Sam Harvard: I Had Unexplainable Interest in Business at Childhood
His knack for business and desire for the good life spurred him right from a humble beginning, coupled with his affinity for abundance at a young age. Although he was born without a silver spoon, Sam Harvard bears an inspiring story that has seen him defy the odds to become one of the world’s foremost business growth strategists. With over two decades in business, he has deployed his expertise in different fields, helping businesses scale massively and creating platforms for entrepreneurial development ideas. The tech-savvy Sam Harvard, in this interview with Ferdinand Ekechukwu and Oluchi Chibuzor, shares the secrets of his success, his inspiring background and insight from his base in Dubai
You are the founder of LAP, a digital skill university and the fastest growing affiliate network from Africa. Can you explain more on this?
We are rebranding the name from LAP to Zibarr. With Zibarr, we are creating an affiliate network. We want to give voices to small businesses that have great products but did not have the marketing capability or budget to reach the type of client that is ideal for their business, product or service. So, if we get young people and train them on teaching skills that can market or promote products that other people have, we believe we can bring a lot of traffic to every business. Every business can have the same fighting chance to be able to reach the number of people who are in need of their products. So, I can create a product right here and I have a lot of people in India buying and that is even happening. We are creating an army of people who could promote different products all over the world using all the tools that are available on the internet in the digital space. So that that small businesses can have the right type of traction that they need and be able to grow massively. That is what that is about. And of course, we have a University where we are teaching 10 unique digital skills which are also monetizable in four different ways. What we do is to teach you 10 skills and also teach you four ways you can easily monetize those skills which gives you 40 unique streams of income.
What is your background like?
I had a similar background with quite a lot of people. It was a humble beginning and I was born to retired parents in the military at a time when pension was a difficult thing in Nigeria. I particularly had poor parents. But I always had an affinity for abundance. I always wanted the best of whatever was available. We were considered the poorest among the poor in my neighborhood. I was born in a poor neighborhood but even those who are particularly poor still see us as poor people. But somehow, through my special brilliance, because I was just very brilliant in school, other parents took interest in me and I had access into their houses to watch movies and I could operate electronics.
I just picked up so many gifts. Without necessarily being taught, I was just good at quite a lot in things. One thing that really was very, very unique about my background or childhood was the fact that I had this unexplainable interest in business. I could remember as young as between 6 and 9 years old, I already knew how to transact. I had already known how to do things and collect money for it. I had a little farm where I was planting maize and I will sell my maize. I believe those women were just trying to encourage a young boy. They will buy those maize and give me money. And I understood what money was even as young at that age.
I had a humble beginning but I had a taste for the good life, I had the desire for the good life and I was always finding myself in the right place at the right time interacting with people that had better backgrounds than me. I was always loved by people who are parents and who had money, material things and all of these things kept shaping my mind telling me that though my parents might be poor, there’s something about me that is beyond what life has offered me. I could make something out of what life has offered me and was able to grow it into the empire that we have today
You seem to be a man of different colours in business. You currently own software companies like Afrofunnels, Learnoflix.com and zibarr.com. Can you share the secret?
Most times when they ask people to share the secret of business success or secret of wealth if they have a lot of money and influence, all of them always have these answers. ‘It is God, it is hard work. It is diligence’. So, I’m also going to start by saying the same thing. It is God, it is hard work, it is consistency and diligence. Having said that, let me go to what I think could be the secrets for these things. The first thing is mindset. The way I think is different from the way many people think and I’ll give you a good example: When somebody buys a car and celebrates it, it is great. And a lot of people start to think that this person is ahead of us, this person has gotten the car and their life is good. When I see these things, I don’t think about it this way. What I think about is what it takes and how it feels to be the owner of a car company. Let’s say I got a Benz. What does it feel like to be the owner or the CEO of Mercedes-Benz? That is how I think as a little boy. I always had that ownership mentality, I don’t want to offer it, I don’t want to buy it. I want to own it. What can I do to also own it? Always approaching ideas, and innovation through ownership. What that does is to open your mind to opportunities around you. It opens your creativity and your ability to innovate. Because as an owner, you’ll look at something that is working and you see how it could be better. And see how you could put resources together and see how you could make it work. That’s the first thing I believe is the secret of me being privileged to lead a couple of organisations. Another thing is I had the courage to start even when things are not perfect.
Looking back as a youth what would you have done separately considering the experiences you have gathered so far in life?
