Fifteen years as a foremost event planner has earned Funke Bucknor-Obruthe a place amongst Nigeria’s industry leaders. She is the founder and current C.E.O. of the Zapphaire Events Group (comprising Zapphaire Events Limited, The Zapphaire Training Academy and Decor by Furtullah) a pioneer events planning company in Africa that has for many years continued to set the trend for event architecture and design in Nigeria.
Funke’s passion for innovation and excellence has built a leading Wedding and Events brand that has delivered well over 1,500 successful events across the globe and has still remained relevant.
Her passion for walking brides through the wedding process led her to publish The Essential Bridal Handbook – a first-of-its-kind wedding resource for the African market. For this reason, she also set up Funke Says – a YouTube series for brides which guides them through their Wedding planning process.
This avid entrepreneur is also obsessed with sharing industry knowledge and giving others room to bloom. This resulted to the creation of the Zapphaire Training Academy in 2009 which has birthed over 500 events professionals.
More avenues to share knowledge was the recently organised Zapphaire Connect Series which brought together past interns and staff of Zapphaire Events and alumni of the Zapphaire Training Academy to collaborate, network and help them forge ahead in their businesses and careers in the Events Industry. Also, she went ahead to organise THE EVENT XPERIENCE AFRICA (TEXA) which is an annual conference geared towards equipping an ever growing audience of event entrepreneurs with the right tools needed to thrive in the industry. The conference is targeted at seasoned event professionals and beginners alike empowering them to be more and do more at the same time providing them the opportunity to learn, unlearn and relearn. The maiden edition was in January 2019 and had over 600 participants from different parts of Africa.
Funke holds an LLB Degree in Law from the University of Lagos and a BL from the Abuja Law School with which she practiced briefly.
Growing up
I grew up in a family of two—my sister and I and my mum and dad. It was a very close knit family. My dad had four brothers and we always spent Christmas together as a family, going to each other’s houses. My grandmother stayed with us, my paternal and maternal grandmother stayed with us. So, I grew up with that type of relationship with my grandparents, taking care of them. So, it was a close-knit family, humble but very intellectual.
My dad was very intellectual, very creative, my dad is a fantastic musician, when it comes to history, arts, literature, my dad knew everything about anything, and I learnt it from him and my sister who is the smarter one, we all learnt it from my dad.
My mum was the business woman. There was no business my mum wasn’t doing. I think I got my entrepreneurial spirit from my mum and creative spirit from my dad.
So, growing up was really fun, great childhood. We used to hang out with my parents a lot. My mum would take us out and my dad would take us out. It was a very good childhood and I really love growing up in my family.
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My parents were very influential in my upbringing because of the things I learnt from my mum and from dad. It has helped me in my business, in events planning. My late pastor was also very instrumental. After university, he played a big role in my life, always advising me, teaching me and always encouraging me. There are several others, my friends and family, my cousins who made me go into event planning fully.
Why you need event planners
First of all, for every event that requires a project manager, because, from concept, to planning, to execution, and to production, every aspect of this requires an event manager or project manager. You need someone to help you come up with ideas, create concepts and bring it to life. So, in our events world, there are different people, some people don’t plan. Some people don’t produce, they just conceptualise.
But we do all three. You need someone that will come up with a concept, someone that will help you through the planning process, when it comes to time management, attention to details, vendor management, negotiations, advice, consultations, and then on the day of the event, you now execute. You need an event manager to help you execute this.
Why they cannot be ignored is that there is no aspect of an event that must be left with a stone unturned. You want to enjoy the process. You want to enjoy your big day. You don’t want to be thinking about what could go wrong or happen during an event because you’ve left it with an expert to take care of.
Apart from event planning that I have, we have a sister company called Décor by Furtullah, where we do events and styling. We have a training school, Zapphaire Training School, I also have a Vlog, my YouTube channel where I teach people that are planning events on how to plan their big day and it’s called ‘Funke Says’ and I also wrote a book called The Essential Bridal Handbook, to help brides plan their events.
So, I’m an author, an event planner, event stylist, and an entrepreneur.
Did you ever know you’d be an event planner?
I’ve always known what I didn’t what to do ever since I was growing up. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn’t want. So, I knew that even though I studied Law from the University of Lagos, and had my BL from the Nigerian Law School, Bwari Abuja, I still knew that Law wasn’t what I wanted to do full term.
