Bukayo Ewuoso walked into his first meetings at Pisi expecting a shorter road than the one he got.
He had reason to. Bukayo is a marketer who crossed into the commercial side of the business at Eskimi, a global adtech platform operating across Africa and beyond. There, he managed enterprise accounts for some of the biggest advertisers in the market — MTN, Airtel, Coca-Cola. He knew how programmatic advertising worked, he knew how to sell it, and he knew the people across the table. The plan at Pisi was to bring those relationships over, compress the sales cycle, and get the new unit moving.
The meetings went fine, but the contracts didn’t come.
The problem wasn’t him. It was what Pisi meant to the people he was selling to. Pisi is the kind of company you use without knowing it exists, sitting between the mobile networks and the businesses trying to reach you through them. Subscribe to something over USSD, get a service alert from your telco, and Pisi’s infrastructure is in that chain somewhere. It was established and profitable but had nothing to do with advertising.
“That’s something I had to learn very fast,” he says.
He wasn’t joining a team. He was starting one, inside a company the market already had an opinion about. That unit, built from scratch, would eventually move billions of naira in ad spend.
This is Part 2 of Questing’s conversation with Bukayo Ewuoso. Read Part 1, on the dormant accounts he revived at Eskimi, here:
What was Pisi when you joined?
A Value-Added Services (VAS) Aggregator business. That infrastructure layer between mobile network operators and content providers. If you’ve ever subscribed to something over USSD or received a service message from your telco, that’s the machinery underneath.
It was a good business, but it was about to get bigger with a full product stack that now includes a full-on adtech suite within the VAS ecosystem. My focus was on building out the adtech arm, which didn’t exist.
What made it worth doing?
Nigeria has over 100 million mobile users and internet penetration sitting around 45%. So there’s a large population that VAS reaches and digital advertising can’t, and a growing one that’s fully online. Pisi already owned the infrastructure side of that.
Building the advertising side meant you could reach both. Not many companies are positioned to do that.
You arrived with experience and relationships from Eskimi. How did that go?
That’s where I started wrong.
I knew people at the brands we wanted, I’d managed some of their accounts directly, and I thought that would compress everything. It took me a few conversations to understand it wouldn’t.
What was actually happening in those conversations?
It’s one thing for someone to pick up your call. It’s another thing for them to give us money.
I noticed they weren’t evaluating me. They were evaluating the company I was asking them to hand money to. That was a different question entirely.
At Eskimi, when I walked into a room, there was already a track record behind me. There were case studies and clients they could call for testimonials.
At Pisi, there was nothing underneath. No proof in the category. So the relationship was all I had, and a relationship on its own doesn’t move money. The brand was still new. People need time to trust.
That’s difficult to accept when you’ve been successful somewhere else.
It is. You carry confidence from what you’ve already done and assume it transfers. But confidence isn’t credibility to someone being asked to spend with a company that hasn’t proven anything in your category yet.
I had to learn that very fast.
How did you fix that? So what changed?
I had to stop chasing the big names.
The instinct was to go straight for the large FMCGs and the telcos, because that’s where the large budget is. But those guys are already in business with people they already know. Convincing them is going to be harder than convincing a smaller brand, and without proof, those conversations don’t convert anyway. There’s also an outcome worse than not converting. You land one, the execution isn’t ready, you lose them and the story travels.
So we went back to the operating board and said Let’s go for the smaller guys. Use them to build proof for the brand.
Did that work?
Yes, but it took longer than I’d have loved it to. The smaller brands don’t move big numbers immediately. But once you have results you can point to, everything changes. You’re not asking a bigger brand to bet on something unproven. You’re showing them it already worked for someone in their position.
That’s just how it works. You can’t shortcut the proof.
Was there pressure internally to move faster?
Always, because everyone wants big names which means generating more money.
But part of building a new business unit is being honest about what stage you’re actually at and saying so when the ambition runs ahead of the readiness. If we’d signed a major brand in month three, we wouldn’t have kept them. The proposals weren’t standardised. The reporting wasn’t consistent. You can’t put a demanding client into a system that isn’t built yet.
You became a reseller for TikTok and a few other platforms. Where did that fit?
That was the second part of the strategy. We wanted solutions that weren’t already easily accessible in the market. If we didn’t have that, we’d just become another platform doing what everyone else does.
Some clients wanted access to specific platforms but had no direct relationship and no internal capability to run it. We became that access point. TikTok was one. There were a few others across different markets.
It got clients in the door on something they already wanted, which gave us a relationship to build on. Then once they’re in, you can show them the rest of what you do.
What was hardest about selling Adtech under a name the market associated with something else?
The name was actually part of what I changed first.
The company was Pisi Mobile. Mobile in the name already told the market what we were — a VAS business, tied to telcos, tied to mobile. If we were going to do AdTech and payments and everything else, that name was going to work against us before we even walked in.
So I recommended we rebrand. Drop Mobile. Just Pisi. It sounds like a small thing but it mattered. It gave us room to be more than what people already thought we were.
Even then, you still have to close that gap on every single call. Pisi meant VAS to most people. You say AdTech and there’s a mismatch between what they’re expecting and what you’re describing.
So I stopped leading with the company. If I open by explaining what Pisi is, I’ve handed the client homework before they’ve heard the offer. I’d lead with their problem instead. Here’s what you’re trying to do. Here’s what isn’t working. Here’s how we’d approach it. By the time the company name comes up, they’re already inside the substance. The name becomes a detail rather than an obstacle.
What surprised you most about building a new unit rather than running one?
How much of the work is internal.
At Eskimi the product was built. Proposals had a format. Reporting had a template. Someone had already decided how client communication worked, so I could spend my time selling and managing accounts.
At Pisi I was building all of that while selling. Deciding what our proposals look like, how we report performance, what we promise and what we deliberately don’t, how we handle a campaign that’s going badly.
That work is slow and nobody outside sees it. Skip it and every client gets a slightly different version of you. Some get good reporting, some get nothing. And then you wonder why you can’t keep anyone.
I also want to say something about the people around me, because I didn’t do any of it alone. My boss believed in the direction and gave us what we needed. And the team that came together to build it — they’re the ones who actually made the vision a reality. Honestly, more than a reality.
What would you do differently starting again?
Go narrow faster. We spent too long trying to be capable across too many things, and it diluted everything. Defining the two or three segments should have happened in month one.
I’d also have set expectations internally about how long it takes to build trust for a new brand. I came in optimistic on timelines because of my own relationships. Being clearer about that early would have made the first stretch less pressured.
What’s something about selling in this market that people don’t say publicly?
Everyone talks about network like it’s the whole game. It gets you in the room. What you do once you’re in there is a completely different thing, and most people haven’t figured that part out.
The Nigerian enterprise buyer has seen a lot of pitches that went nowhere. So they’re not just evaluating your product. They’re watching whether you’ll pick up the phone when something breaks. Whether you’ll tell them before they find out themselves. By the time you’re in those conversations, it stops feeling like selling. They’re just trying to figure out who you are.
This is such a great read!
I'm really inspired, and have taken some cues from this article as regards to a new product-service based solution that we're building on our team at Ennovate Lab, Ogbomoso.
Again, this is such a great read. Thank you so much!
I'd share this with my team members.