By PETER ANOSIKE
Making money can be very easy for some and difficult for others. For Bode Adediji, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Bode Adediji and Partners, who became a millionaire in his thirties, he came into money through dint of hard work, doing the right things and being focused on what he was doing. A real estate guru, Adediji’s firm, no doubt, ranks among the first five in the country. Apart from this, he pioneered the first multi-disciplinary real estate firm in the country.
However, it was not as if everything was strewn together for him to succeed. He came from a very humble background but waded his way through the murky waters of life to the top.
Early beginning
I don’t think that majority of Nigerians who are within my age bracket can say they were born with anything near silver spoon. As far as my humble self is concerned, I came from the humblest of humble background. I was born in Ada in Boripe Local Government Area of Osun State about 20 kilometers away from Osogbo, the state capital. At that point in time, there was no electricity, no water and no hospital, only one or two primary schools. My mother was a farmer and a trader, while my father was a saw miller or timber merchant. I attended primary school in the village secondary school in my village and as luck would have it, I also attended the University of Ife(now Obafemi Awolowo Universty), which happened to be a stone throw from my village, so all my upbringing centered around village life.
When I made my first one million
I became comfortably rich in my early 30s but if you want to use the word millionaire, you can go ahead. Money on its own is a meaningless asset. You find out that you don’t have to go religious to understand some of the comments sages had made about money. One of the wise sayings is that money is a means to an end but never an end in itself. Money is a good servant but a very bad master
On how I felt making my first million, it was a long time ago, but one thing that I can remember vividly was that there was not much difference in my feeling when I was an ordinary worker and when I became financially comfortable. The reason is because my access to millions early in life did not expose me to any luxury life style of any kind, in the sense that any commodity that does not offer any practical and tangible benefit to me in terms of utility is of no consequence whether I have millions to buy it or not. One important thing which we have lost in this country and which was not like before is that whether in the church, mosques and weddings, Nigerians seem to give undue reverence to people whom they know have money without regard to how they made the money.
Journey of life
If a boy did not begin to think of manhood when he was still a boy, when he gets to be a man, that era would pass and he would be nobody. My own journey to manhood began when I was a boy. I was taught early in life that hard work, education, obedience to constituted authority and a structured pattern of life are paramount to whoever wants to succeed in life. I knew from day one that if I did not struggle and compete, there is no way I could make good results in school. Through that philosophy, I spent only three years in the secondary school against the standard five-year period that most students spend because I was getting double promotion. Secondly, I went to the University of Ife without passing through the normal Higher School then and I topped my class in the final year by becoming the best over all student in the department of Estate Management. Through the grace of God and through my endorsement of hard work as the cardinal principle of any modicum of success anybody can achieve in life. A man will not succeed in this world if his planning is not backed by discipline. If there is anything that I want Nigerians to know today, it is that majority of our youths have ambition to become rich, to become popular but this ambition is not underpinned by passion for excellence, passion for planning and passion for hard work. You can see in the majority of them, they want the shortcut to everything. That is why, in majority of cases, they end up as failures. If a man can look at life as fundamentally programmed. I want to say that the life of everybody is based on fundamental programming. If you don’t programme your life positively, you would end up a disaster. If you programme your life very well and you pray for it and work towards it, challenges can come but you will end up becoming a successful human being wherever you find yourself.
What success means
Success to me is the ability at every point in time to impact positively on your fellow human being, on the society or your environment. Mind you, in my definition of success, I have not made any reference to any politician, billionaire or to any poor man. I believe that God created man to be able to lend helping hand to every other man whether he is big or small. Inherent to my submission,for every human being to be able to accomplish that central goal of making an impact, God has endowed all of us with one talent or another.The unfortunate thing about Nigeria and Nigerians is, we fail to recognize the talent that God has given to us as individuals. On the other side, we always try to envy somebody who is good in one line and try to copy him. So whoever at every moment is able to impact positively on the life of others, if he falls dead tomorrow, he must have accomplished the goal for which he was created.
