 Thanks, Christine. It is now according to Trading Economics, the annual inflation rate in Nigeria rose from the fourth month to a near-18-year high of 22.41% in May of 2023, up from 22.22% in the prior month, and matching market estimates. Now, price of food, which is the most relevant in the CPI basket, continue to accelerate to 24.82% in May after jumping by 24.61% in April, mainly on account of vegetables, oil, bread, fruits, meat, and tubers. Now, prices also rose sharply for transportation rather, so 23.9% versus 23.1% amid the few shortages caused by the removal of government fuel subsidy by Nigeria's new president, Bola Amitunambu. Now, McKenzie states that merchants today are planning and buying for their categories amid one of the hardest inflationary environment industries has also seen in decades. When a supplier brings a price increase to a merchant, especially in the economic environment, the buyer may not have the right tools, capacity, or time to determine whether a price increase is warranted. Now, so how can companies prepare to deal with long-term consequences of inflatory markets? And what are the safe strategies to price increment amid inflation? Please, let's hear what you have to say. Remember, you can join the conversation. Send us an SMS or WhatsApp to 081-803-4663. You can also Twitter us at Weisshofka1 with the hashtag Weissho. So I'm going to bring in Jeffrey like in a minute, but I want to hear your thoughts, NJ. What do you think is a safe way for businesses to increase their pricing? Because I just see that a lot of times, you know, you are wondering, but this one does not affect you now. Everybody's attributing, I mean, when it was, first of all, dollar scarcity, everybody was attributing things to dollar scarcity. Now it's feel, you know, tomorrow will be something else, you know. So, but I mean, I feel like, you know, some people are not going about it a smart way. So what do you think? Well, for big business, small business, as long as you own a business, I would say some of the ways you can probably deal with this inflation is to look at, generally, just to look at your expenditure. What are your expenses? Qualify it, you know, what are the, you know, the ones that are reoccurring, the ones that, you know, one time only, what are the, what are the most important, then you prioritize it and see actually even an evaluation will even help you with that, starting with just evaluating how much you spend, what you spend on and classifying it should help. You have a general overview of what your business is going to cost you and every area. So I guess that's one of the ways. I'm sure that, you know, as the night goes on, we'll be posting a whole lot more. Okay. How about you? No, my friend. No, my either. Can you hear me? Go ahead. Okay. Well, it's, it's a very dicey situation that needs an adjustment for both companies, business owners. It's, it's that time where you like is like NJ said, that you have to reevaluate to know how to proceed with your, with, with, with your business. When you look at the changes that you need to make, I mean, with regards to your staff, with regards to your purchases, with regards to procurement, with regards to every aspect of your business, I think it's important for businesses to know that these are times where adjustments need to be made. And in the process of deciding whether or not you're going to increase, because eventually you might, you may find yourself having to increase your prices. There are different ways. I mean, you could look at options of discount rates, you can look at it as against just shooting up your prices. You can make the increment a gradual process because some people just all worked spending so much. We're not cutting down on what is unnecessary in our business. We're going ahead and we're increasing prices. At the end of the day, you find out that what you're going through as a business is also what customers are going through. They need to know how to spend their money wisely. So if you are increasing and you are not, or you are seen to be inconsiderate of your customers, they're going to move somewhere else that they can afford to. So these are some of things that you might need to consider when making your adjustments and making it accordingly, something that is gradual and not something that is sudden, making people to be in a state of panic or not being able to adjust accordingly. I think that's important. But I'm sure our guests will do justice to. Absolutely. So let me bring in Jeffrey Williams-Edm is an accomplished business and sales leader with 12 years of experience in the FinTech financial service and professional services industry combined. Now, with a combined career experience as a new sales hunter, account manager, business developer, business analyst and operations experts managing across functional team, Jeffrey focuses on achieving exceptional results in a highly competitive business environment that demands continuous improvement and volume profit focus results. Now, he's an alumnus of Lagos and Columbia Business School, trained in Malin, Heylem, Heyman and value selling methodology, certified as a safe agile practitioner, Lin Six Sigma, Greenbelt, business analyst, professional and an emotional intelligence professional. He has joined us live, not looking like this picture at all. Why is joining us live from the UK? Hi, Jeffrey. Hello, everyone. Good evening, Lagos. Good evening. How are you doing? We've missed you