Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
The current challenges in transportation in Lagos state, Nigeria, has offered many opportunities for investors, business owners and ideologists.
1. The future of remote work is here.
If you’re an employee, can you re-negotiate the terms of your work hours? Does your job have to be done in an office all day, from Monday to Friday? Are there things you can do from home?
List out your deliverables and tick out the ones that can be done from home. Negotiate reduced office days or office hours with your employer, as long as you deliver on your deliverables.
Studies have shown that less time at the office does significantly impact positively on productivity. In Japan, 4-day workweeks were introduced in Microsoft and it increased productivity by 40%! As an employer, are you more concerned with seeing the faces of your staff or productivity?
2. Opportunities for the Private Sector in Alternative Transportation.
Now, when you talk about transportation, it goes beyond having another uber or buying buses. Look at the entire value chain and select one that works for you.
The shortage of buses have opened up opportunities to get a financing from a bank or a Venture Capitalist to put more buses on the road.
It has also opened up conversations about water transport. Instead of buses, can you get safe marine transport like ferries? Can you open VIP Boat concierge services for those who would rather go by boat? Lagos is brimming with opportunities for waterway transport. We are surrounded by water.
How about Helicopter services? Someone has already started that. Can you locate landing spaces in the metropolis and set up “muster points” to pick up people who want to get to the airport fast because they could miss their flights as they will be stuck in traffic?
Are you in the hospitality business, with a hotel or BnB close to the airport? Can you push your advertising to focus on reduced pricing for people who would rather stay close to the airport the night before or even in the morning of a night flight, so they don’t miss their flight?
Are you in marketing? Can you go to those hotels and BnBs and offer them a marketing plan and a business model that caters to the above-named airport commuters for a commission on each sale/client you bring?
Can you offer concierge taxi services via an app, only for people who need to go to the airport, where they book 24 hours in advance and the app factors in time of day, time of flight, and then uses data to map out traffic situations and recommend the best pickup time for them, so they don’t miss their flight?
Are you paying attention to driverless, one-man “Uber crafts”? Are you still thinking Nigeria can’t catch up to Automated driving technology? Think again. As an investor, you could be one of the early entrants into the industry in Africa as a whole, not just in Nigeria.
3. Collaborations between transport and other industries will increase.
The 2020s have heralded a new era in the way work is done and how ideas are created and implemented. You don’t need to disrupt an industry to take global stakes. You only need to solve the right problem for the right people at the right time and with the right resources.
The decade of tectonic-sized shifts is here. How have you prepared? What skills do you need to survive this new age?
Change is occurring faster than the speed of light. How are you positioned to not just manage this change, but to thrive in it?
A second wave of change is coming. Transport is only the beginning. Are you positioned for it, or will it sweep you off into redundancy and obsolesce?