Pioneering the first multidisciplinary estate firm in the country
The vision came to me when I was pursuing my masters programme in Estate Management at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. It dawned on me that at any professional firm, if any consultant wants to add value from a strategic perspective, he or she needs to have a good bias for a consortium approach to service delivery. So, I asked myself, what are the basic things that defined estate assets? They include conceptualization, design, construction and project management and then property management. This hovers around engineering, architecture, quantity surveying, estate surveying and town planning. So, what I then did was to assemble all these people, bring all of them under one roof and through that approach you can synergize and today we are able to leap in the fore-front of estate consultancy through the multi-disciplinary approach to service delivery system, and since then no looking back.
Management Style
Right now, we are passing through a period of management transition where we have to ensure that whatever we want to do within the short and long term, everybody keys into it. We are into critical arrears like successor plan, advancement plan,diversification plan and, of course, the one that is of very importance to me which I keep on emphasizing but which we have adequately deployed is the nature of our social responsibility because waking up every time or every year and saying that you are giving this or that to the handicap is not sufficient.
Challenges
If you look at the challenges in the village, many have always struggled to put food on the table. However, I happened not to be among those who don’t know where the next meal would come from, but beside the basic needs of food and clothing, there was nothing luxurious about my family set up. On health issue, I could remember when I was about seven or eight years old, epidemic of cholera struck in my village and within a couple of days, hundreds of people had died. That was when public health became a pillar in my heart because in a village where there is no sensitizing and infrastructure to provide for the villagers, a little disease can always turn into an epidemic and before you know it, the entire village could be wiped off.
Aspiring professionals
As a professional, every step of my life is characterized by certain peculiar challenge or another, and I want all professional men and women to bear that in mind. If you want to be a successful professional anywhere in the world, you have to reconcile yourself with the fact that at every given time, certain challenges would characterize your development. Specifically , as a youth corps member and after youth service, the challenge that I had was to imbibe as much training as I could. That would make you to become a servant to all your seniors, send you to all the places without you blinking an eyelid or expressing any fatigue or disappointment. Having learnt that, the next is that as a professional, issues of integrity, hard work, excellence, are the ingredients that clients look forward in individuals. But unfortunately in Nigeria, only a small percentage of aspiring professionals adhere to that. If you are able to relate yourself to what I have always canvassed, that when you see Nigerians moving en masse towards one direction and you are not sure of that direction, go the opposite direction and you would not fail. If you see people who migrate here and there without making conscious effort to ask what are the basis for this mass movement, just go to the other direction and you would succeed.
The other challenge that we have, of course, is that certain trade requires capital and if your line of business requires capital, you have to focus your mind on the most ethical way of getting the capital without which you cannot do anything. The last but not the least is that you should not end up becoming a jack of all trade and master of none. In Nigeria, I can categorically state that many doctors, architects, engineers who would have succeeded, fail half way in their journey because of lack of focus. They make some money in the early days of their careers and they would want to go into politics, chieftaincy title taking or other frivolities. I am not casting any aspersion on anyone but for the younger ones, a focused life is a template for success and an unfocussed life is a recipe for failure. So, if you are an engineer, focus on your engineering field and whatever capital you generate, you can diversify. But for you to be a medical doctor and at the same time a contractor, a politician and at the same time a globe trotter, that is a recipe for failure and this is common with Nigerian professionals.
Advice to the youths
My advice to Nigerian youths is that they should believe in God and believe in themselves and also believe in the country. Whatever challenges you may be passing through as an individual, whatever challenges your country may be passing through, indeed, whatever challenges the world may be passing through, all would come to pass. But where a young person has no vision for himself, has no vision for his country, then he cannot aspire to be anything. For those who may have contrary view, I want to re-assert one position, Nigeria is one of the potentially greatest countries in the universe. Whatever may be our present challenges shall come to pass. The youths should struggle, they should pray, learn, plan, compete and remain visionary.
