Do You Really Need an Abuja Office?

A company is based in Lagos. Its project is in Abuja. Its supplier is in Abuja. A meeting has been scheduled in Abuja for next Thursday. A document needs to be physically submitted to a federal agency in Abuja. A property the company is considering leasing needs to be inspected, in Abuja.

The team is not in Abuja.

So the question arrives, usually somewhere around the third or fourth time this happens in a quarter: “does the company really need to open an Abuja office?” It's a fair question, and it deserves a fair answer, because opening an office is a real decision with real costs, and so is not opening one.

The traditional options, honestly assessed

• ·Travel. Someone flies in, handles the task, flies out. Works for a single urgent trip. Becomes expensive and disruptive the fourth time it happens this year.
• ·Hire permanent staff. Solves the presence problem, creates a new one: recruitment, management, payroll, office space, and a full-time salary for what might be a handful of tasks a month.
• ·Depend on informal contacts. Fast to arrange, hard to hold accountable, and rarely produces a written report.
• ·Ignore the task. The document doesn’t get submitted this week. The meeting gets rescheduled again.
• ·Outsource specific work. Three different vendors, three different relationships, three different standards of communication.

The pattern, not the task

None of these is wrong. Each solves part of the problem. None of them solves the pattern, which is that Abuja tasks keep showing up, one at a time, indefinitely, for as long as the company has any reason to operate near the federal capital.

That pattern is what on-ground representation is built to answer: not a single delivery, not a single hire, but a standing, professional presence that handles whatever the week's Abuja task happens to be, and reports back the way an employee would, without becoming one.