Our inaugural FATE Alumni Spotlight is on Yinka Osobu (FATE EEP 4). In this post, Yinka talks about CMC Interiors, her vision for the company and what she has learnt from FATE Foundation.
What products and services are offered by CMC Interiors? We manufacture home office and hotel furniture, bespoke, and made to measure furniture. Our value proposition is quality furniture at a competitive price with strict adherence to delivery time and after sales services.
What is unique about your business? The furniture items themselves and their unique aspects are very important. We also sell a lifestyle, an experience, a commitment to walk with our customers to create living spaces that are functional, aesthetically pleasing, easy to maintain and ultimately uniquely their own.
What was your mission at the beginning of CMC Interiors? Before I started CMC Interiors I was 100% importing furniture, and when I started to take a closer look at what I was importing I decided I could try to make some of it locally. By the time, a regulation ban on importing furniture was put in place I had already done a u turn to 100% manufacturing. Needless to say the ban did not affect me. So my initial intension was to prove that we can made good custom furniture to customer’s specifications.
What habits helped make you successful? Save save and save. Can’t say enough about that to grow your business. Attention to detail, persistence and ethics never hurts either.
What risks did you face and how have you been able to learn from failures? The ultimate risk to me is never to try. The way i learn from from failures is by picking myself up, exploring, assessing the failure and moving on.
What is your ambition for CMC Interiors and what advice would you give to other FATE Alumni business men and women? To continue to build the brand through quality designs and service, to provide secure long term employment for our staff and to have it succeed the founders. To my fellow alumni I would say to create and build FATE Foundation as the go to place for entrepreneurs since we all know that small and medium business are the back bone of the economy and together we can have a voice for issues that concern us all.
If any what topic did you learn from the most from? I have attended several workshops over the past 10 years and they all have so much to offer. An old workshop was on franchising and I realized I was not prepared for that yet. A more recent one was on the new and aggressive tax compliance awareness. All the workshops are relevant at different times for different reasons.
A graduate of Loyola University in Chicago and the FATE Foundation Emerging Entrepreneurs Programme (EEP) 4 class, Yinka Osobu is the CEO/Founder of CMC Interiors, an interior decorating company with a focus on locally designed office and home furnishing. CMC Interiors Furniture Company is on Coleman Cable Road, Arepo, Ogun State, Nigeria off Lagos-Ibadan Express way.
You can follow CMC Interiors on Instagram @CMCinteriors1 or on Facebook @ CMC Interiors Furniture.