On The Money is a PiggyVest editorial series that explores the personal stories and lived experiences behind the data points in the annual Piggyvest Savings Report.
As an immigrant who moved from Nigeria to the UK for better opportunities, Mofe Binitie has had a whirlwind career. He switched between private practice and corporate, and even earned a daily wage of $1000 in consulting. He talks to us about his many career pivots, his relationship with money, and working in a high-stakes, high-reward industry as an immigrant.
Please introduce yourself.
My name is Mo or Mofe Ibrahim Binitie, depending on the audience. My professional background is consulting, with stints in Private Equity, Green Finance, and, most recently, tech.
What was your first job after university?
After graduating from the University of Benin, I joined Ernst & Young (EY)’s Nigerian arm as an associate.
What did you do there?
I was responsible for transactions and strategy at EY for two years before I left to start an MBA at Oxford University.
In 2016, Ernst & Young was one of the most respected companies to work for in Nigeria. Why did you choose to leave?
My original plan wasn’t to leave EY permanently. My MBA was supposed to be a sabbatical, but it didn’t turn out that way.
Interesting. Why did you choose Oxford for your MBA?
Part of the reason I picked Oxford University for my MBA was that I wanted a programme that focused on social entrepreneurship. Working out of Nigeria meant that much of my EY work focused on private equity firms and the oil and gas industry.
Why green finance?
In Nigeria, I started a non-profit called Be The Difference. I became interested in social enterprises, which focused more on social good than profit. Few academic institutions focused on charity, and Nigeria doesn’t have the strongest social society or institutions.
Before I left, I had worked on some green finance projects, and at Oxford, I would get opportunities to explore that more extensively. In my Strategy and Innovation class, I got paired with a classmate who had also done some work on climate finance. I saw an opportunity to build a business that could help Africa access the funding needed for green finance for its carbon transition. Because of that business, I didn’t return to EY after finishing my MBA.
What happened to that business?
Our business relied on funding from the Green Climate Fund, based in Seoul, Korea, and led by the United States. A few months after launching our business, Donald Trump was elected president.
When he got elected in 2016, President Trump pulled America out of many of its climate agreements, and the fund’s structure changed. That meant we had to reposition our business model by streamlining our process and digitising the business. That was going to take some time, and I had MBA loans to pay, so I started contracting as a consultant.
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How did you discover freelance consulting? Did you know about it before you moved to the UK?
I fell into it by chance. I finished my MBA and was waiting for my results because there were some visa restrictions on my ability to work until I got them. Around that time, I found contract consulting and met my first recruiter.
When he told me the day rate for contract consulting during my interview, I thought he was lying, but then I got my first role a couple of weeks later, and the rest was history.
What was the day rate?
Day rates for consultants can range from $300 for entry-level to $3000 a day for senior consultants. Specialists who work in high-risk transactions can negotiate even higher daily rates.
Whoa! Is freelance consulting popular across the world?
Contracting as a consultant is very particular to the UK and Europe and very different from America. A whole industry of recruiters and platforms has grown around connecting businesses with consultants.
My agent paired me with GoodLord, a property tech company. I ended up joining the company’s product operations team full-time. I did this because the company was digitising the referencing process through which companies confirm that potential renters are eligible for rent. I felt this was a good skill to learn and apply to my green finance company.
At the time, I was trying to combine my work with the restructuring process of our green finance social enterprise. Still, my co-founder got a scholarship to pursue a fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School, so we had to disband the green finance company.
Wow, that’s rough. What did you do next?
I continued working with GoodLord for three years before I left to return to consulting. I worked for a couple of startups as a consultant. I particularly enjoyed my last role at Inchcape Shipping Services (ISS) for a year as a transformation lead for their payment projects.
I was hired because of my previous experience with digital transformation, and they wanted me to transfer those skills to execute their projects. My overall boss had a design background and was trying to do something ambitious and challenging in this space. He was innovating by applying design principles to a 177-year-old shipping/sports agency business to transform the business experience.
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The company oversaw 4 billion dollars in transactions on behalf of its customers. It was based in 80 countries and had over 3000 staff members. Our job was to ensure that every experience the staff, customers, and vendors had when interacting with the business offline and online was objectively reasonable and functionally excellent.
