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Women are good at putting money to work. So why is it still harder for us to access capital?

Seun Tayo-Balogun
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Women are good at putting money to work. So why is it still harder for us to access capital?

In 2021, Fidelity Investments analyzed the performance of 5.2 million self-directed investment accounts over a ten-year period. Women outperformed men by an average of 40 basis points, or 0.4 percent, a year. That difference may sound small. But in investing, small differences compounded over long periods matter.

Fidelity was not the first to notice a difference in how men and women invest.

Research by Brad Barber and Terrance Odean found that men traded significantly more frequently than women, and that the additional trading reduced their net returns. Fidelity’s later research also found that women investors were more likely to say they stayed the course when markets declined.

The picture that emerges is interesting. Women tend to trade less, hold longer and are less likely to react to every movement in the market. It turns out, we can be pretty good at putting money to work.

But this is not only an investment story.

For years, researchers have also studied what happens inside households when women have greater control over financial resources.

The World Bank has documented evidence from countries including Bangladesh, Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mexico, South Africa, China and the United Kingdom showing that when women control a greater share of household income, spending tends to shift in ways that benefit children and families. More money goes towards things like food, education, health, nutrition and housing.

The contexts differ, and I would be careful not to turn this into another stereotype that women are somehow naturally more responsible with money. The point is that there is evidence, across very different settings, that when we have greater control over financial resources, the benefits can extend well beyond us.

And that makes the next set of numbers difficult to ignore.

Because when we move from controlling money to asking for capital to build businesses, the picture changes.

Harvard Business Review reported in 2023 that companies founded solely by women received less than 3 percent of venture capital investments.

Gusto found something similar from a different angle. Among businesses started in 2022, 14 percent of male owners received at least some funding from private capital investment. For women, it was 6 percent.

Men were receiving private capital at 2.3 times the rate of women. And importantly, Gusto found that the disparity could not simply be explained away by the different kinds of businesses men and women were starting.

So we arrive at a strange contradiction.

When we have money to put to work, there is evidence that we can use it effectively. Yet when we need capital to build, we are less likely to receive it.

There is another layer to this.

Women themselves may underestimate their financial ability. In Fidelity’s 2021 research, only a third of women said they felt confident making investment decisions. Seventy percent said they needed to know more about choosing individual stocks.

We were outperforming and underestimating ourselves at the same time.

Confidence matters. Financial knowledge matters. We should absolutely continue learning, investing and becoming more comfortable making financial decisions.

But confidence cannot explain the entire capital gap. Access matters too. Who gets funded matters. Who gets to sit across the table from investors matters. And who gets the opportunity to turn a good idea into something much bigger matters.

This is why I think the conversation about women and money needs to become broader. We know something about what can happen when women have greater control over financial resources.

We invest. We put money into our households. We educate our children. We improve health and nutrition. We start businesses. And in many cases, the impact of that money travels far beyond us. So perhaps the economic question is no longer simply whether we know what to do with money. There is enough evidence to suggest that we do.

The more interesting question is what becomes possible when more capital reaches our hands.

Imagine what we could build.

Until the next note,

– STB

Notes with STB | A content series exploring mindset, money and business.

Sources:

  • Fidelity Investments (2021), Women and Investing Study – analysis of 5.2 million self-directed retail accounts, January 2011–December 2020.
  • Fidelity Investments (2023), research on women, investing and market volatility.
  • Barber, B. & Odean, T., Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment.
  • World Bank, World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development – evidence on women’s control of household resources and investment in children’s human capital.
  • Solal, I. & Snellman, K. (2023), For Female Founders, Fundraising Only from Female VCs Comes at a Cost, Harvard Business Review.
  • Gusto (2023), The Rise of Women Entrepreneurs.

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

From a University Food Business to 45+ Outlets

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From a University Food Business to 45+ Outlets

There is nothing particularly new about jollof rice.

There is nothing new about shawarma either.

Yet Ibigbemi Oloruntobi has built Item7Go around these familiar foods into a fast-growing Nigerian quick-service restaurant business with more than 45 outlets.

Perhaps that is precisely what makes the story worth studying.

Oloruntobi graduated from the University of Ilorin with a degree in Physics in 2011. A year later, Item7Go began as a small food business around the university, serving students who wanted meals that were affordable, filling and quick.

Fourteen years later, the business has moved far beyond its university beginnings. Item7Go now operates across multiple Nigerian cities, including Ilorin, Ibadan, Lagos and, most recently, Abuja. A September 2026 report on its Abuja opening puts the chain at more than 45 outlets nationwide.

But the more interesting story isn’t how many branches Item7Go has opened.

It’s what the business appears to have understood along the way.

You Don’t Always Need to Invent Something New

Entrepreneurship is often presented as the search for the next revolutionary idea.

Item7Go suggests another route.

Rice already had a market. Nigerians already understood party jollof. Students already needed affordable meals.

The opportunity wasn’t necessarily to create new demand. It was to serve existing demand exceptionally well.

Item7Go built around a straightforward proposition: familiar food, accessible pricing and convenience. BusinessDay describes the attraction of the brand in similarly simple terms: good food, fair prices and quick service.

There is a lesson here for founders constantly searching for an idea nobody has ever seen before: the opportunity may not lie in creating a new product, but in finding a better way to package, deliver and build a business around something people already want.

Simplicity Can Be a Strategy

Look at the Item7Go proposition and there is another interesting choice: focus.

Rather than trying to become everything to everybody, the brand became strongly associated with a relatively narrow range of familiar foods, particularly its rice combinations and shawarma.

