An interview with Dr. Cosmas Maduka is like a lecture in Harvard business school-very rich, engaging and quite inspiring. To have built a conglomerate like Coscharis meant hardwork, determination and resilience."It meant having a drive and a passion to succeed," he starts.
"When you want to succeed in life, you must have an allergy to failure. which I did. I lost my father at the age of four and we had only our mother trying her best to raise us. we experienced poverty and I started hawking at the age of six, by the age of seven, I had learnt how to cut palm trees for elderly women and I charged them three pence. I became a breadwinner at an early age. All along I had the passion to make a difference. At a point, my mother sent me to my grandparents. From there my uncle took me to Lagos to be an apprentice. His spare parts shop was at Ebute- meta. I slept in the shop and I recall some children mocking me on their way to school. They laughed at me for sleeping in the shop, but I told myself that I would be better than them in the next six years.
"I went to school up to school up to elementary 3. Though not enough, I tried to do some research and find out how I could take some parts from a Volkswagen car and fix into Honda. I was curious to know which automobile parts could work on another brand. for three years, I worked tirelessly with my uncle and he opened a branch in Jos. I went there to manage it, he opened another branch in Sokoto, I was there and I became a born again christian," he recalls.
The Coscharis group has the franchise of over eight automobile brands and also sells automobile spare parts. Other subsidiaries include: Coscharis Technology, Coscharis Food and Beverages, Coscharis Medicals and Coscharis Agro-Allied. The Nnewi born businessman would not forget an experience that saw him breaking loose from apprenticeship to being an entrepreneur. He reminisces: "My uncle opened another branch in Nnewi, again, I moved there, and I became a new personality entirely. I was just 14 years, then I was involved in certain sins-I watched pornography, smoked and drank. So I left my Uncle shop unattended to. When my uncle discovered that I left his shop unattended to, he disengaged me with just #200! This was a man I served for seven years without any contractual agreement and I never stole his money for once. I told him as I collected the money,' five years from now, you would be amazed at what God will do with the #200.'
"So I teamed up with my brother, who passed standard six, to establish a company called Maduka brothers. but some months after, we differed in ideologies and parted ways. We didn't make enough money, but I had #316 and someone gave me his shop for free. So, I started there and came to Lagos to buy crash bars, went back to the east and sold everything. The same night, I traveled back, bought more and made some money. I bought a motorcycle".
Dreams die hard. Maduka was a dreamer. His is a story of visions and dreams."one day" he recalls "I had gone to Lagos to buy some goods when I passed through the AG Leventis building in Oyingbo. I said to the man walking with me, one day, I would build something like this. He looked at me and wondered if it was that small boy sleeping in the shop that was talking like this. I have always believed that whenever you have a goal, you work towards it. Many young people don't have dreams and they don't have destinations. A destination is where you are going and not shifting from that path. In fact, when I got money to build a house, I didn't build in Ajegunle like my people did. Instead, I built Coscharis Plaza ( my first building in Lagos) on Adeola Odeku, Victoria Island. I was a tenant when I built that house".
Back to the days of small beginning in his business, Maduka remembers relocating to lagos from Nnewi." I teamed up with a friend and we establish a company called Cosdave. By 1982, we parted ways and I started afresh with Coscharis, which I coined from my name and my wife's, Charity. We started the automobile business, became employers of labour and by 1992, we made enough money to set up a branch in Ghana. Then, another came up in Gabon and Ivory coast."
any advise for entrepreneurs? He says " success is not an event, it's a process. It is not a product of chance, It is characterized by dream and visions, which when you nurture,becomes a reality. Go for your dreams."
.........excerpts from Punch Newspaper.
