From School Dropout To Business Mogul: The Femi Otedola Story

BILLIONAIRE businessman, Femi Otedola, has told the story of how he navigated from being a school dropout to building a multi-billion-dollar empire without a university degree or even completing high school.
In his recently released memoir, titled, ‘Making It Big,’ the 62-year-old shrewd investor recounted how his academic struggles made him abandon formal education and plunge into the world of business, which turned out to be his ultimately calling.
In the 286-page book, Otedola recalled his academic struggles right from primary school at the University of Lagos Staff School at the age of six in 1968, and being classmates with notable figures, including Kola, son of the late business magnate, Chief MKO Abiola.
Indeed, “academia and I were not compatible,” he said, as he repeated a class and was consistently at the bottom of his class, noting: “I finished primary school in 1974 because I repeated a class.
“Even when I was allowed to pass, I consistently anchored the bottom rungs of our end-of-term examination results. My interests were definitely not in academia.”
After finishing primary school, he proceeded to Methodist Boys’ High School, Lagos, where his academic struggles continued.
“The school had been founded almost 100 years earlier, in 1878. Alumni include grand names in Nigerian history- Nnamdi Azikiwe, Mobolaji Johnson, Ola Rotimi, Fola Adeola, Olusegun Osoba and Hezekiah Oladipo Davies.
“When I joined the student body in 1974, the principal was D. A. Famoroti, who’d taken up the post in 1963 and would leave in 1980.
“I started Form 1 at age 12 and was there for three years.”
By 1977, when it became clear that his performance was not improving, his parents transferred him to Olivet Baptist High School in Oyo, a boarding school founded by Southern Baptist missionaries in 1945.
He recounted: “My parents’ thinking was that all my siblings were boarders, and they seemed to be doing well. They thought this change would help turn around my attitude towards academia, but nothing changed.
“I started in Form 3 at Olivet, and as I rounded off the first year of my A Levels, my father was establishing his printing company, Impact Press, in Surulere, a residential and commercial district in Lagos State.
“I grew fascinated with the machines and told myself that my future would be inextricably tied to them. I managed to remain in school until the Lower Sixth examination was over. And then, I was finished; I never returned for my Upper Sixth.
“All I wanted to do was get involved in business. My father kept watch over me and drew me close. My sister taught me shorthand. I knew how to type and began typing letters for my dad. I prepared all his business correspondence.
“I was fascinated by the way printing machines treat paper. The white paper is placed on one end, the ink and plates are fixed and the printed material comes out of the other end. It was captivating.”
Despite his mother’s protest and tears, Femi was done with academics; he abandoned school to work full-time in his father’s new printing business and rose quickly to become managing director of Impact Press in 1987 at the age of 25.
“However, I soon became restless. I had immersed myself in all aspects of the business and learned the ropes at my dad’s right hand. I certainly enjoyed the job more than grappling with the Pythagoras theorem and struggling through homework at Olivet.
“As time went by, though, I also thought it was time for a measure of independence from my dad. I still wanted to work for him, I really enjoyed hearing the rumbling of machines and savouring the smell of freshly printed material, but I also wanted to do things differently.
“I told him I wanted to become a sales consultant for the press, and he agreed. He said he would pay me a commission of 10 to 15 per cent on any work I brought in.
“That was a significant break for me. I invested my money in buying cars for sales and marketing outreach and moved on to the next phase in my nascent professional life.”
With this new role, which he really enjoyedFemi started to bring in jobs from major companies and advertising agencies, particularly in the printing of calendars and diaries.
“We could hardly keep up with the demand. Our unique selling point was quality, thanks to the state-of-the-art machines we owned. We were also always on time with job delivery. We were engaged in healthy competition with Academy Press, a company located in the Ilupeju area of Lagos.
“I served as my dad’s sales exec up until 1991, when he started his Lagos State gubernatorial campaign. It was a run for office, ultimately successful, that I had initiated.”
The breakthrough in the family business gave him the confidence and foundation to launch out on his own, and in 1994, he founded Centre Force Limited with N10million capital.
From those beginnings, he built a vast business empire in oil and gas, shipping, real estate, finance and philanthropy, culminating in his chairing the Boards of Forte Oil, investing in power through Geregu Power Plc, and now First Bank of Nigeria’s (FBN) parent company, FirstHoldco Plc, one of the country’s largest financial groups.
Otedola’s educational history has confused not a few, with many believing that he is a university graduate. But he enthused that his true lessons were learnt from watching his father, trusting his instincts and learning from both failures and triumphs.
“I never returned for my Upper Sixth. All I wanted was to get involved in business,” a decision that once worried his mother, but which laid the foundation for where he is today, as one of Africa’s most influential businessmen and investors.