I was responsible for rebuilding their two main products, renegotiating how we sourced foreign exchange for their cross-border businesses, and serving as a transformation product manager for two of their primary products, redesigning and launching them and increasing the product’s revenue by 2 million dollars in the first year.
Whoa! That’s a lot of money.
Yes, that wasn’t all I worked on. I also had to redesign the payment system for the company’s global hub, which made payments on behalf of customers. It was nerve-wracking because the hub handled $1 billion in transactions annually, and I was responsible for redesigning the whole system from top to bottom.
I finished that in March 2024, and in May, I started my next project, joining a startup, MyDevConnect, as the chief operating officer.
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Congratulations! That’s quite the transition from contracting to management. What made you decide it was time to return to paid employment?
MyDevConnect allows me to apply everything I’ve learned from financing and consulting to building a business that helps Africans get work in the global market. To give an example of how this works, our newest client is Anheuser-Busch, an American beer company. We are building a tournament platform for their game, ‘Reign of Titans.’ Much of what we build for them involves facilitating real-world payments and transactions within the game, leveraging my finance background and consulting and project management skills.
To circle back to contract consulting. How is it different from regular consulting?
Contract consulting is a niche career, and you pretty much get a crash course on becoming a one-man startup. You are responsible for your marketing, accounting, administration, and everything else you need. It does give you some freedom to innovate that you wouldn’t have in traditional consulting, but it has its challenges.
What would you consider the challenges of contract consulting?
You must deliver value immediately because you are paid much more than traditional consultants. There is no training, mentorship or career progression. You don’t have job security like a regular job, you only get a one-week notice if the client wants to fire you. Also, you must figure out your taxes, insurance and pensions all by yourself, because you are still a business owner, even though the business is you.
How does one start a career in freelance consulting?
There are many ways to get started, but for me personally, networking (thanks to my alumni network at Oxford and my time at EY) and spending a lot of time on consulting message boards were my one-two combo. The networks taught me about company culture, and the message boards helped me learn about the best freelance networks.
Running a startup is hard, and with Brexit, things are harder in the UK. As COO, how do you future-proof your finances against economic downturns?
Up until five years ago, the UK was pretty stable economically, but with Covid-19, geopolitical instability and other factors, there is a lot of uncertainty, even for a profitable business like MyDevConnect. But I find that being a Nigerian helps.
Growing up in a place where most things are unpredictable and anything could go wrong at any time, you learn to be vigilant and always have a contingency plan for the worst. It’s not a great mindset to have all the time, but particularly for startups, it helps to be solution-oriented at all times.
What are your long-term savings/investment strategies for staying financially stable throughout your career and after?
I think you should always have some liquid cash, but when presented with options, I would always prefer to invest. There is an element of risk that comes with investing, and some of that risk is rewarded if you manage it well.
Start small. I do angel investing, stock options, and ETFs. It also helps to have friends you can discuss investment opportunities with, you can’t know everything and you don’t have the time to research everything. Find friends, exchange tips, talk. You will make some mistakes, but you will survive.
What are the changes in your life now that you are back to working a full-time role?
I don’t think much has changed. I would say I have been working with startups all the years I have freelanced. MyDevConnect is a startup, and even though we are profitable and don’t have to worry about raising investment, I still have to work as hard and show up 110%.
I am no longer responsible for my healthcare, pension, and other concerns. That relieves a lot of stress and allows me to focus on making this business successful.
Are you very proud of any financial decisions you have made throughout your career?
In hindsight, I think investing in an MBA was a good decision. I also did some angel investing in a couple of startups in 2021; I had a really good exit from one of those companies this year, and those funds have come in handy over the years.
What is a major financial mistake you made, and what was your key takeaway from it?
When I got admitted into my MBA programme at Oxford, I chose to fund it almost exclusively with student loans. The plan was to get a high-paying job after school and pay off the loans and interest. My plan didn’t work out, and the loans quickly became a burden.
My key takeaway is that gbese is gbese, and you should only take on interest-heavy loans as a last resort.
What career advice do you have for young people looking to go into freelance consulting?
Get familiar with the recruitment cycle and case studies. The best resources are Preplounge, Fishbowl, and Reddit threads on consulting. The McKinsey Forward programme is also a great resource for getting started.
