money speaks pilot edition1.pdF

What entrepreneurs have inside of
them cannot be taught in business
schools no matter how hard they try
and boy are they trying. Some strange
courses have surfaced now in an
attempt to re-program the minds of
business students in order to turn them
into entrepreneurs but it’s all a farce.
It’s a bit like some of the pop musicians
we have today that have been
completely manufactured by the record
labels and you can’t compare them
with the likes of Michael Jackson,
Whitney Houston or Stevie Wonder.
These musicians are iconic and their
music is timeless, and yet if you ask me
who won American Idol 2 years ago I
couldn’t tell you. That’s how short their
careers are because they were
manufactured. They don’t have the
gene of longevity residing on the inside
of them, because that gene works in
conjunction with another type of gene
called “authenticity”.
The same can be said about
entrepreneurship, it’s a natural gift
and no matter how many business
schools you attend or how many MBA’s
you bag, you won’t stand the test of
time in business if you’re not a natural
entrepreneur.
Jubril Adewale Tinubu is an
embodiment of the entrepreneurial
spirit. A company that he started in his
Fathers garage at the tender age of 26
has grown to become the largest
indigenous oil company in Nigeria,
generating $Billions of Dollars in
annual sales. It takes more than an MBA
to achieve such success, not that Wale
Tinubu has an MBA because he doesn’t.
With interests in the upstream,
midstream and downstream value
chains of the petroleum industry
Oando, the company that Wale built,
has become a Nigerian success story. A
law graduate with a natural flare for
business, he tells the story of how he
wanted to multiply his school fees and
therefore decided to partner with a
friend of his who was importing cars
from Germany to the United Kingdom
and selling them for a healthy profit.
His career in law was short lived and
as he put it and I am paraphrasing “I
wanted to sit on the other side of the
table”, meaning that he wanted to be
the business man and not the lawyer in
the equation. An opportunity came
when a friend of his approached him
for finance to purchase an old 1945
tanker to transport crude oil. They were
able to get a loan for $100,000 at an
interest rate of 10% per month and
bought their first tanker called the
Carolina.
From there they went on to purchase a
further 6 tankers, and as their client
base grew because of their reliability to
always deliver on time so did their
reputation. So, when the opportunity
arose for them to purchase a fledgling
oil company, they did not hesitate.
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