My 1-on-1 Mentorship Experience with Sir Richard Branson

By now, most of you must have gotten the gist of my journey to winning the British Council and Virgin Atlantic organized Enterprise Challenge 2016 of which I emerged overall winner over 10,800+ persons who entered into the competition with me. I apologize for the late post, I would have written a post earlier than now but it has been a whirlwind since the boot camp and post wins in March.

As part of my wins came a one-on-one mentorship session with the godfather of entrepreneurship himself; Sir Richard Branson. I mean, I got flown upper-class on Virgin Atlantic to London, I went to his house at Kidlington, Oxfordshire; I sat on his chair; I shook hands with him; I drank his coffee; I had lunch with him and other Virgin StartUp entrepreneurs... On a serious note, even though I wish I had longer time to extract enough business advice from him as I would have loved to, the short time spent with him is something I'd always treasure.

I came bearing gifts as my cover photo shows, of which he absolutely loved! I found his entrepreneurial journey quite relatable as he said it was basically him surviving for a couple of years. I believe a lot of Nigerian entrepreneurs like myself (without VC funding) can relate to this especially in our current economic state. He pointed out that as an entrepreneur, there's a 2-5 year period where you may be struggling to make ends meet as you grow your business, but this should not deter you. He was very impressed that women charted this year's wins and encouraged us to never be boxed by our fears, or economic factors.

After this session, I got to meet and greet Virgin StartUp Ambassadors and winners of the Virgin Group sponsored VOOM challenge which is similar to our Enterprise Challenge in Nigeria. I also got tickets to attend the Fast100 UK event which is basically an annual award to recognize the fastest growing 100 companies in the UK, and to commend them on job well done.

In a nut-shell it was a full day equipped with networking, networking, and more networking. I will most probably be opportune to meet with Sir Richard once again when I attend my Virgin Sponsored scholarship to the Branson Center for Entrepreneurship in South Africa.

Until then,

Stay Awesome!