference from social media? What has been your competitive edge especially with search engines like Google and others?
We don’t compete with Google. Google is a content provider where you search and whatever content is there, they provide. But they don’t gather content locally or go from door to door to gather their content. Here we go from door to door, get their details so Google actually helps us in reaching out to these people.
Social media, on the other hand, is rather not a competition. We support that. We have a social media tool called flash and that is a tool that SMEs can own for a negligible cost to interact with their customers and track them. People don’t even need the internet to use that. So we work together.
How do you think the government can support SMEs?
Let me start by saying that I really like the Lagos governor. I really respect him a lot because he is doing a lot to help small and medium scale businesses, all for the growth of Lagos. But there is still a lot government can do for companies who support small businesses and provide a platform and infrastructure for the growth of small and medium scale businesses. What I think is that countries grow when SMEs grow to the next level; it’s a leap jump for the economy. When the oil or telecoms sectors grow, yes maybe the GDP grows but the main income grows when the SMEs can actually grow.
How do you guard against internet fraud, considering rising cases of hacking and duplication of websites?
We do two things to keep away from web threats – one is to verify all information on our site and ensure we have a system which people cannot break and get into. Internet fraud is a threat and there are solutions which we embark on. Encryption is one. We deploy high encryption to ensure that most of the people get only the information they need. Besides, we don’t have bank account numbers of businesses or registration numbers, we only keep public information on our website.
Tell us about yourself?
I grew up here in Lagos; I studied in a Hindu school in Ilupeju called Indian Language School, it was wonderful. There are a lot of Indians who marry in Nigeria and Nigerians who marry Indians, so their children attend the school because they teach Hindi, which is our language. I eat beans and garri, amala, and pounded yam. I also love the yam chips that we get on the road side and the corn in Ikorodu where I used to live.
But I later went back to India where I read electrical and communication engineering and later got a masters degree in computer science. I also did another masters degree in entrepreneurship from India School of Business before I returned to Nigeria, worked for some multinational companies before starting mine.
We have seen some businesses go down for some reasons. What steps do you think people should take to guard against this and remain in business?
Here, the operating cost of business increases because of power issues and some others. But what you do is look at your cost and try to optimise your working level. Here, we have got sufficient funding and support from our customers so we don’t see ourselves going down. Other businesses can do same too.