At first, growing up, I thought it’d be Mass Communication, PR, I love talking, and I could do anything that has to do with talking, but I didn’t realize that my nature which makes me very hyperactive, [as such], any time I saw things happening at any time, I just wanted to make people very happy. I wanted to spread joy.
So, when I was in the university, I was the life of the party. At Law school, it was the same thing. I didn’t like people being stressed. A few of my friends were getting married and I encouraged them to let me help them distribute their Aso ebi. They agreed and I helped them for free. So, initially I wanted to be someone that helps people put things together and help take the stress off people.
After exploring Law school, doing my internship in a Law firm and I even went to work in a Law firm after NYSC and I realised this wasn’t for me. So, I went to work in an advertising agency and while I was there, I realised I wanted to do event planning, so I started helping my friends plan their events.
My friend’s sister was getting married and I was fully involved from the beginning. My tag line was “I just wanted to take the stress off people.” That’s how it started and that’s how I ventured into event planning with the name Zapphaire Events.
The importance of customer service
Customer service is the most important aspect of our core values at Zaphire Events. We’re very big on customer service. We break our back for the customer. Customer satisfaction and the overall customer experience. When I’m saying customer, I’m not only talking about the client that got us for the job, I’m also talking about the guest who attends the event because everybody is a customer now and everybody is a potential customer.
However, we are very particular about our customer service at Zapphaire. I think that it is one of the things that stands us out and make people refer us. Apart from the excellent service that we deliver, because we’re very big on customer service, there is no organisation that doesn’t make mistakes, but it’s how you work on your mistakes and make amends, what are the steps you take to make amend? There is no perfect business.
There will be times that you will make mistakes and you will correct it. Our customers have given us one or two chances to correct an aspect of an event that didn’t go well. But how you’re able to rectify it makes the difference. For me, the customer is always right because we’re in the business of satisfaction, happiness, creating joy. We deliver celebrations and its milestone celebration for us, there is no celebration that we don’t take seriously. So, that’s why our customers keep on referring us.
I think that one of the things as well is that we stay true to who we are. We’re not somebody else. The Zapphaire you met 18 years ago, is the Zapphaire you will meet now (with more innovations, creativity, excellent delivery) but the humility and core values, and authenticity of the brand is one of the reasons customers keep on coming and referring us.
Why do many young Lawyers not practice Law?
I don’t have an answer to it. But I think a lot of times, a lot of people don’t know what the legal world entails. So, we see Lawyers and think that this is what it is. But when we get into Law and start practicing, we realise that maybe this is not what we wanted to do. You get in and then you realise “I want to bake; I want to be in finance.” I have my Lawyer friends that are HR experts, some of them are in the fashion world.
So, you get into the Law and realise maybe Law wasn’t for me. A lot of times, a lot of them are not practicing maybe because it’s not attractive or it’s not what we thought it was when we were reading it in books or saw it on TV.
Sometimes, when you’re going to the university, you don’t really know what you want to do, that’s the real truth. At that time, you’re young and you don’t really know your purpose. But when you’re in school you start getting molded, your character begins to form and you start seeing things you like and then you realise, “oh, I don’t think I want to be a Lawyer anymore. I want to do something else, I have a higher purpose, and Law is not my higher purpose and it’s something else that is my higher purpose, I want to go and explore.
Some people have gone to explore and have come back practice Law. Some have never come back. So, I think that there are so many factors that decide how and why Lawyers aren’t practicing.
Is your business benefitting from your legal background?
Being a Lawyer is definitely making a huge difference because with Law, you need to be analytical; you need to look at both sides of everything. So, it helps me process things better. I’m very particular about documentation, contracts. I’m particular about what you said and how you said it.
Law has taught us not to take one side of the story and an analytical reasoning is what my Law has taught me and that has really helped me.
So, Law has taught me professionalism. I learnt how to be professional when I studied Legal Ethics in Law. And that shaped me. So, Law has definitely influenced me.
The reality of losing a loved one
The reality of a loss is that no matter how much you will it, no matter how much you pray, no matter how much you want it, you can’t bring them back. That’s the reality of it and I’ve learnt to cope with it. My sister is dead, my father is dead and that was my only sibling and didn’t know any other father apart from my dad. So, having gone through that, I realized that life will throw you lemons, life will come at you and hit you, life will want to get you down, but you just have to fight it. You have to get up every day.