That matters.

  • A focused offering can make:
  • purchasing easier to manage;
  • preparation more consistent;
  • staff training more straightforward;

customer expectations clearer.

And as a business adds locations, repeatability becomes increasingly important.

We cannot say from publicly available information exactly how Item7Go standardises its kitchens or what its unit economics look like. The company has not publicly disclosed detailed financial or operational data.

But its expansion demonstrates something founders often discover too late:

Complexity is expensive to scale.

Before adding more products, more services and more locations, it is worth asking whether the thing you already sell can be delivered repeatedly and reliably.

Technology Should Solve a Real Problem

Item7Go also hasn’t added technology simply to say it has an app.

Its ordering system solves a very ordinary problem: waiting.

Customers can order ahead through the Item7Go app or web app, choose a pickup location and collect when the food is ready. The company describes the proposition simply as “Ready on Arrival.”

That is what useful business technology often looks like: less friction between the customer and the thing they want.

For a smaller business, the equivalent doesn’t necessarily have to be an expensive custom app. It might be:

  • a good website;
  • a WhatsApp ordering system;
  • automated payments;
  • a better inventory process.

The question is the same:

Where is the friction, and what can remove it?

Start With One Market. Don’t Assume It Is Your Final Market.

Item7Go’s beginnings around the University of Ilorin are also instructive.

Students were an obvious first market for an affordable, quick meal. But the business did not remain a campus food stall.

It expanded into the wider city and eventually into other major markets.

Today, people who may never have heard of the original university outlet know the Item7Go brand.

That progression matters because founders sometimes confuse their first customer with their only possible customer.

Your first market can teach you how the business works.

It doesn’t necessarily define how large the business can become.

Standardise Before You Scale

And perhaps this is the biggest lesson in the Item7Go story.

Opening another branch is not really the difficult part of expansion. Reproducing what made the first one work is. That requires systems.

And perhaps this is where Oloruntobi’s Physics background provides an interesting metaphor, even if we shouldn’t claim it caused his business approach.

Physics trains you to think about systems, variables, cause and effect, and repeatable outcomes. A scalable business requires much the same discipline. The founder eventually has to turn what they know intuitively into processes that other people can understand, follow and reproduce.

A recipe has to become a consistent process. A particular way of serving customers has to become part of staff training. An ordering method can be supported by technology, while the practices that make one successful outlet work have to be structured well enough to be replicated across others.

That is how a business becomes less dependent on the person who started it and more capable of growing beyond them. 

The Bigger Lesson

Item7Go did not invent rice, takeaway food or fast food. What it has done is take something Nigerians already understand and build an increasingly sophisticated business around delivering it consistently.

That may be the more useful entrepreneurship lesson in the story. Building a successful business does not always require creating something the market has never seen before. Sometimes, the opportunity lies in taking an existing product, understanding what customers value about it and finding a better way to deliver it.

We spend a lot of time looking for extraordinary ideas, but some of the strongest business opportunities can be found in ordinary products and familiar problems. The difference often comes from how well a founder understands the market, simplifies the offering, removes friction and builds systems that allow the business to repeat what works.

For founders, that is perhaps the most important takeaway from Item7Go: you do not always have to reinvent the product. Sometimes, you need to reinvent the way the business works.

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

Before you decide whether the glass is half full or half empty, look at the room you’re in.

Seun Tayo-Balogun
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Before you decide whether the glass is half full or half empty, look at the room you’re in.

There is a question most of us have been asked at some point: do you see the glass as half full or half empty? It is meant to reveal something about your outlook, your optimism, the way you are wired.

But here is what the question does not ask: Who filled the glass? How big is the glass? And why do we assume that seeing it as half full is the right answer?

I want to tell you about a boat cruise I was on recently.

At the start of the evening, the anchor made an announcement: once we were ten minutes from docking, nobody would be permitted to use the bathroom. Simple rule. Everyone heard it. Everyone acknowledged it.

Halfway through the cruise, I went down to the lower deck to get a drink. The bar was quieter down there, the view was better, and the seating was comfortable. I ordered a cocktail, settled in, and enjoyed the evening exactly as it should be enjoyed.

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I completely forgot about the rule.

When I eventually got up to use the bathroom, nobody stopped me. I walked the full length of the deck, unhurried and entirely confident, until I arrived at the door and found it shut. The rule had not disappeared because I forgot about it. The door was already shut. I did not need discipline, willpower, or the right mindset. The environment had already decided for me.

That is the point. Build the right environment and certain decisions become easier because the room has already removed some of the options.

That is the thing about environment. It does not always announce itself. It works on you quietly, shaping what you reach for, what you consider normal, and sometimes what you do without thinking.

David Burkus, author of The Myths of Creativity, has written extensively about what allows people and organizations to produce creative work. One of the ideas explored in the research behind his book is that creativity does not exist in isolation. Expertise and motivation matter, but so does the surrounding social environment: the people, structures and conditions in which the work happens.

The environment may be doing more work than we are willing to credit it for.

Mindset culture has done something useful and something damaging. The useful part is real: your internal narrative shapes your decisions and how you respond to circumstances. The damaging part is equally important: it has placed almost the full weight of outcomes on the individual and quietly removed environment from the conversation.

Mindset culture says: If you are not progressing, change your mindset. If you are not disciplined, work on yourself. If you are not producing your best work, try harder.

There is truth in personal responsibility. But personal responsibility does not exist in a vacuum.

Your thinking shapes your decisions. But your environment shapes your thinking.

