Many people have a glittering image in their head of the kind of life Chief Executive Officers live — seven-figure salaries and hefty bonuses, crisp modern attires, luxury cars and lavish penthouse apartments. It’s a level many dream about, but the tracks leading to the CEO job are not always very smooth, especially for those who built from scratch like Abisoye Fagade.

I wanted to see beyond the glitz, so I sat down with Fagade, the CEO of Sodium Group, for two hours on the morning of Friday, August 13, 2021.

A 2018 Harvard Business School survey that studied how CEOs manage time finds that they spend 70% dealing with internal constituencies, 16% with business partners, 5% with the board of directors, and 9% on other outside commitments – the media, industry groups, government, community and philanthropic activities.

So You must be very lucky to get the CEO of one of Nigeria’s leading marketing communication agencies to sit with you for two hours on a Friday morning. I could imagine the number of invitations he stabbed to sit with me. I may not know all, but I know he missed the retirement from service event of the immediate past Chief Judge of Ondo State, Justice Oluwatoyin Akeredolu, held that morning.

Maybe not just luck worked for me, but persistence, too. It took me six months before he agreed to sitdown and chat.

“I have to commend your persistence and consistency. You were a good pain in the ass,” Fagade told me when we finally met.

We spent two hours in his office in a quiet neighbourhood in Opebi, Ikeja, the Lagos capital that has maintained its place as the headquarters of Nigeria’s Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing Communication Agencies for more than two decades. 

In the 19th century, Ikeja was famous as an area raided for slaves; in the 20th century, it became an agricultural settlement. From the mid-1960s, industrial and residential estates began to spring up in Ikeja. By 1976 Ikeja became Lagos capital, and now you could call it the headquarters of Nigeria’s communications industry.

While we waited for my team to set up the camera, Fagade and I sat in his office sipping ginger tea and talking politics, business, a little about marriage and his view on how many young Nigerians now leave the country in droves.

And his sense of humour? Amazing.

With a degree in Demography and Social Statistics from Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in 1998, Fagade has gone to great lengths to give the integrated marketing communications industry an excellent panache since he started the journey in 1999 at De-United Foods, manufacturers of Indomie noodles, four years after the company opened its first production factory in Nigeria.

Fagade was part of the marketing team that made the Indomie brand a household name and the biggest noodles brand in Nigeria.

Son Of A Banker And Teacher

Born on March 10, more than four decades ago, into a conservative Christian family where prayer, church attendance, and high moral values are taken very seriously, his late father, David Fagade, whom he described as a powerful dresser, was a banker. Fagade draws inspiration from his style of dressing.

“My father was a fashionista. He influenced my sense of fashion if I have any,” he told me.

He picked his humility from his late mother, Dorcas Fagade, a teacher and deaconess in the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), who died on June 13, 2021.

“Her prayers, especially at the beginning of a new month, that’s what I miss most about her,” he told me as he shared fond memories of his late mom.

Fagade studied at Queen of Apostle Primary School, Oluyoro, in Ibadan and Lagelu Grammar School, Agugu, Ibadan. Lagelu has produced two former Oyo governors – Lam Adesina (1999-2003) and Abiola Ajimobi (2011-2019), and Fagade believes he’s next in line.

Over the years, Fagade has kept his wife and family away from public eyes. “Let’s leave them out of this,” he told me when I asked.

The Marketing Journey

When he moved to Lagos in 1998, it was for his one-year National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme at Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (NITEL). After NYSC, Fagade landed his first job at De-United Foods. It was a marketing job, and his stint in marketing at OAU had prepared him for a career in marketing.

“The then General Manager (De-United Foods) said he was looking for a young man who can market. I didn’t know what marketing meant at that time but I was in AISEC when I was in university, so I understood a bit of marketing,” he recalled the journey with nostalgia.

Fagade told me marketing was a calling and if not marketing, he joked about being a pastor, but on a more serious note, he told me his childhood dream was to be a Naval officer, “but my father didn’t want me to join the military.”

Before he left De-United Foods for Starcomms, a telecommunication company, as a Direct Marketing Manager in 2004, he had travelled around the 36 states of the country marketing Indomie. By 2004, Indomie had become a household brand across Nigeria. Until 2006, De-United Foods said Indomie commanded 100% of Nigeria’s noodles market share, and now it presently accounts for 74%. Fagade shares part of the credit.

The marketing journey took him to the Tequila Event of Immersion Marketing Strategies (IMS) Group as a Client Service Manager. SO&U Saatchi and Saatchi Group was his last paid employment. After rising to become an Associate Director, he left to found Sodium Brand Solutions in 2009.

When Fagade founded Sodium in 2009, he set out to bridge a gap. “I realised there was a gap that still needed to be bridged, so I started Sodium as a full-blown experiential agency,” he says.

