Bulls n Bears Entrepreneurship Zone :: Building a business empire one idea at a time: Akinwande Durojaye on his success

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Nigerian serial entrepreneur, Akinwande Durojaye is the founder and
co-founder of six thriving businesses – JustBrandIt, FixMyRide Limited,
ShomoluErrands and Logistics, LashBells Foods, and 708. These businesses
were started out of Durojaye’s quest for financial independence and
employment creation.


How did it all start?


Durojaye’s journey in business began in 2005 when he was an undergraduate
of Information and Communications Engineering at the Covenant University,
Nigeria.

He started out as an intermediary – looking for people that need printing
services.

“For example, if there is someone that wants to print a complimentary card,
I would tell them I can do it and then sub-contract the project to a
printing company in Shomolu – which is the printing hub in Lagos, to get it
done,” Durojaye explains. “When I got a printing job, I would find out the
original cost and add a mark-up of about 10-20%.”

For the next ten years, Durojaye traded under his dad’s company name. He
did this until he was able to get his own office and printing press machine.
In 2015, he decided to formalise his business and register it under its own
name. That year, he established and registered JustBrandIt, a branding and
advertising agency that handles digital and corporate marketing in Nigeria.
The company also has a printing press and graphics hub where it does all its
creative designs for marketing. JustBrandIt clients now include schools,
SMEs, MSMEs, banks, and also multinationals like Oracle, Microsoft, and
British Council.

When JustBrandIt became self-sufficient, Durojaye scaled up. In 2016, he
established and co-founded five other businesses – ShomoluErrands and
Logistics, a dispatch courier company that do logistics solely within the
Shomolu area of Lagos state; LashBells Food Company, a snacks production and
packaging company that packages traditional local snacks and ingredients
like KuliKuli, Kokoro, and bleached palm oil for sale locally as well as for
export within and outside Africa; FueledUp, a technology-driven
Uber-modelled company that dispatches fuel for personal and business use;
and 708, a service delivery and consulting company with special focus on
general merchandise supply. The same year, Durojaye co-founded FixMyRide
Limited, a fleet management company that deals in auto sales, short lease,
servicing, maintenance, and repairs.

According to Durojaye, all the companies he built, co-founded, or managed
have always been self-sufficient. “JustBrandIt started from the scratch with
zero funding. The company was built with the profits made over the years. We
didn’t need money to start FixMyRide because we started from leasing
vehicles on a contract basis and we made our profits from the commission we
added.” Today, his businesses employ about 300 staff, of which 210 are
drivers.

Durojaye plans to open a quick shop in key business clusters around Lagos
to cater for branding and printing needs of every business. With FixMyRide,
he intends to set up an auto workshop for “people who cannot afford the
service of authorised car dealers but also do not want to take their vehicle
to a roadside mechanic.”


Surely it couldn’t have been easy?


Erratic power supply, people management, and not having the right
organisational structure were some of the challenges Durojaye faced in the
early years of his businesses. His inability to say “no” to some projects
was also a weakness he battled with.

“I was willing to take every order. I found it hard to say no to a job
because I didn’t want to lose the money or a client. Sometimes, these jobs
have limited and strict deadlines,” he recalls.

“You know, it takes a level of grace for an entrepreneur to hand over his
or her business to structure. When you start your business, there is this
tendency to want to do things by yourself. Over time, I developed the
ability to say ‘no’ and was able to submit to a structure which guides how
we operate.”

Despite the fact that Durojaye started his company with no capital, he
confessed that at a point, funding the business was a challenge.

“Funding is a major challenge for businesses in Nigeria,” he says. “It is
difficult to access loans even from the commercial bank you have banked with
for years. And when a bulk of your business is based on purchasing orders,
you need a reserve on finance.

“Sometimes, we work with multinational firms whose payment term is between
20-60 days after delivery. These projects often run into millions so we have
to look for funding to do the work before we are paid. There could also be a
factory error and we may not notice it until maybe a thousand copies has
been printed. So we have to print it all over again because our watchword is
to produce quality product.”

As for people management, the challenge is to instil a mind-set to produce
quality products (at all times) with the artisans who are working for the
company. “It was quite difficult to build that quality mentality and culture
into each and every staff member. But we have enjoyed the grace of hiring
the right staff and managers who are helping to manage different areas of
the company. We have a proper structure in all the companies – so it’s not a
one-man business.”


What can we learn from his experience?


Over the years, Durojaye (who is one of the 30 young individuals listed in
Forbes Africa’s 30 Under 30 for Business in 2018), credits the successes
achieved with his businesses to the gift of referral.

“We hardly do any adverts. Based on the trust we have built with our
customers, they are able to refer us to other people and this trust is
something that money cannot buy. Trust is very significant to business
growth and success.”

For budding entrepreneurs, Durojaye believes passion and emotional
intelligence will help them move their business forward.

“Passion is very key. As cliché as that sounds, passion is very important
because it will keep you going no matter the challenges – passion first, and
money follows. Don’t force yourself to turn your business into passion. You
can even be in the 9 to 5 workspace and still have your own business.” –
Howwemadeitinafrica



Akinwande Durojaye

 

 

 

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