Before you spend another month trying to think your way into better results, ask honestly what environment your thinking is happening inside. The people around you. The conversations you are part of versus the ones you observe from the outside. The information you consume every day. The behaviours your environment makes easy. The space where you do your most important work. And perhaps even the things your current environment has made so normal that you no longer notice them.

Sometimes the work is internal. You need to change how you think, what you believe, or what you are willing to do.

But sometimes, you have done enough work on yourself. You need to change the room.

Your mindset matters. But your environment may be doing more work than you think.

Until the next note,

– STB

Notes with STB | A content series exploring mindset, money and business.

Source: Burkus, D. (2013). The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas. Jossey-Bass.

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

Ideas Don’t Arrive Fully Formed: What Amazon, Netflix, Nintendo and Instagram Teach Us About Turning Ideas Into Businesses

VIctor Akinwale
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Ideas Don’t Arrive Fully Formed: What Amazon, Netflix, Nintendo and Instagram Teach Us About Turning Ideas Into Businesses

Amazon began with books. Netflix began with DVDs. Nintendo began with playing cards. Instagram began as something called Burbn.

Today, these names are attached to businesses that look very different from their earliest versions. That difference matters because building a company rarely means taking an idea from a notebook and executing it exactly as planned. The original idea can provide the starting point, but customers, technology, competition and experience can change what the business eventually becomes.

Amazon is a clear example.

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, the idea was to build an online bookstore with a selection that a physical shop could not match. Amazon opened its virtual doors in July 1995, selling books online. Its early communications described the company as an online bookseller, and its initial ambition was to use the internet to offer an unusually large selection of books.

The company did not remain there. Within a few years, Amazon had moved into music, videos, toys, electronics and other categories. By 1999, it was describing itself as a place where customers could find and discover almost anything they wanted to buy online.

The important part of the Amazon story is not that Bezos had a grand plan to sell everything from the beginning. He started with a specific category that made sense for the internet and expanded from there.

A starting point does not have to define the final size of the business.

That also offers a useful lesson for anyone sitting on an idea and waiting for it to become perfect before taking the first step. Amazon did not need to know everything it would eventually become before it launched. The initial idea was specific enough to test, and the business grew as Bezos and his team learned what the market could support.

You do not need the finished idea to begin. You need an idea that is developed enough to test.

Thinking can improve an idea, but putting it into the market produces information that thinking alone cannot provide. Customers can reveal what they value, what they ignore and what needs to change.

But starting is only part of the process. What happens when the conditions around the business change?

Netflix followed a different path.

When Netflix launched its online DVD rental store in 1998, customers could rent DVDs through the internet and receive them by post. The service was built around the technology and consumer behaviour of its time.

That business eventually became something else.

As broadband internet improved, Netflix introduced streaming in 2007. The company later moved into original programming, beginning with House of Cards in 2013. In 2023, Netflix sent its final DVD, bringing an end to a 25-year chapter that had provided the foundation for its next stage.

Netflix’s story shows that an idea can be right for one period and still need to change as the market changes. A founder who remains committed to the original business model simply because it worked at the beginning can miss the opportunity created by new technology or changing customer behaviour.

The business you start is not necessarily the business you will need to keep building.

Nintendo’s history stretches even further.

In 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi began a small business manufacturing Hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto, Japan. Nintendo eventually moved into other forms of entertainment and began manufacturing games alongside playing cards in 1963. By 1978, it had entered the video-game business, and the company later became one of the world’s best-known names in gaming.

There is a useful distinction here. Nintendo did not abandon the idea of entertainment; it changed the form through which it delivered it.

For founders, that distinction matters. Sometimes the enduring idea is not the original product. It may be the problem the company wants to solve, the experience it wants to create or the market it wants to serve.

Nintendo’s history shows that a company does not have to remain confined to the business it first entered.

The product can change while the purpose behind the business remains.

Instagram offers perhaps the clearest example of an idea being reshaped by users.

Before Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were working on Burbn, a location-based social app that allowed users to check in, make plans, share photos and interact in several ways. After watching how people used the product, the founders noticed that photo sharing was attracting the strongest interest. They decided to strip the product down and focus on photographs.

The change was significant. They had spent about a year working on Burbn, then threw most of it away and built the much simpler product that became Instagram.

The lesson is straightforward: an idea can become stronger when you remove what is unnecessary and focus on what works.

For founders, that can be uncomfortable. Time, money and effort create an attachment to what has already been built. But the work invested in an idea does not automatically make the idea worth keeping in its current form.

Building something is not a reason to keep building the wrong thing.

Amazon, Netflix, Nintendo and Instagram took very different paths, but their histories reveal the same principle: successful businesses are often shaped through the process of building them.

Amazon began with books and expanded. Netflix began with DVDs and moved into streaming. Nintendo began with playing cards and eventually became a gaming company. Instagram began as Burbn before its founders focused on the feature users valued most.

For someone with an idea today, that means the first version does not have to answer every question. It needs to be strong enough to test.

Waiting until an idea feels completely developed can keep it permanently in your head. Starting gives you evidence. Customers respond. Markets reveal opportunities. Problems become clearer. Some assumptions survive; others have to be discarded.

The point is not to change direction every time something becomes difficult. It is to distinguish between persistence with purpose and attachment to an idea simply because it was the original one.

An idea is a starting point, not a finished product. Build it, learn from what happens, and give yourself permission to improve what you started.

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

Nigeria has a fake-product problem, and it’s doing more damage than we think

Seun Tayo-Balogun
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Nigeria has a fake-product problem, and it’s doing more damage than we think

Over the past few days, I have been reading comments from Nigerian women describing itching, irritation and other reactions they associate with sanitary pads. Some say the problems stopped when they changed products.