His moniker ‘Salt of the world’ that became the name of his company ‘Sodium’, was a favoured utterance of his secondary school teacher.

“We were in a lesson, and our Chemistry teacher said, ‘you this boy, you’re always jumping up and down like Sodium’, and that’s how the name stuck,” Fagade told me. “He didn’t know what he was doing when he called me that name, so growing up, I started researching, and I joined the Bible to it, so I came about Salt of the world. Sodium means Salt, and in everything that you eat, there’s Sodium in it. That means someway, somehow, you’re going to need me.”

Sodium’s Turbulent Beginning

Coca-Cola was Sodium’s first client, but they were reluctant to do business with an infant agency. They had fretted about the financial capability of Sodium to handle their first project worth over a hundred million naira.

But they gave him a chance, and he did more than a good job. 

“The first job I ever got at that time in 2009 was the Coca-Cola Christmas tree, and it was about N120 million PO (Purchasing Order). It means they will pay us 30 days after. For a young entrepreneur, I didn’t have anything I probably came out with, maybe less than the N10 million I saved from my work. Then I’ve already paid for offices, I’ve paid for computers, I’ve been paying salaries, and there was this challenge of ‘how am I going to execute this?’ That was the fear of my client at that time, and I wanted to prove to them that I could do it,” Fagade says as he reminisced about the early days of Sodium.

No big bank gave him a loan; he told me, “they were saying ‘you are young, you don’t have pedigree, we can’t support you.”

A microfinance bank came to his rescue.

“I remember Adosser Microfinance Bank; they are young men like me. I went to them, and those guys said, we see your passion, but you don’t have a pedigree. I said I had to do this job. Those guys loaned us about N10 million,” he says.

From his experience running Sodium for more than a decade, Fagade believes the Nigerian system does not support SMEs, “we have experienced it over the last 14 years, and it’s been struggling all the way.”

Many SME owners in Nigeria have also voiced the same criticism. 

A year after Fagade floated Sodium, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released a report in 2010 which says the SME sector in Nigeria is strategically positioned to absorb up to 80 percent of jobs, improve per capita income, increase value addition to raw materials supply, improve export earnings, enhance capacity utilisation in key industries and unlock economic expansion and GDP growth.

Despite this projection, SMEs in Nigeria still face a range of challenges — from accessing funds to contending with regulatory hurdles, the multiplicity of taxes, and high operating costs. Fagade had a taste of all of these at the infancy stage of Sodium Brand Solutions.

After executing the project worth N120 million, “I could barely manage to have five to six million naira profit from the job because I was paying back bank loans,” Fagade says.

To be trusted to handle a big project by a top global brand like Coca-Cola gave Sodium a talking point that it could take into any sales pitch — it was a credible credential that would recommend it to any other big corporation anywhere in the world. And Sodium used it well.

From Sodium’s early stage, Fagade mastered the art of tenacity that made him survive at all costs. That art led him to Tanzania to start Sodium, but that did not turn out well. Not because he didn’t plan well, but he believes it was because the Tanzanian communication industry was too hostile.

He told me his experience in Tanzania is a story for another day, but he gave a sneak peek.

“We did the ‘share a Coke’ campaign in Nigeria, and Coca-Cola Tanzania saw it and showed interest. We went to Tanzania, presented the idea, they loved that concept, and they agreed for us to come and do the activation. So we started moving ourselves to Tanzania,” he says

“So the agencies there rose and said how can an agency from Nigeria come and establish here and start doing business. They started fighting us, a project meant to last one year; we couldn’t even spend two months, we couldn’t borrow in Tanzania, we borrowed in Nigeria to fund a project in Tanzania. We were changing from naira to dollar to shilling; in between those things, we were losing money, but it is what it is, we learned our lessons, and we’re still moving on.”

In Nigeria, Sodium is flourishing with a growing clientele that includes Chevron, Pernod Recard, MTN Nigeria, Unilever, Pears – manufacturers of baby care products, Eva water, Lagos state government, McVities biscuit, Sunlight detergent, and many others.

This growth prodded Fagade to expand his business interest into hospitality with Alexia’s Place (a boutique hotel), Alexia Oil and Gas, consumer goods, Alexia Media Solution and agribusiness.

Sodium has gone from an agency running after a microfinance bank to fund its first project in 2009 to a group of companies with multiple business interests under its belt and about 100 employees whose families rely on Sodium Group to put food on the table.

The growth is not an accident of history. It’s a product of the doggedness of its CEO, who says other professionals now run the company “while I just do the job of boardroom management.”

Fagade considers his place in the business world well earned by dint of hard work, humility and a spirit that never breaks in a storm. It is this belief that has continued to fuel his passion to continue growing.

