I’m NOT an Entrepreneur

I’m just an artist who understands money

Photo by Niels Steeman on Unsplash

The Boot Cut Guy

I started my first business in my second year in architecture school. It was a fashion experiment that turned out to be immensely profitable. So profitable that I frittered the gains away on fufu, vegetable soup, and braided cow innards, woven into an unhealthy mess of animal fat.

At the time, I had two pairs of bootcut trousers which were just coming back in vogue. Every time I wore them, I got nods of admiration from the other boys who wanted to look like me. Not long, people started asking how they could get a pair too. So, one fateful day, broke, hungry, and beaten down, I was inspired to put out posters all over campus with a picture of my bootcut trousers and my phone number, and a tagline that said something like:

Need Bootcut Trousers? Call this number.

With this calling card, I made a tidy fortune.

I had a fabric palette for the many customers that walked in through my dorm room doors looking for the bootcut guy. After making their selections and paying upfront, I travel downtown to buy the fabric and drop it off at my tailor’s along with their trouser measurements. Three to five days after receiving the orders I head back to the tailor’s to pick up the ready batches for distribution. My only investment in that business, asides from the dozen or so photocopies of the marketing poster I designed, were a tape measure and the bus fares to and from the fabric market and the tailor’s shop. In all, my profits were a third of the total costs. The remaining two-thirds went to the tailor and the fabric vendor.

Life’s Good

My second business was inspired more by opportunity than lack. This was during my National Youth Service program. I was in my roaring 20s. Four days a week, I joined herds of other young graduates in our moderated transition into the workforce. One day a week, we undertook community development activities in service to the nation. In those four days, I worked in a new-generation bank as a teller.

Coincidentally, at about the time I got my ‘temporary’ employment with the bank, LG electronics, then looking to break into the Nigerian consumer market started a buy-now-pay-later scheme for bank staff. All we had to do was show up at any store with our I.D. card and post-dated cheques drawn on our salary accounts, and we could practically walk out in minutes with whatever we wanted from their decent and fairly priced offerings.

I bought my first computer through this scheme, and later bought two more for friends of mine who didn’t qualify because they weren’t bank staff. Based on our agreement, they paid me monthly ahead of the salary week to offset the debt obligations I incurred on their behalf.

One day while tallying my ins and outs, I realized that I could make a tidy profit from the arbitrage my qualification for the scheme afforded me. If I set up a similar scheme for the over five thousand corps members who weren’t bank staff, I could make a killing.

Thus I established the “One Computer per Corper” scheme. I got the blessings of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) to approach L.G electronics who would provide the computers, while the NYSC provided the guarantee they needed to give out the computers on credit. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I’d position myself, sit pretty and collect tolls. At some point in the transaction, I realized that I needed to set up a limited liability company so I set up LIGHTHOUSE LEASING with a doctor friend I met during the service year who’d been a beneficiary of the L.G scheme too — albeit on my account.

After a dozen or so meetings between L.G. and the NYSC, the initiative was dead in the water. Getting the NYSC to provide a guarantee for corps members wasn’t as easy as it looked on paper, the monthly corps member stipend barely covered the cost of the computers the corpers we surveyed wanted to buy and the Federal parastatal behind the NYSC wasn’t eager to match their allowances despite our ruse that the initiative was more about 21st-century literacy than profits. We were entangled in enough red tape to gift-wrap the Pyramids.

From the unfortunate ruins of that deal, however, we salvaged LIGHTHOUSE LEASING and there began my journey to understanding how LLCs worked and the advantages of corporate structure.

Collarstic

After my service year, during one of the long jobless days of living with my cousin, I noticed that employees who wore uniforms like the Police, Nurses, and our bank security personnel, usually folded a handkerchief over their collars to prevent the sweat stains that frayed their collars on the long run. In the months that followed this lightbulb moment, I spent my idle time developing a patent for a collar protector and I registered it with the Nigeria patent office. I called the product Collarstic.

The collar protector, which was the first product of the now-defunct LIGHTHOUSE LEASING, was targeted at the uniformed workforce demographic. With the help of my brother who had connections in China, we designed and manufactured 500 pieces of Collarstic and shipped it down to Lagos. It was destined to be the next big thing.

Over a decade later, we sold nothing and have nothing to show for all of our grand ideas except for a long expired bag of collar protectors, a promotional video, and a website, long forgotten.

At this point, you will have to agree with me that I am not really an entrepreneur. Time will not bid me the liberty of making a list of all my failed projects. Entrepreneurial ideas that start feverishly and soon burn out with the same fervor by which it was born.

This truth I so comfortably profess now came at great financial and time costs. It also took a high level of introspection in acknowledging my limitations as a human being. I am a Creative and that’s it. I am an architect by training who loves to build. A writer by passion who loves to tell stories and an individual who would rather not entrust his financial security or freedom in someone else’s hands.

All through the random bursts of entrepreneurial activity that dot my past and present, I have always taken the position of exploiting short-term opportunities, investing the gains and exploring the security that multiple income streams offered me. This motivation has helped me to create value and make money over the years from my core skills such as writing, talking, thinking, and drawing, and my ability to show up with brilliant and oftentimes bizarre ideas.

My Confession

However, I have a little confession. I have not always been like this.

Books

Raised by civil servant parents living and working in a small rural town, my first training in finances came from reading Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad in my late teens. This book resonated so much with me that I have lived my entire life on its timeless principles.

Experience

A second part of my training came from my above-average tolerance for shame and being shamed. I am never too shy to fail or be laughed at. Embarrassment doesn’t command a great value in my world.

After returning home from England with a master’s degree in Real Estate, I didn’t overthink the decision to make and sell 1,000 Occupy Nigeria t-shirts for a N100,000 spread in the 12 days that the country shut down for the Occupy Nigeria protests in January of 2012. To overcome my fear of selling I’d initially made a few custom protest tees and sold them from the boot of my car. When the first 100 units sold out in less than a day of peddling them, I didn’t need a fancy graph to do the math. At a time when the whole country was economically grounded, I was awash with cash.

My London friends who saw me on the protest grounds hawking from the boot of my car couldn’t understand my motivations but I really didn’t have anything to prove to them.

Mentorship

The third and perhaps most powerful influence on me was meeting my mentor — a real estate magnate in Lagos who employed me straight out of university and took a liking to me and through countless experiences, taught me about life and business.

Figuratively, this man became my father and I have walked in his footsteps now for over a decade. I have studied him closely at meetings. I have listened to his first-hand recollections of his origin stories and I am a trustee of his future visions. I have watched him sell ideas, and seen him turn insane dreams into reality.

Nothing, nothing beats this privilege that life granted me by offering me front-row seats to witness such overwhelming achievements.

Still, I am not an entrepreneur.

I am an artist who derives unquestionable joy from creating things, but also one who has acquired a business acumen over time and learned to turn my creation into wealth. I am a privileged man, blessed in no small measure by life. A gifted man from whom humanity expects more.

Do you know yourself? Who are you?

Osundolire Ifelanwa