‘Private sector should patronise serv

The CEO of EAF Management Consulting Ltd shares insight on what it entails in being a female CEO in Nigeria, the role her compa culture in Nigeria and on the need for private sector firms to patronize new start-ups instead of just the traditional companie

Tell us about yourself My name is Elizabeth Aluko, I’m the CEO of EAF Management Consulting Ltd, and EAF is a Human Resource Management outfit that provides Smart HR solutions to bridge competency gaps that instigate poor performance in organizations. We also assist organizations with Corporate Event Management such as Stakeholders meeting, year-end event.

I am a graduate of economics and statistics from the University of Benin and I hold a master’s degree from the Obafemi Awolowo University. I started my career in the banking industry before joining the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS) as a Tax administrator, Field Audit staff to be precise. That background led to the birth of EAF Company.

EAF manages Special Projects supervised by our certified PMP licensed professionals to ensure standard and purpose. We also have trained Public Relations experts that provide organization image protection solutions such as CSR, Cam- paigns and media publicity when needed.

EAF as a company got registered in 2015 but officially started its operations in 2016. So far so good we have executed some training programs, implemented some social impact projects, corporate event planning and handled some media Relations and publicity for some big brands in both public and private sector.

What was the idea behind you starting up the company?

During my NYSC, I was opportune to serve with The British American Tobacco company where I worked as an intern in the human resource department, and being a multinational company I was exposed to international level of HR practices and that ignited my passion for HR, although I had limitation of background, considering I studied economics and statistics.

Out of the love for the profession, I decided to go through the rigorous examination route to get a professional qualification from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM) after which I got my practice license as a certified HR personnel.

I decided to go into HR consulting since no company was ready to offer me the opportunity at the level I wanted due to practical inexperience in the field, also for the burning desire and passion that I had, coupled with the years of experience in tax, financial and risk management from the LIRS and banking industry. I saw the gaps that required to be bridged and I had all that it takes to run a company. That is how EAF management consulting came to being.

What stands EAF out from other firms that are in the industry?

I must say it has not been easy surviving as a company especially in a competitive terrain like ours but one thing that kept us going over the years is the kind of service that will render to our clients, it is very personalized kind of service that we offer to our clients; we work with them in such a way that we put ourselves in a position to understand their business and become part of them in order to be able to help them grow and achieve their aim and objective of existence.

Another thing that stands EAF out from every other firm out there is the fact that we are very passionate about what we do and our commitment to delivering best services to our client at all times is what we hold paramount.

The companies that we have worked with, who are now our clients have over time realized that we are trustworthy and can be dependent on to deliver services with high level of professionalism.

What is the success level of the company?

We have actually recorded a couple of breakthroughs in terms of the projects that we have successfully executed which ordinarily people would think a small start-up will not be able to implement and also considering the kind of companies that we have worked with.

To God be the glory that we have been able to record those breakthroughs without much challenges and through which we have been able to prove ourselves that even though we are a start-up company, we are very innovative, creative and we have what it takes to successfully carry out a project.

Some of our specific milestones of the past year include; our impactful public education and training which we executed in collaboration with some of the big public sector stakeholders and also some big private sector firms.

What was your major milestone of 2018? I would say our biggest accomplishment in the last year will be our tax education programme which is popularly known as Tax101, a tax education radio program, which was born out of the need to fill the knowledge gap that exist between the taxpayers and the tax authority.

Based on my experience as a tax administrator I understand that we have a very poor tax culture in Nigeria and a lot of taxpayers are poorly educated when it comes to the tax laws and tax administration processes and because of that a lot of them were committing tax offences ignorantly and unfortunately in law, ignorance is not an excuse.

We felt the need to collaborate with the tax authority also with the mind set to promote a better tax culture by helping to educate the general public about the Nigerian