By Oluwole Dada
In the past few weeks, we have explored the impact of the customers, competitors, and external forces on how demand is shaped. This week, we are reviewing how the optimization of the internal environment can help an organization build resilience in order to navigate the different environments.
The internal environment determines success more than the other factors as the capability built determines the extent of impact of the other forces earlier discussed. For Nigerian and African marketing professionals, the lessons are clear: embrace customer insights to fend off competitors, adapt to macro shifts for resilience, and build a strong internal foundation for agility.
Your financial resources determine what investments you can make, which markets you can enter, and how long you can sustain operations during difficult periods. You must maximize profitable growth by precisely targeting high-margin opportunities, rigorously measuring the return on every investment and leveraging data to optimize customer acquisition and service costs.
You must be lean, agile, and resource-efficient. You cannot afford waste when the external economy is tight. Your human resources, I mean the quality of your people, their skills and competence, their motivation, and their alignment with your vision often make the difference between success and failure. Organizations must close the “japa” gap with coaching, HR playbooks, performance reviews and having a strong talent pool.
Capital resources and material resources determine your production capacity and operational efficiency. Nigerian Breweries, Guinness Nigeria, and other manufacturing firms constantly invest in upgrading their production facilities, not because the old equipment has stopped working, but because newer equipment offers better efficiency, lower costs, and improved product quality.
These internal investments create competitive advantages in the external environment. Corporate governance structures determine how decisions are made, how accountability is enforced, and how the organization responds to opportunities and threats.
When Oando had governance challenges, it affected their market position and stakeholder confidence. Strong corporate governance isn’t just about compliance but also about building organizational resilience and stakeholder trust.
Guaranty Trust Holding Company’s transformation from a bank to a holding company with interests in payments, pensions and other financial services required not just regulatory approval but a complete reimagining of their internal capabilities.
They had to develop new skills within their workforce, create new organizational structures, and build new operational processes. That is internal environment optimization at scale. Risk management frameworks determine whether you anticipate problems or are blindsided by them. Companies that had robust risk management processes were better prepared for COVID-19 disruptions, fuel subsidy removal, and forex volatility. Those without such frameworks suffered disproportionately.
Your organizational goals and objectives provide direction and focus. Without clear goals, every opportunity looks attractive, and you dissipate energy across too many fronts. With clear goals, you can prioritize investments, allocate resources strategically, and measure progress objectively.
Internal process includes how you do what you do. This often determines your competitive position. McDonald’s success globally isn’t about secret recipes. It is also about processes that ensure consistency. The same principle applies in Africa. Chicken Republic’s expansion across Nigeria has been possible because they developed replicable processes for site selection, store setup, supply chain management, and staff training. Organization must pivot with precision by aligning agile talent to their most critical growth levers, ensuring they capture market share through faster experimentation and a frictionless RTM strategy.
It is not enough to have resources. These resources must be ruthlessly aligned to organization’s market objectives. Flutterwave didn’t become a unicorn by accident. They aligned top-tier engineering talent (human resources), venture capital (financial resources), and an agile risk-management framework to solve a single, massive macro problem: seamless cross-border payments in Africa.
Their internal environment was engineered for innovation and speed, allowing them to outmaneuver slower, more established players. Your internal processes must be built for agility. The ability to pivot based on customer feedback and macro shifts is critical. Head of departments who will win are those who empower their teams to test, learn, and iterate rapidly, breaking down bureaucratic silos that stifle response time.
Another part of internal environment is building a brand that sells. You must make your product and services distinct and this confers competitive advantage on you. These distinctive assets include colors, mnemonics, taglines, and rituals that survive media shifts. Examples of these are MTN’s Y’ello, Airtel’s red, Peak’s mountain and Milo’s green. They are assets that anchor memory under clutter. You must endeavor to add some marketing spend to promote these assets.
In summary, give focus to the following and you would have succeeded in building resilience for your organization thereby enhancing your competitive advantage. These are financial resources, human resources, capital resources, material resources, corporate governance, risk management, internal control, assets: brand, route-to-market, use of technology, use of data and ways of working: speed of execution, discipline, and agility.
The businesses that will thrive in the coming years will be those that master the art of simultaneously managing their internal capabilities and external relationships while remaining obsessively focused on delivering value to customers in an ever-changing environment.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
