A man called the office last week. He'd seen our website, liked what we said about being "the operator behind the operators." He wanted to start an LPG retail plant in Ibadan and wondered if Bomart could help him from end to end — find the land, run the engineering, get the DPR licence, source the tank, install the dispensers, hire the operators, and supply the gas.
We had a polite conversation. Then I told him no.
Not "no, we can't do all that for the price you have in mind." Not "no, the timeline is tight." Just: no, this isn't what we do.
This is a piece about that no. It's also a piece about why, in a market like ours, the suppliers most worth working with are usually the ones with the shortest yes-list.
What we actually say no to.
Here is the honest list. Every week, Bomart turns down four kinds of business:
1 · Household cylinder retail.
We don't refill 12.5 kg or 6 kg cylinders. We don't run retail outlets. If you're a homeowner who needs gas for cooking, we are the wrong company. There are excellent people who do that work — the operators in the cap-strip on our homepage are among them.
2 · Plant-setup engineering.
We don't design plants. We don't build them. We don't acquire DPR or NMDPRA permits on behalf of customers. If you're starting from raw land and a dream, we cannot help you — and we say so before you spend a naira with us, not after.
3 · Sub-half-tonne spot orders from unverified buyers.
Below 0.5 MT, the logistics economics genuinely don't work for us in a way that lets us still keep our delivery windows tight. We'd rather refer the order than dispatch it badly.
4 · Pure haulage-only contracts.
We won't run trucks for someone else's supply chain without owning the supply relationship ourselves. The reliability we offer depends on us controlling both ends.
That's roughly half the calls our operations line takes in any given month. Half.
The argument for the no.
Every business book ever written says focus matters. That's true and also not very useful. So let me give you the specific version of why I think it matters here.
Reliability — the kind we put at the top of our brand — is not produced by having a wide menu of services. It is produced by doing a narrow thing the same way, every day, for years, until the operational rhythm is automatic. The depot relationships are seasoned. The dispatch desks know our team. The trucks roll at the same times. The customers expect what they get because they've gotten it eleven years running.
That rhythm breaks the moment we start saying yes to things that don't fit it. Plant engineering isn't reliability work — it's design work, on a different timeline, with different skill sets and different risk profiles. Retail cylinder refill isn't reliability work either — it's high-volume, low-margin, consumer-facing work that runs on entirely different metrics.
The temptation to take both is real. The temptation in a tight market is even bigger. When supply is short and prices are climbing, every operator wants to expand revenue. The discipline is to remember that the customer who is paying you for reliable LPG supply to their hotel kitchen does not care that you've also started running a separate trucking business, or a separate equipment procurement business, on the side. They care that their kitchen never goes dark.
The thing nobody says out loud.
Here's the part of this argument I think most operators in Nigeria don't say publicly, but understand privately:
In our industry, a supplier whose service list is too long is almost always a supplier who is excellent at none of it. The yes-to-everything posture is usually the tell, not the strength.
It's worth asking your current supplier — the company you're trusting with your plant's uptime — what they don't do. If the answer is "anything you need, we can do," that's not a confidence signal. That's an unfocused operation that hasn't yet been forced to choose. And in our work, the moment you're forced to choose between two customers under pressure, you choose the one in the lane you've actually committed to.
I'd rather be the supplier whose customers know exactly what they're buying and exactly what they're not — than the one who promises everything and starts dropping balls when the market squeezes.
What the other half gets.
The other half of our calls — the customers we do say yes to — are plant operators, hotel groups, factories, restaurants, and bulk buyers who need reliable LPG delivery in Lagos, Ibadan, and the broader South-West.
What they get is, I think, the natural product of the no list above. Tighter delivery windows. A named operator who picks up the phone. Eleven years of incident-free dispatch records. Two corridors of loading redundancy. Net-15 terms for customers who've earned them through verified onboarding.
None of those things are accidents. They're the dividend of focus. They're what's possible when half the things you could be doing are firmly, politely, in someone else's lane.
If you're an operator weighing suppliers, ask the question I'd ask: what does your supplier not do? If the answer is short and honest, you're probably in good hands.
— Abisoye