You can’t allow yourself to be too sad. I get sad sometimes. I think about it. Sometimes I want to be alone, that’s fine. But I’m comforted by the fact that they also lived a good life. They lived well. I think about what God gave them and what God gave me, the joy of them being in my life for those periods, those moments, I cherish them. I think about the good moments, I think about the happy moments, I miss them because I want to talk to my sister, I want to talk to my dad. I want to ask my dad questions about our family history, I want to ask for his advice.
So, I miss those moments. For anybody going through any form of loss, going through pain, going through grief, I can’t tell you how to deal with it because it’s personal to you, but I want to tell you that despite the pain, you have to have hope.
Managing festivity during Covid-19
First of all, if you’re talking about festivities, November and December are periods that people always have a lot of parties and concerts but because of COVID-19 a lot of these things have been reduced. We normally would have concerts with concert organizers during this December. A lot of all the concerts we’re working on have all been cancelled, but we have our weddings, birthdays and celebrations but it is not as many as it would have been before COVID-19.
So, yes, people are celebrating but they’re also being very careful and cautious because Covid-19 is still out there and people just want to make sure that they’re safe.
COVID-19 came in March in Nigeria and it almost came and crunched the business because almost all the events we had in March, April, May, got cancelled, postponed and people couldn’t celebrate.
So, it was very tough at the very beginning, but it made us go back to look inwards our business and say “how can we even tighten our business better? What can we bring out even when this is over? What are we going to be doing differently?” So we went back to look at our processes and all the things that we were doing that we’re not doing right and tried to get them properly done. We went back to look at even our people.
During this period, we didn’t let anybody go because we thought, you know what, we need to keep our people, but we also redefined job roles for people in our team, and everybody had to adapt and some people who couldn’t adapt, after a while, I just had to let them go and that was not because we couldn’t pay salaries, we realized that at some point, we were carrying dead weight.
So, COVID affected us but we were able to weather it. We went into virtual events that we never thought we could do, and did them so well, we started creating celebration packages for people and things like that. We did so many things but we were able to come out of it. And to God be the glory, throughout the period, we were able to pay salaries and keep our team.
…and to those who had to reschedule their events
To everyone that had to postpone events because of COVID-19, I’ll just say that health and life are what matters the most. Safety is important and as much as possible; we just need to make sure that that is fine. Any event that one wants to do, one has to consider what the most important part is because you can do the party later.
For example, if it’s a wedding, you can do a simple ceremony and come and do your party later.
Your birthday, you can mark it and do something bigger later. As long as we’re alive, we can celebrate.
Days you can’t forget
There are many days on the job that I can’t forget. Some good and some bad. There are several…it was about crisis management. Those events teach me about crisis management. There are things that are beyond your control and when you’re building a marquee and there was no weather forecast or there was weather forecast that didn’t tell you there will be a storm, and there is a storm and the marquee falls or you’re expecting 500 people and the client neglected to tell you that they printed extra cards, and you will now have 2000 people in a marquee of one thousand, things like that.
Those events have shaped me and I can never forget them because it has taught me how to be more resilient, how to adapt, communicate more with our client and ask the nitty-gritty questions again and again. I always tell my team, anything can happen so, you have to think of plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D and with that you’re ready for anything that may go wrong.
The Event Experience Africa
We started the annual event in 2019. I’ve always mentored people in the event space, but I realised that we didn’t have any conference for Africa that would bring us together to share our views collectively. I go to a lot of conferences internationally where I go to learn, but there was none in Nigeria that was for Africa. And from our training school, we’ve always taught people, so, I said we need to bring this home because we want to empower people, we want to teach. We want people from all over Africa to connect. We want people to see Africa as a place of knowledge, as a place of creativity.
We also want to share knowledge with each other. We want to learn, relearn and unlearn. But most importantly, we want to connect and educate.
That’s what The Event Experience Africa is and it’s for Africa not just Nigeria. However, the starting point is Nigeria because that is where I am from. The first edition we had 600 people, the second edition we had over a thousand people and people went away growing their businesses.
So, it’s to help people grow their businesses, do new things, get new skills, see a broader perspective. People came from different parts of Nigeria and others from outside Nigeria like Ghana. It’s about sharing of knowledge across the regions.
Do you take time off?
Yes, I do rest sometimes and my way of resting is that once I’m at home, I’m reading, I’m fine and I take time off. Sometimes, I travel and when I travel I rest. I also love spending time with my friends, my family and doing things I love, fun things. I like dancing and for me, those are the ways I take time off and rest.