in Nigeria. You know, I'm fine. I'm fine. When the picture came up, I could say everyone laughing to say it doesn't look like that anymore. But how are you, Jeffrey? I'm fine. I started growing my hair like four months ago, so it's growing well. Awesome. Awesome. All right. So, Jeffrey, I mean, you are someone that is very keen on, you know, business growth for, especially for small businesses, right? So, I know you've been monitoring the things that have been happening, you know, especially in our economy here back here in Nigeria, and you already know what is happening around inflation, the current lifting of the subsidy, and so many things that have happened, right? So, it's a bit tight. I was talking to someone. I said everything still falls back to the consumer. Like, literally, before I buy even Tooth Speak right now, I have to consider, is it really important? Can I use my finger to remove whatever is coming? Like, it's disturbing my teeth, because as a consumer, it seems like everything is coming to me, right? If the power prices go up for electricity, it falls back on me. If the price of fuel is going up, it falls back on me. Whatever it is, the case, it falls back on me, right? And it's now worse for an entrepreneur, especially for a small business, because now, you are now not just facing all of these that I've said, you didn't have, like, staff to take care of, right? So, I would understand when businesses say, okay, yes, they want to increase their, what's it called, their prices, right? But I still believe that there should be a smart way. I'm currently trying to build up a budget for a client that had done something for last year. And I don't even know how to start, because, you know, everybody, every vendor that I've called, I've said to me that, oh, madam, price don't change. So, I'm still trying to rock my head. How do I manage the pricing in a way that I do not chase my client away? At the same time, be profitable. So, it's a very tough place to be. I don't know how we can manage this situation. So, you tell me as the expert. Thank you. Let's go to be here again. I think to start the conversation, we need to look at what inflation really means. And I think when people understand it, it's easy for them to build out the right strategies, as you've mentioned. So, in a more simpler way, inflation is you're not having the same value for money that you used to have for whatever it is that you want to spend money on. So, if I was buying a basket of tomatoes for $20,000, if the value of money drops, then I need to spend more money to buy that same basket of tomatoes. That's inflation. So, when you see this index, when you say 16%, 19%, it's the average index of how much you need to add to your current value of money to buy the same quantity of things that you usually would. Now, in the context of a business, there are probably three things that this would impact on. It would be your cost of label, cost of logistics, and the materials that you need to buy. And so, when you're looking at adjusting or maintaining a price framework that makes your business, I mean, continue to exist, I think the first thing is to go back into the things that change because of inflation. So, I would look at label. I would look at the material cost. Can I adjust my label framework if I was getting five supervisors? And that cost of five supervisors, if I keep two and get junior people for five supervisors to work on, that changes my cost structure immediately. Now, the same applies to material. Can I source locally? Can I backward integrate? Can I change supplier? Can I agree a different price framework with my suppliers? And the same thing with logistics as well, the things that you need to continue to keep your business running, all of these things are impacted when inflation comes. And so, if you want to start building the right strategy, I think you need to start from those indices and look into them. One very, very notable one I advise people is don't be quick to change your price. Sometimes you have very good margins. So, for instance, if your average margin is 40% if you're in the clothing business, if you're in the food business, your average margin will be between 10 and 12% and so on and so on for different sector. Now, if the inflation rate, for example, is 16%, but your average margin is 40, 42%, can you still cushion and sustain your price? Yes, you can. Now, the strategy of sustaining your price means that volume will come because others may not react to the market that way because they don't have the same price structure, cost structure that you have. So, my advice from a strategy point of view is if the impact is not a lot to your cost, sustain your price. That way, your market shares potentially going to increase because people will come to you. So, think about it, you go to the market and on a popular shade where a lady is selling Ugo and you find that a particular woman always has the same quality, the same quantity but her price is 200 Naira, 500 Naira cheaper. Definitely, more market women will go there to go shop from her. Automatically, she's getting more volume, more sales to compensate for the reduced margin so for me, that would be the first approach. I'm going to have a follow-up question but I quickly want to go on a very short break, right? When we come back from that break, we'll continue the conversation. Stay with us. All right, thanks for staying with us. Now, if you just tuned in, we're having an amazing