Making money can be very easy for some and difficult for others. For Bode Adediji, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Bode Adediji and Partners, who became a millionaire in his thirties, he came into money through dint of hard work, doing the right things and being focused on what he was doing. A real estate guru, Adediji’s firm, no doubt, ranks among the first five in the country. Apart from this, he pioneered the first multi-disciplinary real estate firm in the country.
However, it was not as if everything was strewn together for him to succeed. He came from a very humble background but waded his way through the murky waters of life to the top.
Early beginning
I don’t think that majority of Nigerians who are within my age bracket can say they were born with anything near silver spoon. As far as my humble self is concerned, I came from the humblest of humble background. I was born in Ada in Boripe Local Government Area of Osun State about 20 kilometers away from Osogbo, the state capital. At that point in time, there was no electricity, no water and no hospital, only one or two primary schools. My mother was a farmer and a trader, while my father was a saw miller or timber merchant. I attended primary school in the village secondary school in my village and as luck would have it, I also attended the University of Ife(now Obafemi Awolowo Universty), which happened to be a stone throw from my village, so all my upbringing centered around village life.
When I made my first one million
I became comfortably rich in my early 30s but if you want to use the word millionaire, you can go ahead. Money on its own is a meaningless asset. You find out that you don’t have to go religious to understand some of the comments sages had made about money. One of the wise sayings is that money is a means to an end but never an end in itself. Money is a good servant but a very bad master
On how I felt making my first million, it was a long time ago, but one thing that I can remember vividly was that there was not much difference in my feeling when I was an ordinary worker and when I became financially comfortable. The reason is because my access to millions early in life did not expose me to any luxury life style of any kind, in the sense that any commodity that does not offer any practical and tangible benefit to me in terms of utility is of no consequence whether I have millions to buy it or not. One important thing which we have lost in this country and which was not like before is that whether in the church, mosques and weddings, Nigerians seem to give undue reverence to people whom they know have money without regard to how they made the money.
Journey of life
If a boy did not begin to think of manhood when he was still a boy, when he gets to be a man, that era would pass and he would be nobody. My own journey to manhood began when I was a boy. I was taught early in life that hard work, education, obedience to constituted authority and a structured pattern of life are paramount to whoever wants to succeed in life. I knew from day one that if I did not struggle and compete, there is no way I could make good results in school. Through that philosophy, I spent only three years in the secondary school against the standard five-year period that most students spend because I was getting double promotion. Secondly, I went to the University of Ife without passing through the normal Higher School then and I topped my class in the final year by becoming the best over all student in the department of Estate Management. Through the grace of God and through my endorsement of hard work as the cardinal principle of any modicum of success anybody can achieve in life. A man will not succeed in this world if his planning is not backed by discipline. If there is anything that I want Nigerians to know today, it is that majority of our youths have ambition to become rich, to become popular but this ambition is not underpinned by passion for excellence, passion for planning and passion for hard work. You can see in the majority of them, they want the shortcut to everything. That is why, in majority of cases, they end up as failures. If a man can look at life as fundamentally programmed. I want to say that the life of everybody is based on fundamental programming. If you don’t programme your life positively, you would end up a disaster. If you programme your life very well and you pray for it and work towards it, challenges can come but you will end up becoming a successful human being wherever you find yourself.
What success means
Success to me is the ability at every point in time to impact positively on your fellow human being, on the society or your environment. Mind you, in my definition of success, I have not made any reference to any politician, billionaire or to any poor man. I believe that God created man to be able to lend helping hand to every other man whether he is big or small. Inherent to my submission,for every human being to be able to accomplish that central goal of making an impact, God has endowed all of us with one talent or another.The unfortunate thing about Nigeria and Nigerians is, we fail to recognize the talent that God has given to us as individuals. On the other side, we always try to envy somebody who is good in one line and try to copy him. So whoever at every moment is able to impact positively on the life of others, if he falls dead tomorrow, he must have accomplished the goal for which he was created.