Those experiences deserve to be taken seriously and investigated. They do not, on their own, tell us what is causing the reactions.

But as I read the conversations that followed, particularly the calls for women to abandon pads for period panties, menstrual cups, disposable underwear and even baby diapers, I found myself thinking about a much bigger problem.

What happens when consumers stop trusting the products in a market?

Because switching products does not necessarily solve a quality problem. The alternative can also be counterfeit, poorly manufactured or substandard. The issue is not simply which product we choose.

It is whether we can trust the market from which we are choosing.

The problem is bigger than one product

Nigeria’s problem with fake and substandard products is not new. What makes the current conversation interesting is how many different categories now seem to provoke the same question from consumers: Is this genuine?

In August alone, NAFDAC received 225 complaints about suspected counterfeit products and says it typically receives more than 200 complaints a month. These are complaints, not confirmed cases, an important distinction, but they tell us something about the level of concern in the market.

And counterfeiting is only part of the problem.

Something I found particularly interesting while looking into this was SON’s explanation for why substandard products remain in Nigerian markets. Beyond smuggling, the agency says some importers deliberately ask foreign manufacturers to manufacture products below the required specification for profit.

Think about the difference.

The product does not necessarily have to be a fake version of a famous brand. The compromise can begin with the specifications themselves.

To the person buying it, however, it may simply look like another product on the shelf.

Then there is purchasing power

This is where I think the conversation becomes more complicated.

When purchasing power falls, price carries more weight in everyday decisions. If two products appear to do essentially the same thing but one costs considerably less, the cheaper one becomes harder to ignore when household budgets are stretched. That does not mean people with less money deliberately choose fake products. Many consumers may have no idea that the cheaper product is counterfeit or substandard.

But economic pressure changes markets. Research on food fraud in Nigeria found a relationship between financial constraints and consumers’ tolerance of fraudulent products. In one study of more than 2,000 Nigerian consumers, 21.1% agreed to some degree that during difficult economic times it could be acceptable for sellers to sell counterfeit or adulterated food if it caused no harm. Household income was also significantly associated with attitudes towards food fraud.

A separate 2026 study similarly found that economic hardship can contribute to the normalization and tacit acceptance of fraudulent food products.

Of course, while food is only one market, the economic mechanism is worth thinking about.

Falling purchasing power does not only change what people can afford. It can also change the kind of market that develops around them.

Where there is enormous demand for cheaper products, there is money to be made by businesses willing to satisfy that demand by compromising quality. And that creates another problem.

Quality has a cost

I understand this part particularly well from running a business. Proper materials cost money. Genuine sourcing costs money. Compliance costs money. Duties, appropriate storage, distribution and quality control all cost money.

A business that absorbs those costs is not really competing on equal terms with one that quietly removes some of them while presenting something that looks equivalent to the consumer. This is why fake and substandard products are not only a consumer-safety problem.

They distort competition.

The business doing things properly becomes the more expensive option. SON itself recognizes this. One of the stated purposes of its conformity system is to provide a level playing field for genuine businesses and prevent economic losses caused by substandard imports.

But I think there is an even bigger economic cost.

Trust is economic infrastructure

Every time we buy something, we make assumptions we rarely think about.

  • We assume the brand on the package made the product.
  • We assume the ingredients listed are the ingredients inside.
  • We assume that when we pay for a particular quality, that is what we are receiving.
  • We assume that basic standards have been met.

That is trust. And trust removes friction from an economy.

Now, imagine the opposite.

You have to investigate every bottle of medicine before taking it. Examine every cosmetic carefully. Question every unusually cheap food item. Verify every electrical product. Wonder whether the sanitary product you have used for years is still being made to the same standard. Suddenly, a simple transaction requires more information, more time and sometimes more money.

Businesses feel it too. Genuine companies have to spend more proving authenticity and protecting their brands. Retailers have to work harder to establish credibility. Regulators spend resources pursuing offenders. Consumers increasingly retreat to sellers they already trust.

That is why trust is economic infrastructure.

We usually think about infrastructure as roads, ports, electricity and telecommunications. But markets also depend on confidence that the rules mean something, standards mean something and what we are paying for is reasonably close to what we are receiving.

Of course, individuals have a role. Where we buy matters. Who we buy from matters. Prices that make no commercial sense should make us ask questions, particularly for products we eat, drink, swallow or use on our bodies.

But there is a limit to how much responsibility can reasonably be transferred to the consumer.

We should not have to become investigators every time we go shopping.

A functioning market should make it relatively easy to trust that what you paid for is what you received. And perhaps that is the bigger issue behind the sanitary-pad conversation.

The question should not end with whether women should switch from pads to period panties, menstrual cups or something else. It is whether we are building a market in which consumers can trust any of those choices.

Because once people routinely begin questioning whether the food is genuine, the medicine is genuine, the cosmetic is genuine or the sanitary product is genuine, it’s no longer a collection of isolated fake-product problems.

It’s a trust problem.

And trust is economic infrastructure. When it breaks down, the market becomes more expensive for everyone trying to do the right thing.

Until the next note,

STB

Notes with STB | A content series exploring mindset, money and business.

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

Why Aliko Dangote Is Our Inspiring Person of the Month

VIctor Akinwale
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Why Aliko Dangote Is Our Inspiring Person of the Month

If you hear the name Aliko Dangote, you probably think of Africa’s richest man. But there is more to his story than the billions attached to his name.

