Mr Bankole Bernard is the Group Managing Director (GMD) of Finchglow Holdings and the President of Association of Aviation Training Organisation of Nigeria (AATON). In this interview with SHOLA ADEKOLA, he speaks on the one year in office of the President Bola Tinubu-led government, aviation and travel businesses in Nigeria, amongst other sundry issues. Excerpts:
WHAT is your assessment of President Bola Tinubu government’s after one year?
I would have expected we would have made some reasonable progress, but nothing much has happened. Again, in life, we have slow starters and we have those that are able to get things done as quickly as possible, but the most important thing is to focus on progress.
I still want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they spent the first year assessing the industry to have a better understanding of it and hoping that after a year in office, they should have a clearer picture on the direction they want to go.
However, we need a review of most of our bilateral arrangements and improvement in our infrastructure. Everywhere around the world, international airport terminals have been stylishly converted to shopping malls where all you need is available and it becomes an all comers’ activity there, but we are yet to get there.
Even if we have not remodelled or come up with massive airport terminals, we should be able to provide certain infrastructure that will make the movement of passengers and transaction of goods a lot smoother.
One of the fundamentals is providing WiFi for airports. A free WiFi is inevitable, not negotiable. Let us eliminate these ideas of having too many janitors in our toilets. Are we having toilets or having janitors? We need to be able to do things in international standards that we see around the world. So, ours should not be different.
What do you think of the state of the travel industry in the last three years?
If you have been following the news in recent times, you will discover that airlines have been declaring huge profits because the emergence of COVID-19 brought about a change in the industry and the change then happened to be positive for the operators. The operators within the industry, unlike in the past, have always been about commerce business for passengers getting the best.
So, for the first time, the market trend has changed for operators getting the best, just like the labour market now has changed from employers’ market to an employee market. It is the same way the aviation industry has changed from passengers’ market to operators’ market.
Operators are calling a lot of shots and people have discovered that it doesn’t make sense to say I will be travelling tomorrow. Everybody wants to fly now and enjoy themselves because they know that a lot of people died during COVID-19 without enjoying their resources as they were saving for the future.
Finchglow Travel, the first of the conglomerates of Finchglow Holdings would be 18 years this month. How did the vision start?
Basically, this vision came when I visited the office of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) in Madrid, Spain and I had a meeting with the then Vice President of the association and they told me that in the whole of Nigeria, they had less than 10 Approved Training Organisations (ATOs). Then, I wondered why we could have less than 10 approved ATOs in an environment where we have more than 200 million people. Then, I made up my mind to be the 10th one if we had less than 10 approved ATOs in the country.
So, I decided to return to Nigeria to start an aviation school and to the glory of God, we started from Toyin Street at Ikeja, but we realised that the reason a lot of people will not invest in that area is because it is highly regulated with a lot of restrictions. I felt if that is the case, there are lots of opportunities for those who are willing to do things right. Then, we pushed further to another property at Emina Crescent within the same axis, which was bigger than what we had on Toyin Street.
But, we still found out that it was still a struggle after the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic because the outbreak made our classes to shrink more by giving one metre space. So, we now decided we needed something bigger and that was how we are now at the new building with the state-of-the-art facilities.
When we were in Toyin Street, we had just three classrooms. We moved to Emina Crescent and we had just four classrooms and now in the building on the same Emina Crescent, we have eight classrooms with bigger capacity. That has really positioned us for the kind of growth we were looking for.
However, the idea of coming into the aviation industry started in 2002. I was a banker and I quitted the job in 2003. In 2002, I wanted to go into the aviation industry to float an airline, but I realised that floating an airline is capital intensive and I didn’t have such capital. However, it is always good to start at the rock bottom; nobody climbs the ladder from the top. I felt the best approach would be to first understand the commercial by running a travel agency, which would give me an insight into the sector. Without the travel agencies, a lot of the airlines would die.
I have always said this to some of our local airlines; they believe their job is just to sell tickets, but that is the beginning of their failure. Any airline that focuses on just selling of tickets has missed a big part of that business because your primary job is to move passengers from Point A to B, then, allow the rest to be handled by others, but they get discouraged because of the commission they intend to give to travel agents. The question you should ask yourself is everywhere around the world is that the way it is been done? So, why should you do yours differently here by saying you want to sell tickets? You will definitely miss it because you will expose yourself to a lot of things that should not happen.
By 2006, we started Finchglow Travels and being a manager in the bank, how much could the company earn that they would be able to pay me salaries? So, it was all about let us keep the dream and bring it to life. Our dream for this month, May 2024 is ‘Dream, Dare and Deliver,’ because you have to dream, you have to bring it to reality by taking that bold step and when you take the bold step, you are able to deliver and that is what brought us to where we are today.
Tell us about Lagos Aviation Academy (LAA)?
The story is changing by the day. We realised that what is not making it profitable at the outset was the fact that we had a smaller space, but now, we have changed that space and we can run more courses concurrently with the eight classrooms that we have. So, we are not lacking anything in this our new office. We have a kitchenet that can sit over 30 people at once, we have a breakout room where students can sit and do self-study without any hindrance.
So, it is all about the investments you take into the business. One thing you must understand is that anything that has to do with education is a long-term investment and that is what we have done with this.
How is Lagos Aviation Academy thriving amidst consistent poaching of workforce by competitors?
In the journey of life, you will find some people that would key into your dream till the very end while others would exit at a stage to experience something more. To the glory of God, the whole faces that you are seeing here, they still believe very much in the dream. Some of them started in this organisation in different capacities and roles. So, when you have the right people, you will get the right changes you expect in your business.
I won’t be a leader that will hold down any member of my staff. A leader that cannot find capacity in people and take them to their greater heights is not worthy of being a leader. So, that is what you have seen here.
