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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