For decades, Dangote has built businesses across industries, moving from trading into manufacturing and some of Africa’s largest industrial projects. His success has made him one of the most recognisable businessmen on the continent, but the more interesting part of his story lies beyond the size of his fortune.

It is in the way he approaches work, the values he has passed on to his children, his views on success and wealth, and the legacy he hopes to leave behind. These offer a closer look at the person behind one of Africa’s biggest business empires.

That is why Aliko Dangote is our Inspiring Person of the Month.

1. He has built his life around the belief that nothing is impossible

One phrase has stayed with Dangote for years: “Nothing is impossible.”

It is also a phrase his daughter, Fatima Dangote, associates closely with her father. She has described him as a visionary and identified “Nothing is impossible” as his favourite expression. She has also spoken about the values he has instilled in his children, including hard work, discipline, perseverance and humility.

Dangote has explained the thinking behind his approach to business in similar terms. Speaking about the bold decisions he has made over the years, he said:

“We always dream very big, and we’re committed to investing in Africa.”

He has also revealed that he keeps a sign on his desk that reads “Nothing is impossible.”

For Dangote, the phrase appears to be more than a motivational line. It reflects the mindset behind his willingness to pursue ambitious projects, take difficult decisions and keep going when the path ahead is uncertain.

2. He has shown that big ambitions require perseverance

There is a tendency to look at Dangote’s businesses today and forget how long some of them took to become what they are.

His expansion into large-scale manufacturing came with serious setbacks. In an interview about the early challenges of his cement business, he recalled a period when a completed factory was not functioning properly and the company faced major financial pressure.

“We were really in trouble,” he said.

The experience, he explained, taught him the importance of “tenacity and focus in business.”

3. He is thinking beyond personal wealth

Dangote has accumulated a fortune large enough to make his name synonymous with wealth in Africa. Yet, when asked how he wants to be remembered, his answer was not about how much money he made.

He said:

“I have actually passed the stage of just doing business to make money. I want to leave a legacy. I want to be remembered as somebody who has industrialised Africa.”

For Dangote, the question of legacy appears to have become as important as the question of wealth. His ambition is no longer simply about building successful businesses, but about what those businesses can contribute to Africa.

In 2023, he described his vision as wanting to see “an industrialized, productive, healthy, and self-sufficient continent.”

4. He has kept his personal lifestyle simple

For someone who has built a fortune of billions, Dangote’s description of his personal life is strikingly simple.

He recently revealed that he has lived in the same house for 36 years and has no plans to leave.

“You know how long I’ve been here? Thirty-six years. I don’t plan on leaving. I’m very comfortable here.”

He also spoke about the lifestyle he shares with his daughters and family, describing them as “very, very down to earth” and saying, “Maintaining us is not expensive.”

The comments offer a glimpse into how Dangote separates the scale of his business interests from his personal lifestyle. His wealth may have grown enormously over the decades, but he says there has been little need to constantly change the way he lives.

5. He keeps thinking bigger

For Dangote, reaching one milestone has rarely meant stopping there.

He started in trading before moving into manufacturing, built businesses across several industries and expanded beyond Nigeria. Then came the Dangote Refinery, a project on a scale that few private companies in Africa had attempted.

Explaining his approach to big decisions, Dangote has said:

“We make a lot of bold moves, which other people find very difficult to take. We always dream very big.”

That willingness to think beyond what already exists has been a defining part of his career. His story is filled with decisions that required him to commit significant resources to ideas that would take years to fully realise.

For Dangote, the size of the ambition has always been part of the point.

What We Can Take From His Story

Aliko Dangote’s story offers lessons that go beyond business and wealth.

Think big. His belief that “nothing is impossible” shows the importance of giving yourself permission to pursue ambitious ideas.

Persevere. Big goals come with setbacks. His emphasis on tenacity and focus shows that ambition must be matched with the discipline to keep going.

Build beyond yourself. Dangote wants to be remembered as someone who “industrialised Africa.” His focus on legacy shows the value of creating something that can continue to make an impact beyond your own lifetime.

Keep building. From trading to manufacturing and eventually the Dangote Refinery, his career shows what can happen when ambition is followed by action.

The lesson is simple: dream bigger, work hard, persevere, and build something that matters.

That is the inspiration we take from Aliko Dangote, our Inspiring Person of the Month.

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

From a Sewing Machine to Top Nigerian Children’s Clothing Brand: The Story of Ruff ’n’ Tumble

VIctor Akinwale
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From a Sewing Machine to Top Nigerian Children’s Clothing Brand: The Story of Ruff ’n’ Tumble

In 1996, Adenike Ogunlesi was looking for good-quality pyjamas for her three young children. The options available in Nigeria did not meet what she wanted in terms of quality, durability and style, so she decided to make them herself.

The first set was made from cotton, with colourful fabric, lace and a Peter Pan collar. Her sister-in-law liked what she saw and ordered seven pairs. Soon, Ogunlesi began wondering whether other parents might also be willing to buy them.

She started selling the clothes from the boot of her car after dropping her children at school. She also took them to church bazaars and school markets, gradually expanding beyond pyjamas into trousers, shorts, shirts and skirts.

“I took all my kids’ clothes apart to see how they were made, developed patterns out of some of them, and just started making trousers, shorts, shirts and skirts, and all kinds of things,” Ogunlesi recalled.

One market changed the way she viewed the opportunity.

Ogunlesi had taken about ₦120,000 worth of clothes to a market and sold almost all of them. The sales made her realise that the demand could extend beyond the people who already knew her.