“You just have to keep going because when I look at about 80 to 100 Staff, I’m paying, I look at them and say this family depends on me, if I leave them now, I’ve left about a hundred homes stranded, so I keep pushing, and here we are not dead, we are still alive,” he says as he takes pride in how far he has gone.

Fagade told me he enjoys pulling people off the street and motivating the younger generation. Before showing interest in public office, he’s adding value to young people across the country through his Oyo Si Ma Dun (OSMD) foundation.

“Well, I just felt like handing out money is not enough for people; you need to do a lot more. You need to understand the value system of this country; what we do is to see how we can instil more value into our young people,” he says.

Fagade Keeps A Keen Eye On Public Office

Most people eventually jettison their dreams, but Fagade remains passionately committed to his. After over 20 years of executing some of Nigeria’s most iconic marketing communications campaigns, Fagade is now keeping a keen eye on political office. 

He wants to govern Oyo State and has given it a shot once.

Why Politics? I asked him. ‘Why not politics?’ He responded.

‘Why governor?’ I asked.

“It is the only position that can give me the kind of executive power and the financial muscle to make the kind of paradigm shift I want in Oyo State,” he told me. “So if you want to make a change, you have to take the bull by the horn. And that’s me taking the bull by the horn.”

He dreams aloud of the day Oyo will become Nigeria’s second economic hub. “We want to be able to take that away from Ogun state because what has Ogun got that we don’t have. We have an international border; we are close to Lagos.”

He believes this is possible with the right infrastructure (now springing up with the Lagos-Ibadan rail project) and the right marketing strategy (which shouldn’t be a problem). Fagade led the ‘it’s good here’ campaign that attracted investors to Kwara State under ex-governor Abdulfatai Ahmed. He hopes to replicate that success in Oyo state when he becomes governor.

At the heart of his faith in creating a better Nigeria, starting from Oyo State, is his political philosophy that a muddy cup needs a lot of clean water to purify it, and if we all stay away, who will make it clean?

“Politics is like a muddy glass cup,” he told me as he tried to make me see reasons why I should get involved in politics while I’m still young. “If you add a few drops of clean water, it will never have any effect, but the more you pour clean water, the clearer it would become. At some point, it will become crystal clear if you were able to get out all the muddy water from the cup.”

Through OSMD, a foundation he founded 11 years ago, Fagade now rallies young people and adds value through training and empowerment. He believes they are the engine to drive the Oyo state he envisions.

“We need everybody on board to do it better. Bring your expertise, attend our programmes and motivate young people. That’s what we need; you don’t have to be in partisan politics,” Fagade told me.

How is he surviving in a hostile political environment?

“They will scare you, mess with you and overspend you. It’s politics. You’re not allowed to come in; they don’t even want you to come in. That’s why I’m not leaving my day job. My life does not depend on it.” he says. “You have to stoop low to conquer because they do not want you to be part of them. They won’t allow you.”

If there’s one thing I am sure of, it is that his talent and business acumen will take him a long way in public service if he gets the opportunity to serve.

With young Nigerians now distrusting older politicians, as revealed in a recent poll by Neusroom, Fagade may be on his way to providing the kind of leadership young Nigerians have been seeking.

The Neusroom survey, published in March 2021, polled 7,000 young Nigerians and revealed that they now have a strong mistrust for older politicians and want young people to assume the position of leadership.

The Celebrity CEO and Golfer

When he is not designing communications strategies or attending political meetings in Ibadan, Fagade is on the golf course. His love for golf started when he was working on the Akwa Ibom State government’s Ibom Golf Resort in 2007. 

“I was directly involved in bringing Colin Montgomerie, Nancy Lopez, and Retief Goosen to Nigeria with IMG Group, and I could remember Colin asking me if I played golf, and I said no. He said, ‘you won’t know what you’re missing till you start; golf is life’.”

Following Colin’s pitch, Fagade has immersed himself in golf since 2007. He is a member of the Ikoyi Golf Club. But he wished he had joined earlier.

It may have taken him a moment to realise the benefit of golf and how it would be a new centre of his life, but he immersed himself in the sport once he did.

“Golf is life, and it teaches you a lot of lessons.”

After two hours in his office, my view of Fagade took another shape. Many of my assumptions about him melted away; admiration increased, and I left with a new sense of his person and mission.

To say that Fagade’s ultimate goal is to grab power is to misunderstand him. His ambition, as I found, is not driven by the thirst for power. It is about value and impact.

In the end, all that is admirable about Fagade converges. He’s a repository of charm, suave, humour, humility and inspiration, who succeeded in making politics look attractive to me. 

“I like that man. He’s so friendly, humble and humorous,” Kingsley, my colleague, told me when we returned to our office at Community Road, off Allen. It was on that street that Fagade said he started Sodium before it became big.