A builder, business educator, speaker and creative.

I started at eighteen

I launched my first fashion brand at eighteen, while I was a student.

The business grew to reach students across four universities in Nigeria. There was demand, there was momentum, and I could see the possibility of building something much bigger.

I had plenty of ambition. My understanding of how to run a business had some catching up to do.

I made mistakes, and eventually, I ran the business into the ground.

That experience forced me to confront something that has stayed with me: having an idea, finding customers and getting access to resources can take you a considerable distance. Knowing how to manage and grow what you have built requires another level of understanding.

I had reached the limits of what I knew.

That made business education personal

I studied Materials and Metallurgical Engineering at FUT Minna, but my experience in business gave me another education to pursue.

I wanted to understand what I had missed. How businesses make money. How they organise delivery. How they manage growth. How founders make decisions that give their businesses a better chance of lasting.

Since then, I have devoted years to learning, taking courses, applying what I learn and developing through the work itself.

That is where my passion for business education comes from. I know what it feels like to have the drive to build something and lack the knowledge to hold it together.

It is also why I enjoy teaching. I want other entrepreneurs to have better tools for the decisions in front of them.

The work kept evolving

After fashion, I moved into music marketing and management, where I had room to express myself creatively while learning about audiences, attention and promotion.

That opened the door to marketing and advertising. I became increasingly interested in how businesses communicate value, attract customers and turn attention into demand.

Then I started looking more closely at what happened around the marketing.

Sometimes customers were interested, but the offer was difficult to buy. Sometimes sales were coming in, but the business was barely making money. Sometimes the marketing worked, and the operation struggled to fulfil what had been promised.

My work expanded into business development, commercial strategy and operations. Eventually, I founded SỌKẸ Africa to help businesses work through those questions and take their offerings to market.

Each stage widened my perspective. Creative work taught me about expression and perception. Marketing taught me about demand. Operations brought me closer to the people, processes and decisions required to deliver.

What building has taught me

In 2023, a friend and I started a shoe business.

We partnered with a craftsman, developed prototypes and began making sales. Then I put together a marketing plan, and the orders started coming in.

We were already celebrating.

Unfortunately, production had other plans.

Our production partner struggled with the volume. Shoes arrived with the wrong materials, the wrong fit and other quality problems. We found ourselves replacing orders, issuing refunds and managing complaints. We went into debt and eventually closed the business.

I had helped create demand that our delivery system could not handle.

That experience changed how I understood growth. More customers place more pressure on cash flow, people, production and quality. A business needs to be designed to carry that pressure.

It is one reason I care so much about sustainable growth. I have experienced what happens when demand grows faster than a business’s ability to deliver.

“A business needs to be designed to carry the pressure of growth.”

What I believe

I want us to build businesses that can grow, remain healthy and continue creating value over time.

That requires commercial discipline: understanding customers, knowing the numbers, making deliberate decisions and creating systems that allow other people to contribute.

It also requires responsibility.

I struggle with how easily exploitation gets excused as ordinary business behaviour. Somewhere along the way, “it’s just business” became an explanation for treating people badly.

I believe we can hold ourselves to a better standard.

Honest communication, fair value exchange, responsible leadership and respect for customers, employees, suppliers and partners should influence everyday decisions. They should show up in what we promise, how we price, how we pay people and how we respond when something goes wrong.

These are the impactful business practices I want to see more of, and help more people put into practice.

Building and teaching

Today, I regularly sit with entrepreneurs through go-to-market work at SỌKẸ.

Those conversations keep my teaching connected to the realities of building. I encounter the assumptions behind an offer, the gaps in a sales process, the pressure on a founder and the operational consequences of commercial decisions.

I also see how much difference better business understanding can make.

That is a large part of why I speak and teach. I want to help people recognise problems earlier, question practices they have accepted and make more informed decisions about what they are building.

I teach emerging and established entrepreneurs. The questions change with the stage of the business, but the commitment to building intelligently remains.

My book, Build Intelligently, Everything Entrepreneurship, my articles, videos and speaking all give me ways to share that thinking.

I particularly enjoy practical workshops. Give me a board, a marker and enough time to work through a business problem with a room full of people, and I’m very much in my element.

I want people to leave with something they can examine, decide or apply in their own businesses.

There is a creative in here too

Photography, visual storytelling and creative direction remain important parts of my life.

They give me room to observe, experiment, be playful and express ideas differently. That creative instinct has travelled with me through every stage of my career, and it continues to influence how I communicate and approach problems.

“Multidimensional builder” is how I make sense of these connected parts of myself.

I build, I teach, and I create. Each gives me something to bring to the others.

What I’m working towards

My ambition is to build organisations, knowledge and systems that remain useful beyond my personal involvement.

Through SỌKẸ, that means developing a company with its own capabilities, people, methods and commercial value.

Through education, it means turning experience into resources and conversations that help other people become better builders.

It also means practising what I teach: documenting what works, developing people, sharing responsibility and building with the long term in view.

I have experienced the excitement of starting, the consequences of getting things wrong and the work of learning how to do better.

I bring that experience into the room whenever I teach.