Why B.O.B?
A friend of mine asked me “why The Business of Business?” I guess a few others may have the same question so I decided to quickly put pen to paper or is it fingers to keyboard.
I remember during our Founders’ retreat last year when our consultants asked us the reasons we embarked on the DIYlaw journey? One of our answers was because “we need to win! We need to show that globally recognised businesses can be built here in Nigeria.”
We all use Uber, Amazon, Twitter, Airbnb Spotify, Canva, Typeform to mention a few, yet none has been built from or in Nigeria. Outside of tech, we have Starbucks, McDonald's, L’Oréal, Pampers, Zara, Ikea, H&M, again, not one from our motherland.
So for us at DIYlaw, The Business of Business (BOB) is a small step towards changing that narrative.
I get excited when I see businesses like MainOne, Iroko and Paga leading the pack to change the narrative.
I look at Flutterwave, Paystack, Printivo, LifeBank, ReelFruit, Farmcrowdy, and I see them refusing to be contained within the shores of Nigeria. From their founding, they’ve positioned themselves to be global businesses. (P.S. This is not a bragging moment, I did not list these businesses because we’ve worked or are working with them 😎😎).
To me, these businesses are all winning — winning being a continuous process — as they fight and win battles every day to achieve their dreams.
BOB is our way of positioning more winners, we want to help entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses. It is us helping entrepreneurs achieve their dreams.
Building a sustainable business goes beyond knowing your trade, it goes beyond being good at what you do. It involves everything else that needs to be in place to propel your business forward and that’s why we are helping entrepreneurs “build the business that runs your business”.
Financials, HR, corporate governance, legal, marketing, strategy, investment-readiness etc are the blocks that need to come together to build a business that scales, so we thought, why not be a bridge between experts and service providers in these areas, on the one hand, and entrepreneurs on the other hand.
Viola — the one-on-one sessions with The Sages.
The panels were carefully curated and chosen to drive home our goal of building sustainable businesses.
I couldn’t have described The Titans better than @folasanwo did in his Tweet. They’ll be telling us about their journey as successful business owners and entrepreneurs.
Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible to bootstrap your way to a building a successful business in Nigeria, talk less of building a global brand — cue in The Money — They’ll talk about funding opportunities and how to access them.
The Innovators — entrepreneurs who are beginning to attain some level of regional or global expansion or recognition will tell us about how they are scaling their businesses. Let’s learn from them and hear what it is they are doing and how they hope to achieve their goals.
Thanks to Google Nigeria and FATE Foundation, there will be training sessions on digital skills and financial literacy for small and growing businesses.
Bottom-line is we LOVE entrepreneurs and BOB is an expression of our love. It is a celebration of entrepreneurs.