“I just closed my eyes to everything else and thought: ‘Okay, what exactly is going on here? There must be other people with this need,’” she said.

She began looking more closely at the children’s clothing market. At the time, she found that the available options were limited, with little variety in colours and designs. She wrote down what she believed competitors were doing well and where she thought they were falling short.

“At the time, I didn’t realise that what I was doing was market research,” she later explained to Harvard Business School. She visited places where children’s clothing was sold, looked at the products, compared prices and considered what she could do differently.

One of the gaps she noticed was the way children’s outfits were being sold. Many came as three-piece sets, leaving parents with little flexibility to combine different pieces.

Ogunlesi decided that customers should be able to buy individual pieces and create their own combinations.

“So I thought if all they want is a shirt, they should buy the shirt and be able to mix it with the shorts or trousers of their choice – just to be free to create a style for their kids, the way they would like their kids to be dressed,” she said.

That approach became part of what differentiated the brand.

From the boot of a car to a store

As demand grew, Ogunlesi moved beyond selling from her car. She hired tailors and began producing clothes for a supermarket, where she was given a section to display the products.

The experience did not meet her expectations.

She noticed that customers tried on the clothes and left them on the floor, leaving the area untidy. For Ogunlesi, it showed that building a good product also meant paying attention to how customers experienced the brand.

In 1998, she opened her first Ruff ’n’ Tumble store in Lagos, using her personal savings and money borrowed from her older brother.

The store soon gave her another indication of the demand for the brand. During Christmas, a long queue formed outside the shop. She rented the space next door and expanded the store.

From there, Ruff ’n’ Tumble continued to develop its operations and reach more customers. The company introduced computerisation and an enterprise resource planning system, began keeping customer information and followed up with customers after their purchases, including those who had not returned to the stores.

The business expanded from Lagos to Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan and Kano. By 2015, Ruff ’n’ Tumble had become a recognised children’s clothing brand in Nigeria and employed more than 200 people.

Building clothes that last

For Ogunlesi, durability became an important part of the brand’s identity.

She wanted children to be able to wear the clothes repeatedly and pass them down to younger siblings.

“As a mother, durability is key. I didn’t want clothes that after two or three washes are finished,” she said.

That focus on quality has remained part of how she describes Ruff ’n’ Tumble. In later interviews, she has spoken about the importance of researching global trends while paying attention to local tastes and culture. The company also distinguishes between its customer, usually the parent buying the clothes, and its consumer, the child wearing them.

The company has since expanded beyond retail. Through Gatimo Apparel, Ogunlesi has developed garment manufacturing capacity, while the Betti-Okuboyejo Foundation provides garment-making and entrepreneurship training for young people.

For a business that began with children’s pyjamas, the progression has been substantial. Yet Ogunlesi’s story is also a record of how a business can evolve by paying attention to its customers, studying its market and continually improving its standards.

Her own path into entrepreneurship was also shaped by a willingness to make a difficult decision. She was originally expected to become a lawyer but left law school after two weeks because she knew it was not the path she wanted. Entrepreneurship, she later said, gave her the “freedom to create your own universe” and “the power of choices.”

That willingness to move forward has also shaped how she thinks about mistakes. “Don’t stay in that place, just move on,” she said when discussing setbacks. For her, the important thing is to acknowledge what went wrong, learn from it and keep sight of what she wants to create.

That philosophy can be traced through Ruff ’n’ Tumble’s history. A need for better pyjamas led to a few pairs of children’s clothes. Selling from the boot of a car led to studying the market. Studying the market led to a clearer understanding of what parents wanted. As the company grew, the same attention to quality, customer experience and adaptation continued to shape what came next.

That may be the most useful part of Adenike Ogunlesi’s story for anyone building a business today: the idea may start small, but the standard you set for it does not have to be.

Keep defining, redefining, refining and evolving.

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

Nigeria has had Oil for 70 Years. The Dangote Refinery IPO Shows us where the Real Value is.

Seun Tayo-Balogun
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Nigeria has had Oil for 70 Years. The Dangote Refinery IPO Shows us where the Real Value is.

Dangote Refinery is about to go public in what is expected to be Africa’s largest IPO.

About 4.1 billion shares are being offered at ₦525 each, potentially raising approximately ₦2.15 trillion. The money will help fund the refinery’s next stage of expansion, with plans to increase capacity from 700,000 barrels per day to 1.4 million by 2029.

Those are big numbers. But something else interests me about this IPO – what sits underneath the numbers.

Nigeria discovered commercial quantities of oil in 1956, and by the 1970s, the oil boom had transformed the country’s finances. What that moment could have meant for Nigeria’s industrialisation is a conversation for another day.

For decades, we produced crude oil, exported it, and imported significant quantities of the products made from it. We had something enormously valuable. But having something valuable and creating value from it are two very different things.

When oil changed everything

Growing up in Nigeria, I remember my mother repeating something General Yakubu Gowon was said to have declared during the oil boom years:

Money is not our problem, but how to spend it.

I did not fully understand what that meant then. Nigeria had oil, and at one point, so much oil revenue that the problem was reportedly how to spend the money.

Decades later, perhaps the more important question is the one we should have been asking all along:

What are we going to build with it?

Because for all the crude Nigeria produced, we eventually found ourselves in an extraordinary position. We exported the raw material and imported much of what it became. This is where the Dangote Refinery story becomes more interesting than one company or one billionaire.

Nigeria is exporting more of what it once imported. The numbers show a major shift in petroleum-product trade.

