ENTERPRISE
Passion is my driving force
It’ s an impressive piece of real estate, recessed from the major Lekki-Epe Expressway but quite visible to the passer-by. Unlike its counterpart in other parts of Lagos, this property sits on sprawling grounds. Interestingly, with the economic recession, when most businesses are keeling, over, CEO, Jonathan Odega, captain of the Orchid Hotels ship is throttling full speed ahead.
How did you conceive the Orchid idea? It came in several dimensions. The fact that I trained as a building engineer and aall through my youth, I had thought of a construction company to create a platform to employ people and add a lot of value to the environment and change some of the things that I had thought are not the way they should be. And then along the line as I was travelling around and then I would be in hotels and then I found that a lot of things were not right the way they were being done. At a time I began to conceive the idea of entering into the arena and playing so that you can actually get some of these changes to be brought to bear. Secondly, if you watch the game of Monopoly, you will see that hotel development is the height of it. Monopoly is a real estate game. So from construction, I gradually moved into real estate development and from there one metamorphosed into building and running hotels. Thirdly, the industry has been dominated by foreigners and then you find out that our people go there. Look at all the big hotels and tell me if you can find a black man in Nigeria as GM. You will not find one. They will tell you to your face that a black man cannot be a GM in our own country. That is sectionalism and it is not right. I felt that the only way to bring about a change of this trend is playing in the field oneself. So then the opportunity came to start. One had done a lot of real estate development. And, of course, hotel development is really real estate. If you understand the concept of laying out structures, having the user in mind, from day one you are already beginning to give the service and if the infrastructure is correct, the facilities are right; the job of managing the place becomes easier. So it’ s more or less 80 % facility management of real estate. With all these things, it was very easy for me to slide into these shoes. You mentioned that when developing, one has the user in mind. That means that whoever is the user has priority and has ownership for that time he’ s spending. You are just custodians for the user. The essence is that once you have developed
18 invests. ng- MARCH / APRIL 2017