Mr Alder started by sharing statistics on the longevity of Nigerian Businesses. The statistics are as follows; 80% of new businesses will survive the first year, only 30% of businesses will be around in 10 years; 45 is the average age of successful startup founders, businesses founded by those under-30s often fail due to lack of experience and lack of a good team and illiquidity account for 52% of business failures. He also mentioned a list of global examples like Nokia, Blackberry, Kodak, and Blockbuster, and how they have been outdated by disruptively innovative options. 

He revealed that if we want to know about business success, we must know about business obituaries. He mentioned some business places such as input, output, throughput, pushput, client and feedback. He then revealed that a business was likely to fail through any of these places. In addition to that, he mentioned that it was important for a business owner to ask for feedback from their customer about their product/service so that it can be put back into the business input. Most business owners, he said do not concentrate on these six elements and so they fail.

As he went on, Mr Alder went on to say that a lot of people start up their businesses on a logic that would cause the business to fail. He then condemned the idea of a business owner refusing to hire enough people because they want to save money. Mr Alder also pointed out that business owners must make sure that they communicate their services easily in the way it is written on their business cards.

Sharing the story of his earlier days in starting out a business, he admonished that in delivering a job to a client, throughputs should not be reported; the client is only interested in the results. He defined output as the natural by-product of a series of exercises. He then stated that output is not a product; it must be converted to a product. 

He ended by mentioning what he called “the confidence of ignorance” and what this meant was that if a person didn’t know what they were doing, they go ahead and put all their creative best into that effort so that it comes out excellently eventually. He made this conclusion after sharing his story of how he began branding consulting back in the day.