In 2023, Nigeria exported an average of about 46,000 barrels of petroleum products per day by sea. By the second quarter of 2026, that had risen to approximately 350,000 barrels per day. At the same time, seaborne petroleum-product imports fell from nearly 400,000 barrels per day in 2023 to below 130,000 barrels per day in the second quarter of 2026.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says production from Dangote Refinery has driven much of that change. Think about what happened here.

Nigeria did not discover oil in 2023. It increased its capacity to do something with the oil it already had.

That distinction is at the heart of industrialization.

The economic value of a resource is not determined only by how much of it you have. It is also determined by what you are capable of doing with it.

The further you move up the value chain, the more value you create. Extract crude and there is value. Refine it and there is more. Build industries around its derivatives and the value chain extends further, creating opportunities for businesses, skills, jobs, exports and products that serve the domestic economy.

The same principle applies far beyond oil.

A country can grow cocoa and export the beans, or develop industries that turn cocoa into higher-value products. It can produce cotton and build textile industries around it. It can possess minerals and develop the expertise and infrastructure required to process them.

The question is:

Where do we stop in the value chain, and what would it take to move one step further?

Now the refinery itself is entering another value chain

This is why the IPO matters.

Dangote Refinery began as a privately financed industrial project. It became a productive asset, supplying the Nigerian market and exporting refined products. Now part of that asset is being opened to public investors while the company raises capital for further expansion.

That is another important part of the industrialization story because industrialization needs capital. Capital markets can move savings into productive enterprise. Businesses gain money to invest and expand, while investors get the opportunity to own part of the value those businesses create.

That does not mean every IPO is a good investment. The larger point is that a productive Nigerian asset is now seeking trillions of naira from the capital market to help finance its next stage of growth.

Saudi Arabia offers an interesting historical comparison.

The Saudi government completed its acquisition of Aramco in 1980. In the decades that followed, Aramco expanded beyond producing and exporting crude into refining, petrochemicals and other downstream activities.

Aramco itself describes this evolution as becoming an integrated petroleum enterprise, with downstream investments designed to capture more value across the hydrocarbon chain. In 2019, Saudi Aramco went public, allowing outside investors to own part of the company.

The lesson worth paying attention to is:

Having the resource was never the end of the story. What matters is the productive capacity built around it.

One refinery can have an impact far beyond refining

One refinery does not make an industrial economy. But an industrial project of this scale can move an economy further in that direction. Its value is not limited to the petroleum products coming out of the refinery.

A project of this size creates demand around it. It needs engineers, technicians, transporters and suppliers. It creates opportunities for logistics, storage, maintenance and other supporting services. And when locally refined petroleum products become more available, the effects can travel further into an economy.

Transportation costs affect the price of moving goods. Energy costs affect businesses. Petrochemical inputs feed other industries. Increased exports can bring in foreign exchange, while replacing some imports can reduce the amount leaving the country to buy products it could produce itself.

These are called spillover effects in economics. They are part of what makes industrial investment important.

The real opportunity, then, is not simply to build another refinery. It is to create more productive assets around the things Nigeria already has, while developing the infrastructure, skills, capital and supporting businesses that allow their value to spread through the economy.

Some will be enormous industrial projects. Others will emerge because those projects exist in the first place. That is how one investment can begin to create value far beyond itself.

More than fifty years ago, Nigeria reportedly had so much oil revenue that the problem was how to spend it. Perhaps the more consequential question was always:

What can we build with it?

That is why the Dangote Refinery IPO interests me beyond the ₦2.15 trillion offer.

Nigeria did not suddenly acquire a new natural resource. What changed was our capacity to transform one we have had for decades. That capacity is serving more of our needs at home, selling more products abroad, and now seeking public capital to expand further.

And the lesson extends far beyond oil.

What a country learns to do with what it has matters more than what it has. Because until you can create value from what you have, having it is not enough

Notes with STB | A content series exploring mindset, money and business.

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

LEGO Nearly Went Bankrupt. Here’s What Its Turnaround Can Teach Business Owners

VIctor Akinwale
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LEGO Nearly Went Bankrupt. Here’s What Its Turnaround Can Teach Business Owners

LEGO is one of the most recognisable toy brands in the world today. Its colourful bricks are found in homes, schools and playrooms across the globe.

But in the early 2000s, the company was struggling to survive.

LEGO had expanded aggressively into new products, markets and businesses. It had moved beyond its traditional building bricks into video games, clothing, watches, theme parks and other ventures. The expansion made the company bigger, but it also made the business more complicated and expensive to operate.

By 2003, LEGO’s sales had fallen by 26 percent, from DKK 11.4 billion to DKK 8.4 billion. The company recorded a pre-tax loss of DKK 1.4 billion. Its financial position had become so serious that the company was facing a debt burden of roughly $800 million.

LEGO had spent years trying to become more than a toy company. In the process, it had started losing control of the business it already had.

When Growth Became the Problem

LEGO’s expansion was not necessarily a bad idea.

The company had a powerful brand, a loyal customer base and a product that had been successful for decades. Extending that brand into new areas seemed like a reasonable way to create more revenue.

But by the early 2000s, LEGO had moved far beyond its core business. It was operating LEGOLAND theme parks in several countries, producing branded clothing and accessories, developing video games and creating television and film content. It had also expanded into company-owned retail stores, books and magazines.

LEGO was no longer simply selling building bricks. It was trying to build an entire entertainment ecosystem around the brand.

The problem was that expansion brought complexity with it. Every new business required money, people, management and attention. Some of these ventures were not generating enough returns to justify what they consumed. At the same time, LEGO’s core toy business was struggling with changing consumer habits, stronger competition and pressure from retailers.

