What would Google do?
In August 2017, we had our first major break in station automation. A government parastatal awarded us an R&D project in station automation, though the contract sum was just slightly more than $100,000, it was the first project of that scale and size we would embark on, we were determined to give it our very best not minding if we are able to turn a profit or not, we will leave no stone unturned.
The project was for pump and tank automation in about 15 stations in all the geopolitical zone of Nigeria, at that time automating a station would mean running cables from each of the pumps to the manager’s office, doing the same from each of the tanks. As hard as that sounds, that was not the core of the project hence we contracted the laying of cables and associated civil work out to an advance team so we can focus on what really matters on the project
We have an idea of how tasking installation of tank gauges can, the work that would go into doing actual calibration or reverse calibration to interpret the height read by the ATG to accurate volume understood by the users. Our biggest fear is about the unpredictable nature of pumps in the Nigerian market, there are too many cases of the hand of Jacob, the voice of Esau.
There are many brands of pumps in the market, at Fuelmetrics, we group them into two categories: Chinese pumps and the rest. The rest are the good and predictable ones, while Chinese pumps are typically a random case of mix and match, Chinese pump marketers basically buy the cheapest of different components, assemble them and stamp their name on it. The electronics of most of these pumps are basic and, in most cases, outrightly primitive, they were designed to do the basic: measure and display volume dispensed, in most cases no standard was followed, no plan of integrating with management systems, no documentation. There are some good Chinese pumps that had these facilities, but the merchant bringing them in negotiated off those features to get lower prices, after all, no one needed those features in Nigeria.
Of all the 15 sites we were awarded for the project, only four stations had good and stable pumps, the rest were different shades of Chinese pumps. We went from site to site to see what is the best we can do to make these pumps work. A lot of liaising with the pump manufacturers, who treated us with suspicion of being potential competitors, they were not used to being asked some of the questions we were asking, why do you want to know about our communication channel, why would you ask me for communication protocol. You are from Nigeria, no company in Nigeria manufactures controller etc. were the remarks we got, this was the first hurdle we had to cross. At this time we had not launched our own game-changing controller, we were still purchasing forecourt controllers from a reputable company in Ukraine.
We eventually got some of the Chinese pumps to work, or rather the pumps got us to work. We would put a pump online and within a few days, typically 2 days, there would be one big problem or the other with the pumps, we would jump on the next available flight to go and fix the problem. This is a big headache for us, the agency that awarded the contract and the station management. Imagine all the pumps in a station not able to dispense because of a disconnection somewhere, your team has returned to Lagos and the station is in a remote town in Kano. After about five trips, we made a painful decision. We would seek the indulgence of our contractor to disconnect all the pumps while we continue to figure out how to deal with the pumps. The ATGs were working as promised but without the pumps, you won’t get the full picture of activities in the station.
At the station where we made the call to our contractor, the atmosphere was tense between the three of us present. If there is a weakness in my team, it is that we are all engineering inclined and we are perfectionist, many times over, we will leave 99 sheep to rescue the one missing sheep, we also prefer to under-promise but over-deliver. So for us to make a downward review of the scope of a project we have signed for is outrightly not acceptable to us, then there is the silent realization that this will be the reflection of our journey in the larger market. Chinese pumps own 70% of the market share in Nigeria because of their price advantage.
I asked a question at the station after a deep reflection of the situation. If Google was a station automation company, and Google is faced with this problem, What would GOOGLE do? the first reaction was that we are not google, we do not have their kind of money or talent. But I pressed further, we have to think like them, what would google do. We got a second thought, google will replace the entire pump to bootstrap the process, then define standards for other pump manufacturers to follow. Again this looks like something google will do but we lack the capacity to do it, but it is one of the possible things. After a lot of fort and back within ourselves while standing we arrived at what we think Google will do.
Google will seek to understand the workings of the equipment from the first principle, this will help google to pinpoint the lowest common denominator in the technology stack, after identifying the lowest common denominator, an adaptor will be designed that can interoperate with the various upper layer of the stack, there will be some compromise at the initial stage to accommodate as wide an array of equipment as possible at the initial stage till they get to a point of scale that is too large to ignore. From that scale point, google will start to build standards and advice other manufacturers to emulate or implement those standards, now the time will be ripe to bring on board the features that were initially sacrificed to accommodate the initial array. The manufacturer, google, and the customers will all end up being winners in the long run.
This is exactly the route we took, we plunged all of the revenue from the project on R&D to get that initial adapter, we burnt the entire return, raised more money from our investors, and iterated as fast as possible. In the space of one year, we came up with four different iterations, each iteration significantly better than the previous. We also reached out to the various manufacturers, some of our R&D budgets were spent on buying things we did not need from them, simply to get their attention and to be able to advise them on what works and what doesn’t work in the Nigerian market. Protocols were designed and labeled Nigerian protocol on our account; we established connections to virtually all of the big Chinese pump manufacturers. Over time, they learned to trust us, they seek our opinion on implementation, and together we are delivering value to everyone in the value chain.
At this point, we are careful not to take sides with any manufacturer. We recommend as objectively as possible when customers ask us for recommendations, we ignore some market opportunities on purpose if we think they will put us at war with those we consider partners. This doesn’t mean we cannot play in those spaces in the future, but we are not interested at the moment. The result is speaking for itself, we are the market favorite in automation. We have not churned any customer who has paid for our product in the past three years, our first spending on marketing was made less than a month ago, yet we are growing quarter on quarter because of referrals we get from satisfied customers.
I was in a meeting with a potential partner some months ago, and they asked for proof that our product is as reliable as we say. The answer was simple, I am here in this meeting, Ola the company C.O.O is here in this meeting for the past 3 hours and our phones have not rung for once, yet over 200 stations are depending on our technology at that time. We could not have had this level of peace if we did not decide to solve the problem heads-on from the first principle.
It’s 2021, 3 years after we began work on that decision and we have moved beyond just volume reporting to integrating the industry with the financial sector, there is still a lot to be done but we have proven that it is possible.
At Epump, we are not mercenaries, we are missionaries. We stop at nothing to ensure filling stations that engage us get value for their investment