In the area of business and money, it’s been a great, great experience for me so far and one of the major things that I would have done differently if I’m given the opportunity to probably be 20 years old again or be 15 years old again is to invest more in personal development and when I mean personal development, it means to invest more in my ability to make more money and I that I am doing it now but I wish I started earlier. I wish I had not tried to do investments, multiplied money, you know just try to get rich and all that I would embrace failure as part of the process and that would not hold me back from investing. Learning from people who have the type of life and successes that I desire. Paying them to teach me the behind-the-scenes, paying them to show me the processes that created their results. I’m almost 40, I can’t fail that much. I even now I’m still willing to fail at a lot of things because failure is the best teacher of success, it’s the next door neighbour, the last bus stop to success because at the back of that failure, is that pure sure sustainable and proven success pathway.
Can you explain how your foray into entrepreneurship has helped shape your views on youth unemployment?
Interestingly, I don’t believe in the word unemployment. I think it’s an overused word and it is sort of over flooded. And it should receive a lot less attention. I think the right thing should be employability. People have always said there are no jobs but I do not believe in that. They are just so we just don’t have enough people to create them. We also do not have enough qualified people to get those jobs. There is a four-word question that every young person must ask themselves. If you’re unemployed today, one of the main questions you must always ask yourself is what can you do? Your answer to this question and your ability to answer the question is what will determine if you’re going to remain unemployed or they will beg you to work for them. Right now, I have a lot of organisations who are looking for my skills asking me to work for them in one capacity or the other. What we can do to solve the unemployment problem is to develop people’s ability to answer that question “what can you do?” The more they can answer that question the less unemployment we are going to have. Because everybody becomes productive; everybody learns one skill or the other that they can market or export and build the productivity of the country they live in.
As a renowned strategist and with your mission to create five million jobs in the country in the next five years, how possible is this claim?
The good news is that this is very possible, way more than possible. But of course, it’s all about strategy. We can’t create five million jobs by following the same strategy that other people will follow on what the government will follow. We have to bring in a different touch to the things we are trying to do. First of all, let me quickly state clearly that the types of jobs we are creating are sustainable jobs and the jobs that brings out innovation and creativity in people, not necessarily any form of menial job that is just giving them a little stipend. We’re talking about real jobs. For context, we are looking at a minimum earning of N200, 000 in today’s economy for a minimum earner out of these five million people. Now talking about how possible this is, we are not going to create the jobs directly. What we want to do, which is our mission, is to create job creators who will in turn create more jobs. So what we going to be doing in the next five years is to reach out to a minimum of one million people who are going to become successful entrepreneurs by learning ten unique highly proven skills that they can build businesses with and eventually be able to hire people who would create real values and earn good money. So we are creating the jobs indirectly not directly.
Aside from achieving this goal you have set for yourself, how do you ensure they exceed the ideation stage and grow into a viable venture that can attract massive FDI?
The good thing about the goal we set for ourselves and our mission in the next five years is that it is beyond ideation right now. It’s already fruit-producing. As I talk to you right now we have over 120,000 people who have signed up to be job creators and we intend to have a million of them sign up in the next one year. Every week, we have at least 1,000 people that are showing interest in being a part of the move and this move is even beyond Nigeria. It is spreading across other African countries. We are looking at least 29 African countries and the next one year that we are spreading this vision to. What this simply means is we want to export skills to the rest of the world to solve problems for small businesses, to solve problems for governments, who are going to be paid or all of these Nigerians who are solving these problems,
It is clear your modality is through tech; of course, this is one critical sector you have played so much in. But looking back at your social media interaction, you claimed there is failure in business unless you succeed. Is this true for you?
My answer is that the road to success most times is paved with little, little failures and depending on what projects you are facing at a certain period; it might look like it’s a mega project and if it fails you should recognise that you are only learning how things are not supposed to be done. You’re supposed to dig deeper to understand what strategies or techniques you use. The teams you work with, all of the processes of that business that made it fail and you can use that to proceed into the next project as a wiser businessman. That’s the model that I ran over a couple of businesses that did not do well eventually. Some started out well, but because of some things that went wrong, business was crushed or they went down. But I did not allow that to keep me down. I stood up immediately, picked up all the lessons that the failed business taught me and went into the next big thing that I needed to do. If you carry that mindset or you operate by that mindset knowing that every time something did not work out it is not a failure, it is a lesson teaching you how to do it better, teaching you not to do with the next time and that makes you a better businessman.
Recently we have seen a proliferation of online marketers offering various claims on becoming a millionaire in one or three months; are these promises possible through the internet?
Yes, it is possible but not just possible for everybody. So, I will clarify what I meant by that. People are not equal. They say fingers are not equal. People are coming from different backgrounds, different skill-set and different exposure. Which simply means when A applies the technique to making money online it might work for them faster because they have a couple of things already and B might not have any of these things. So, it’s going to take them a longer time. Making money online is not a function of how fast do you made the money, it’s a function of getting the strategy right, offering value. It is a question of whether you have a product to sell, whether you understand the process of selling, or you understand the process of lead building. It is more of a process than timing.