conversation already with Jeffrey Williams, Adam, on safe strategy to price increments amid inflation. Now, please, let's hear what you have to say. Remember, you can join the conversation, send us an SMS or WhatsApp to rate 1-803-4663, you can also tweet at us at WeishuAfrica1. Jeffrey, I already believed that we cannot even exhaust this conversation today because I mean, there's more that can come out of it but quickly before I come to NJ and Noma. Now, I understand my, because I run a beauty business, right? Skincare to be precise and perfuming business for years and usually our markup would be around, say, 40-45%, right? But some other people, based on the rentals that they also, like they are overhead in terms of rentals, you know, having like stores in like the malls, I see their pricing and I see, I'm able to calculate that their pricing is already around that 70% markup. Do you understand? Based on the pricing. So, you know that this price is not, is like an, is a hydro-headed, what's it called, increment because if we are not being hit from the three things you talked about, label, logistics, material, we are being hit by probably cost of the rental, right? Property. That's one of the major costs for businesses. So, I mean, if I'm already putting up like a 50% markup based on the fact that, okay, I've considered rent, I've considered salaries, I've considered all of those things, when these things then go up, how do I manage it? I can't, no matter how, what's it called, how slim I want to go with that markup, it will still not be, you know, at some point, I believe the way I see it, honestly speaking, I think some businesses would have to do like a 200, 300% markup for them to be able to sustain the other things that come with just running the day-to-day business. Am I correct or that is very wrong? Well, you are right. People have to adjust their price in order to sustain their business. So, absolutely you are correct, but I think what we're discussing is how do you do it safely so that you don't run out of business? I think that's what we're discussing. If you are able to do it in such a way that your business can continue to exist, you can do it in such a way that people will continue to patronize you, then you've done very well for yourself. And just to mention, in that situation, you've actually also mentioned the solution. If you have a physical business location and it's costing you a lot, it's time to start transiting into an online type business, because that's where the volume of people who may not have opportunities to come to your business will have access to it. For me, that would be the best strategy. It's less expensive. You don't have to provide costs that you've just mentioned, and that way to help you to sustain the price that you want to apply. And in that way, it's more around positioning your brand. So, if your business was a B2B, as an example, maybe it's time to consider a B2C. Maybe it's time to consider a B2B to C. Maybe it's time to also consider moving it from a brick and mortar to a more online type business. There are always situations that you can adopt that allows the opportunity for you to either increase it little, sustain it, or gradually increase it as mentioned on the program. So, that would probably be an approach to look at. But you can't take away inflation. It's there. So, it's now how do you want to approach it? And what do I need to do as a business so that I don't overprice myself? Now, just to mention, you mentioned a very unique situation. It's the mall. So, everybody has the same business situation. That means that when you change your price in such an environment, most likely your competitors are also changing their price because the same cost matrix affects them and also affects you as well. But in some cases, it's not. So, before you change your price, one strategy you need to look at is you need to look at what competitors are doing. You don't want to say what was 1,000 Naira is now 3,000 Naira, and everybody else is 2,000 Naira. You would overprice yourself. So, be conscious of that as well as you make your decision around pricing. Okay. I was going to ask actually what he just answered. I had two questions in mind. One was how do businesses literally save costing in terms of how do you manage your business so that you don't, because I know he earlier mentioned that you should sustain his best advices for you to sustain the price so that you can get, you can eat into the market share. But my question, so follow up to that is what are the things that you have to do in order to, because as a business, when you sustain that price, your costing is not going to drop. Your costing is still up and is still going up, depending on the way the market has been affected. So what are the things that businesses can do in order to be able to try during this sustaining the price? Do you understand? So what, I don't know, do you understand my question? I do. So one of those things that businesses can actually do in order to be able to try during that period of sustaining the price just so that- Just keep it afloat. Yes, just keep the business afloat. What are those things, what are the things that the businesses will have to look into or do in order to sustain that whole process? I think one of the things I've advised people in the past is to diversify the product portfolio. And let me break that down so that everybody can understand that. You have a certain product. So let's say, for