Babajide Duroshola will be the first to tell you that he loves money. He loves making it, spending it, saving it, investing it, and, believe it or not, giving it away. Piggyvest sat with Duroshola to discuss how money has shaped his extensive career which spans consulting, corporate banking, software engineering, mobility tech, finance and VC investing, the lessons he’s learned, and the advice he has for founders and young entrepreneurs.
Hi Babajide, could you please introduce yourself?
My name is Babajide Duroshola. I currently lead business operations for an African company focused on being the financial partner for everyday income earners. I lead business operations for our Nigerian market. I love money and everything related to it – saving, investing, and budgeting – so people often assume I’m from a finance background. But I actually studied engineering and have worked in business operations and HR for finance companies, but I have never worked as a finance analyst.
What was your first job?
My first job was in consulting. I spent four years working on human capital advisory and business advisory.
Consulting is notoriously difficult to get into, especially if you don’t have a finance background. What was your way in?
It was through an NYSC placement. The firm was looking for data entry analysts to enter business cards collected by its consultants. There were 20 of us initially, but we were all put through a battery of tests and competency assessments to select the best trainees. They selected five trainees, and I started my career doing data entry.
I was very curious and trainable, so I got drafted into a few consulting projects, and that’s how my career took off.
From there, you made the first of your many industry pivots from consulting to banking. Why did you decide to leave consulting?
The love for money. I remember Access Bank offered me three times what the consulting firm was paying me at the time. Interestingly, there was an offer between Access Bank and KPMG and an opportunity to advance my career in consulting, but money was the ultimate decider.
Consulting can be very theoretical, where you design interventions and offer advisory services, but you don’t implement them. How did you handle the shift from advising companies to implementing projects?
Interestingly, I didn’t work in corporate banking, even though I was now working at a bank. I joined Human Resources (HR) at Access Bank, specifically as a business partner to the enterprise resource group, which includes the risk, audit, IT and finance departments. Being a business partner meant providing HR services and support, which required me to learn a bit more about the business domain.
After that, I spent a year in process improvement, where I worked on HR processes such as recruitment, performance management, Learning and Development (L&D), and onboarding. We spent a lot of time understanding the pain points of each process and then working to improve them. This role challenged me because I had to design solutions, present them to management, secure their buy-in, and implement them.
I quickly learnt (with a lot of insults) that external environments significantly impact the success of your ideas and that some ideas simply do not work, despite your best intentions.
Your time at SafeBoda is particularly interesting because, as country director for a mobility tech company, you were responsible not only for the company’s expansion into Nigeria but also for keeping costs under budget. Did everything you learnt in consulting and banking prepare you for this new challenge?
So, I never really had a career path, which is surprising for someone who worked in HR. Instead, I have a skills bucket and have found ways to leverage the skills I have for the roles I want. I’m used to doing hard things and reinventing myself because I have learned to create a process around problem-solving. A good process has an input and an output, and this applies to businesses as well. Once I define the output I want, I can take everything I know and have learned and refine it to ensure I get the output I want.
I was a science student who thought I would study medicine, so I dropped further maths in SS1. Imagine my surprise when I got into the university and discovered that Engineering is all about further maths. While I wasn’t at the top of my class, I did fairly well for someone without a math background. Then I went to consulting, then to HR, then to community management at Andela, before joining Safeboda.
There is also a bit of luck in it, but I believe that luck is when preparation meets opportunity, and I was always prepared. I applied for a country manager position at a very interesting company before I applied to Safeboda, and I made it to the final stage. It was between another candidate and me, and they chose him because he had industry experience. I took that in stride and applied that lesson to prepare for my next go around.
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You worked for Andela, one of Nigeria’s first tech unicorns, at a time when the company was really breaking new ground in tech and business. What was the energy like at that time?
It was electrifying. I have always been influential since secondary school, and I’ve always been able to convince people to do things, but Andela gave me significant leverage to use that skill in the service of a brand. I was a community manager, which was akin to being the face of the brand, and I felt like a rockstar. I would go to universities and get recognised by people who believed work at Andela was the biggest career boost because of the work being done there.
This was also the era of building in the ‘open’, so I became an evangelist of the brand. Communities were also becoming a thing, and we partnered with Google communities in Nigeria before starting our own Andela communities. I was inspired to write and to use my social media to share my journey and the brand story. I learned from that experience that building a brand inadvertently builds you a following. Even today, you can tell which company I’m building with by the colour scheme of my social media posts from a particular period.
Many people don’t understand that it is easier to build a personal following by working with a brand than by doing it on your own. Andela was where I learned that, and that it was possible to do amazing things in the right environment.
You currently lead business operations at M-Kopa, your second scale-up for an international company in a decade, a role that requires you to make a lot of money while saving the company money. How have you succeeded at doing this, and what creating products for entrepreneurs taught you about money?
When I first started at M-Kopa, my colleagues thought I was very stingy, but now they think I am very generous. But the reality is, I haven’t changed; they just don’t understand the financial principles that guide how I respond to periods of abundance and periods of financial constraints. People who lead successful business operations understand that financial levers are the best tools to do this and master when and how to deploy them.