Pioneering the first multidisciplinary estate firm in the country
The vision came to me when I was pursuing my masters programme in Estate Management at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. It dawned on me that at any professional firm, if any consultant wants to add value from a strategic perspective, he or she needs to have a good bias for a consortium approach to service delivery. So, I asked myself, what are the basic things that defined estate assets? They include conceptualization, design, construction and project management and then property management. This hovers around engineering, architecture, quantity surveying, estate surveying and town planning. So, what I then did was to assemble all these people, bring all of them under one roof and through that approach you can synergize and today we are able to leap in the fore-front of estate consultancy through the multi-disciplinary approach to service delivery system, and since then no looking back.
Management Style
Right now, we are passing through a period of management transition where we have to ensure that whatever we want to do within the short and long term, everybody keys into it. We are into critical arrears like successor plan, advancement plan,diversification plan and, of course, the one that is of very importance to me which I keep on emphasizing but which we have adequately deployed is the nature of our social responsibility because waking up every time or every year and saying that you are giving this or that to the handicap is not sufficient.
Challenges
If you look at the challenges in the village, many have always struggled to put food on the table. However, I happened not to be among those who don’t know where the next meal would come from, but beside the basic needs of food and clothing, there was nothing luxurious about my family set up. On health issue, I could remember when I was about seven or eight years old, epidemic of cholera struck in my village and within a couple of days, hundreds of people had died. That was when public health became a pillar in my heart because in a village where there is no sensitizing and infrastructure to provide for the villagers, a little disease can always turn into an epidemic and before you know it, the entire village could be wiped off.
Aspiring professionals
As a professional, every step of my life is characterized by certain peculiar challenge or another, and I want all professional men and women to bear that in mind. If you want to be a successful professional anywhere in the world, you have to reconcile yourself with the fact that at every given time, certain challenges would characterize your development. Specifically , as a youth corps member and after youth service, the challenge that I had was to imbibe as much training as I could. That would make you to become a servant to all your seniors, send you to all the places without you blinking an eyelid or expressing any fatigue or disappointment. Having learnt that, the next is that as a professional, issues of integrity, hard work, excellence, are the ingredients that clients look forward in individuals. But unfortunately in Nigeria, only a small percentage of aspiring professionals adhere to that. If you are able to relate yourself to what I have always canvassed, that when you see Nigerians moving en masse towards one direction and you are not sure of that direction, go the opposite direction and you would not fail. If you see people who migrate here and there without making conscious effort to ask what are the basis for this mass movement, just go to the other direction and you would succeed.
The other challenge that we have, of course, is that certain trade requires capital and if your line of business requires capital, you have to focus your mind on the most ethical way of getting the capital without which you cannot do anything. The last but not the least is that you should not end up becoming a jack of all trade and master of none. In Nigeria, I can categorically state that many doctors, architects, engineers who would have succeeded, fail half way in their journey because of lack of focus. They make some money in the early days of their careers and they would want to go into politics, chieftaincy title taking or other frivolities. I am not casting any aspersion on anyone but for the younger ones, a focused life is a template for success and an unfocussed life is a recipe for failure. So, if you are an engineer, focus on your engineering field and whatever capital you generate, you can diversify. But for you to be a medical doctor and at the same time a contractor, a politician and at the same time a globe trotter, that is a recipe for failure and this is common with Nigerian professionals.
Advice to the youths
My advice to Nigerian youths is that they should believe in God and believe in themselves and also believe in the country. Whatever challenges you may be passing through as an individual, whatever challenges your country may be passing through, indeed, whatever challenges the world may be passing through, all would come to pass. But where a young person has no vision for himself, has no vision for his country, then he cannot aspire to be anything. For those who may have contrary view, I want to re-assert one position, Nigeria is one of the potentially greatest countries in the universe. Whatever may be our present challenges shall come to pass. The youths should struggle, they should pray, learn, plan, compete and remain visionary.
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