instance, you're selling weed in your fashion business. You would have a certain niche that you're addressing. You want to keep up premium hair and all of that. When you diversify your portfolio, it means that you want to sell other type of product to other type of customers. And you can change that by quality or variation that comes with the product. And what that means is you would sustain the high-paying customers but have a variance for the mid-price category of customers or below the pyramid customers. So that's where your core product is not diluted because you're trying to reduce your price. One of the things I've seen as well is people have found ways to layer value to sustain this. So what that means is if I enjoy eating at a restaurant, what the restaurant could do is take away two chickens and offer me one with my rice and say if you want to cook or fries with that, the price would be what you are used to. So when you recalibrate your product mix, you are able to sustain price for the items that are expensive. You sell expensive. For the items that are cheap, you provide better pricing for that. For items that were more voluminous before, you need to dissect the offering in such a way that customers are also affected by inflation. Remember, it's not the businesses alone. The people buying those products are also affected. They might want a smaller or different variance for the price that they are comfortable with and they can build on that gradually in order to achieve the overall value that they feel right to spend more money on. Absolutely. Now, let me come to you. All right. Jeffrey, just to add to Angie's question. Now, I want to concentrate in the context of startup businesses. I'm talking about, for example, someone, an Agigibred seller who may not have product mix or may not have the opportunity to or may not have the assets to be able to diversify in that regard. What would your advice be for somebody like that? Somebody who has a store, just regular everyday people. They may not, they may be startup businesses or small businesses and they do not have that capacity to diversify. Like you've rightly said, what would be safe strategies that they can use to stay afloat? Because literally, these people don't have income as it were. I mean, what they're bringing in is not as much as if you had a business, a thriving business. So what would you advise someone in that capacity to do that one? And then what role does it got actually play in helping businesses or individuals through a process of price increment or inflation as it were? I don't know if that's clear. Yes. So I would take the first one. You probably ask the second question again, because it was okay. So price is a factor of cost. So we can take away the fact that price may have to increase. And please understand that because you've increased your price or because you sell at a premium or higher prices, normally you're not going to get a customer. It is the impact that most times people look at, which is, I mean, I have less customer than I should. That's the impact. Or it would take me a longer time, a longer sales cycle to sell what I want to sell. Those are the impact. So if that little small business has calculated its costs and understands that my overall cost is 80% and I'm going to make 20% margin, I think for this kind of customer, it is positioning that is important now because there's nothing you can do around the price. How do you want to sell your product? How do you want to position this product? Do you want to offer certain things with that pricing so that you attract the kind of customers that you are looking for? So in such a situation, go with your price. As long as the cost is clear, there's really nothing because your small business, every margin means something to you. Now, in some cases, people find ways to sell in addition to what they do. So I'll give you an example. There is a lady who sells amala, local amala joints in Sabo. I don't want to mention the name, but a lot of people know there. Now you go there, you have your amala. Now, usually, the amala you buy is maybe 1000, and you go back and it says it's 1200. See, when you're hungry, whether they sell it at 1000 to 1003, you still eat. So what she did was that she met with her vendors and struck a deal that allows her to get free water from vendors. So instead of reducing the price, she now started offering water with the amala when you buy it. Now, the margin that she makes on the amala is maybe 200 Naira. The cost of the water is 14 Naira. So she's now selling with a margin of 116 Naira. And again, you have to look at it. Is that visible to sustain your business? If it is, sustain it as my first strategy. The problem becomes if the margin of inflation is higher than the margin that you make from your business, then that business is going to crumble. That's what you should need to look out for. Now, if the margin is reasonable enough to sustain your operation and your growth, and of course, saving for future growth, then I think you are in a good place. Okay, Jeffrey, I really loved what you had mentioned earlier on leveraging technology, building technology. Many years ago, a friend of ours actually started her business online. It was purely online until a lot of pressure to then have a physical store. She eventually had a physical store. But basically, most of her businesses still come from online requests and all of that. And I see that is happening. So how can we approach, as