I have very strict financial principles and have applied them since my days at Andela. I think of myself like a company, and I draw a salary from my income, which is a percentage of revenue. The rest of the ‘revenue’ I generate, I allocate through tools and principles such as budgeting, conscientious spending, investing and delayed gratification. Those principles have helped me insulate my staff and the business from periods of difficulty.
My mother struggled to pay our fees when I was in school, so helping others in similar situations is something I deeply care about. These acts of philanthropy are budgeted for as Corporate CSR and assigned a percentage of my budget, as are other obligations such as tithing. These percentages are adhered to strictly; their values might increase or decrease, but the percentages remain the same. It is that discipline I apply to my work finances, because they are tested and they work.
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Financial success starts from the personal; if you don’t have personal financial discipline, it is almost impossible to have corporate financial discipline.
You are also a limited partner at Rallycap Global, a VC fund focused on early-stage, emerging-market startups. This feels like a full-circle moment for someone who started their career in consulting and built their reputation at startups. Why invest?
I am a limited partner, but I’m not actively investing because I still have active portfolios that are my current focus. Investing kicked off in 2020 because, at the time, I was a country manager and earning a lot of money, so I had to decide how to invest it. I chose to invest in other founders.
I usually tell people I don’t have any present plans to build a business. This might change in the future, but for now, I am very invested in helping other people build their businesses. I could do this by working for the company and helping them scale using my experience and expertise, but I’m at a point in my career where I have responsibilities and taking a pay cut to build an ‘exciting’ startup no longer makes financial sense. But I can take some of the money I’ve made and direct it towards investment, either as a seed fund or offer advisory services.
What is the biggest mind shift you have had to make since you started working in VC investing?
There is always this hubris among founders who believe the only way you can understand the challenges of running a startup is to launch your own. But I have managed multi-million-dollar businesses in this same economy and even incorporated a company in Nigeria, building its structure and presence from the ground up, so I have firsthand experience of the entire founder’s journey. The only thing I didn’t have experience with was raising capital, and I’m currently doing that at M-Kopa.
I felt it was very important to share this knowledge with founders, and the only way founders will listen to you is if you give them money, so that’s what I did.
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Your career is very interesting because you have almost a holistic understanding of the startup ecosystem, having helped build startups and now funding them. How has that shaped your understanding of money, specifically capital?
Investing is all about capital and resource allocation.
There are different kinds of capital: the capital you invest in yourself to position you to make more capital, the capital you use to create a defence against uncertainty (such as ill-health, sudden death, accidents or theft), and then the capital you invest in for long-term, future rewards. Your goals for your capital will inform how you invest it.
When people come to me for advice on their personal investing, I usually direct them to Piggyvest, because it offers clearly defined short-term returns on their investments that they can use for other things. Insurance and emergency savings are a great way to create defence funds, and in the long term, you can consider major investments that require some serious research and commitment.
I have investments that come with a 3% non-negotiable management fee. It sounds counterintuitive to pay to manage your investments, but that is how serious investing works. Most Nigerians would not invest in any fund that requires them to enter the fund, but those funds are managed by professionals who take on the day-to-day management of those investments.
Running a startup is hard. In your experience, how can startups future-proof their businesses against economic anyhowness?
Hire professionals.
‘I can read the contract’ is a problem I see too often among young professionals and entrepreneurs. Hire a lawyer, an accountant, a tax consultant. Even if it is a one-off contract. Allocating slim resources to professionals might be annoying, but it saves you in the long run. The business landscape is too volatile to go at it alone when professional services can make a very cost-effective difference.
Are there any financial decisions you have made over the course of your career that you are very proud of?
All my financial decisions. I’ve always been very astute with money, and I have no Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), so I have always sought consistency over quick turnarounds. Consistency allows you to buy when returns are low and buy when returns are high, and eventually average out. I remember starting to save in USD when the dollar was N306 to the dollar. I remember investing early with designated funds, and I’ve seen how much my investments have grown.
As Nigerians, we have a weakness for gambling and an aversion to facing reality. That’s why so many people are looking for the next best thing and missing out on good deals because they’re seeking a quick payout or an unearned windfall. Many people who failed to take advantage of bitcoin when it was low are now jumping on the next best thing, looking for the next big bull run without really understanding how stocks work or how to make a profit from such investments.
The goal with investments is to average out, and that can only happen if you invest consistently.
What financial tips would you like to share with other young professionals who want to build a financially secure career?
You’re not a rockstar. As a young professional, you should aim to live like a professional, not like a celebrity. Superstars like Davido and Genevieve seek luxury; professionals seek quality and class. Avoid lifestyle creep as much as possible, and learn to live below your means for as long as you can. Being a professional doesn’t mean you need a Patek watch. A Tissot does the same thing but at a much lower price.
I would also advise that you start with your defence layer when you begin investing. You are in a volatile market where you can lose your job at any time, so set up your emergency fund, pensions and insurance premiums before you focus on anything else. Keep things simple, keep your investments consistent and plan for the long term.
