She left Oil & Gas at 40 With No Business Experience to build a Billion-Naira Empire

Paglalarawan

What does it actually take to build a business that lasts 25 years in Nigeria — through recessions, exchange rate crashes, COVID, counterfeit competitors, and a rapidly changing economy? Mrs. Temilola Adepetun has the answer, and it is not what most people expect.This episode of Founders Connect is one of the most layered and honest conversations about what entrepreneurship really looks like over the long term. Temilola breaks down exactly how she validated a business idea in her head before there was internet, how she dragged inventory through the streets of New York in winter with stiff hands and no nails left just to keep the business stocked, and how she survived two major competitors rising up to take her market — not by going to war with them, but by refusing to compromise on quality until her customers came back to her on their own.She talks about the real cost of growing too fast, the discipline of growing organically, and why staying focused on your lane in the early years is one of the most underrated business decisions a founder can make. She walks through what it took to go from being the sole operator of a seasonal business to building a head office, hiring a COO thirteen years in, doubling revenue within two years of that hire, and then using that momentum to attract private equity. She explains what due diligence actually looked like for a brick-and-mortar business and why the most powerful thing she ever did was bank every single naira she made and keep audited records from day one.She also shares her mental model for leaving corporate life, the Yoruba philosophy that shaped her decision to take the leap, how she read the market before anyone else saw it, and the specific mindset shift that helped her see a seasonal business not as a limitation but as a puzzle to solve. And she opens up about succession planning, the deliberate decision to pass operational control to a younger leader whose values aligned with hers, and why she believes that letting other people in — truly in — is the most importan