we round up this conversation, how can we approach moving, especially for people that are able to have those? Because literally, there's nothing right now that you cannot do online. Even food, business, I mean, a lot of people, the logistics industry has really boomed because so many people now are relying on what's it called dispatch and all of that, healing services to bring their goods to them. So how can we begin to move if you say there's a strategic plan to then say, okay, you know what, in the next few months, I want to just integrate my business so that I take off all that cost and put it and invest it, all be a good way to move your business, especially for those that can actually move to a virtual store. What's the quickest way or the best way to approach that? Okay, that's a very good point. I think we're living in a very, very, very, very great era where Nigeria is being celebrated for the way it has adopted e-commerce, the way it has adopted technology, the rate at which people are now using smart devices, the overall penetration of data within Nigeria. So it's a very good era to go into digital commerce. I think the first is to understand your business operations first and what part of that business operations need to change for online business to be made possible. Most times we make the mistake of just switching on the online business. Meanwhile, the overall logistics and structure of the business does not support it and then the woman or the man gets frustrated and it shuts everything down. So that will be the first thing, understand your business operations, understand the part of that business that needs to change. The second part is that you need to know the available solutions online. So who's providing what tools do they have? What am I need as a company if I switch to this platform or adopt a platform? Do they have the necessary tools that would benefit my type of business? If it's food, if it's tailoring, if it's service, it must be there. Otherwise, you would then go through your process of integration, waste time, waste effort, waste money to just realize that you took the wrong decision. The third part is, the people within your organization need to know that as a business owner, you're going towards that direction. You can isolate everyone else and take that decision because you will not be the one to run that on a daily basis. So as part of your business strategy, talk to the team. Identify who among the team will be responsible for managing that, provide for them the adequate training that is required. Pick a vendor that has a very well-structured support system that can train and provide support for these people that you have delegated to manage that part of the business. And if you can, step back after a couple of months to evaluate if the business is really benefiting from taking that decision. As soon as the business is crumbled because they went online, they can miss the demand, they can sustain the operational requirements for going online, and then brand just gets messed up. So very frequently, check on it. Check the sales is bringing in. Check the capacity impact is having on your business. Check the reviews online. Check the customers that they're happy. And I'm sure with these steps that the company will do well. Awesome. Awesome. What a nice way to put it. Jeffrey will definitely bring you back. And I want to just add that. I like the fact that you said carry the team along. Even your customers, right, there will be a smart way to also carry them along in telling them, okay, how would you like your services to be? Would you prefer that we bring this goods or whatever it is to you? I'm sure by the time you get those filters, you'll be able to tell, if your customers, especially your existing customers, because you definitely get new customers online, that your existing customers are open to let us integrate to an online, fully-fledged online. Well, would you advise that quickly? If you are physical and you want to go online and it's getting really successful, would you advise that just move everything online or it's still best to manage both brick and mortar and online quickly? I don't think you have a straightforward answer. If you have customers who come into your store, you don't want to close them out, right? No, what if your online sales becomes bigger than your brick and mortar? Well, I would say if it saves you cost. The most strategic reason why you do that, so yes, if it saves you cost, yes. You are a man of strategy. You don't have to ask us straight questions. I don't look for you, but thank you so much, Jeffrey. Thank you so much. We definitely need to shadow more of you on the show, because we need to get ourselves informed and we need these strategies for us. I mean, it's really very apt. Thank you, Norma. Thank you, NJ. Now, before we go and show you follow us across all social media handles at Weshaw Africa, you can drop your comment, like, share, invite your families and friends to watch and follow the conversation. We apologize. We can't take messages today. Now, if you missed our quote for today, here it is again. It says dynamic pricing, charging more when goods and services are in high demand and short supply and less when the opposite is true, isn't new. Gasoline retailers, hoteliers and airlines have been deploying this technique for years. Can you imagine that? We'll see you guys tomorrow at 8 p.m., as we bring another great conversation to your screen. Ciao.