The company had more products and more activities, but it was becoming harder to manage the business profitably.

LEGO had created more ways to make money, but it had also created more ways to lose it.

The company had too many products, too many variations and too much inventory. Its manufacturing system had become increasingly complicated, while some of its new ventures were performing poorly.

LEGO’s own 2003 annual report acknowledged that its growth strategy had contributed to the loss of market share.

The issue was no longer simply how to grow. It was how to regain control of a business that had become too complicated.

The Decision to Change Direction

In 2004, LEGO began a major turnaround.

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp became CEO and helped lead the company towards a simpler and more disciplined business model. Instead of continuing to expand in every possible direction, LEGO began returning its attention to its core business.

The company cut costs, reduced its workforce, sold assets and simplified its product portfolio. It also became more deliberate about what it produced and how it produced it.

LEGO sold LEGOLAND Parks to improve its financial position. It reduced its production and operating costs substantially and began eliminating products that were not contributing enough to the business.

The company wasn’t abandoning innovation. It was becoming more selective about where innovation happened.

The question changed from “What else can LEGO do?” to “What does LEGO do best, and how can we do that better?”

LEGO’s turnaround was not achieved by abandoning creativity. It was achieved by bringing discipline back into the creativity.

The company continued developing new products and experiences, but increasingly built them around the strength of its core building system.

And the results followed. By 2010, LEGO had eliminated its debt. By 2015, it had become the world’s most valuable toy company, surpassing Mattel in brand value.

The company that had once been struggling to survive had become one of the strongest brands in the global toy industry.

What This Means for Your Brand

LEGO’s story is useful for any founder or business owner whose company is growing, expanding or trying to recover from a difficult period.

1. Don’t confuse expansion with progress

Adding a new product, entering another market or starting another business can make a company look bigger.

But bigger does not automatically mean healthier.

Every new product requires money, people, attention, marketing and management. If the returns do not justify those resources, expansion can weaken the business instead of strengthening it.

Before adding another thing, ask whether the things you already have are performing as well as they should.

2. Your core business deserves attention

When a business starts growing, there is often pressure to chase the next opportunity.

LEGO’s experience shows why founders should be careful about that instinct.

The core product is usually where a company has its strongest knowledge, customer relationships and competitive advantage. Moving away from it too quickly can mean abandoning the very thing that made the business valuable.

Expansion should strengthen the foundation, not distract you from it.

3. Not every product deserves to survive

Businesses can become emotionally attached to their own ideas.

A product may have taken months to develop. A new service may have required a significant investment. A particular project may have been the founder’s favourite idea.

None of that guarantees that customers want it.

LEGO’s turnaround required difficult decisions about products and activities that were adding complexity without enough return.

For a brand, knowing what to stop can be just as important as knowing what to start.

4. More choice can create more problems

A larger product catalogue can appear attractive because it gives customers more options.

But every additional variation creates operational demands.

More inventory has to be managed. More products have to be marketed. More decisions have to be made. More resources become scattered across different priorities.

A business does not become excellent simply because it offers more. At times, reducing complexity gives a company the room to improve what matters most.

5. Innovation works better when it has a foundation

LEGO did not solve its problems by becoming less creative. It became more disciplined about where its creativity was applied.

That is an important distinction for brands.

Innovation does not always mean abandoning the old model for something completely new. It can mean finding new ways to make an existing strength more valuable.

For LEGO, the brick remained at the centre. New ideas could then build around it.

The strongest extensions of a brand should make the core business stronger, not make customers forget what the brand stands for.

6. Know when to simplify

There is a point in the life of many businesses where complexity starts to look like success.

The company has more employees, more products, more departments, more partnerships and more markets.

But underneath all of that, the business may be becoming harder to manage.

LEGO’s turnaround shows that simplification is not necessarily a retreat.

Sometimes it is a way of getting back in control.

The Bigger Picture

LEGO’s near-collapse was not caused by a lack of ideas.

It had plenty of ideas.

Its problem was knowing which ideas deserved the company’s money, attention and energy.

The turnaround came when LEGO became more disciplined about growth, returned its focus to its core strengths and made difficult decisions about what needed to go.

That is perhaps the most useful lesson for a growing brand.

You don’t have to pursue every opportunity. You have to recognise the opportunities that make your business stronger.

LEGO nearly lost everything by trying to become too many things at once.

Its recovery began when it remembered what it was best at.

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

A janitor quietly built an $8 million fortune. Here’s what his story teaches us about building wealth.

Seun Tayo-Balogun
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A janitor quietly built an $8 million fortune. Here’s what his story teaches us about building wealth.

Ronald Read drove a second-hand Toyota Yaris, dressed in worn flannel shirts, and was known to hold his coat together with safety pins. He spent decades working at a gas station and later worked for seventeen years as a part-time janitor at a J.C. Penney in Brattleboro, Vermont.

He read the Wall Street Journal every day and was a regular at his local library. He did not have a financial advisor, a college degree, or a Wall Street connection.

When he died in June 2014 at the age of 92, his estate was worth nearly $8 million. He left $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital and $1.2 million to the town’s Brooks Memorial Library, the largest bequests either institution had ever received at the time. (NBC News, 2014; TODAY, 2015)

His own family was, in the words of his stepson Phillip Brown, “tremendously surprised.“

Read quietly bought stocks for decades, building a remarkably diversified portfolio over time. He eventually owned at least 95 stocks, including Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, J.M. Smucker, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, Dow Chemical and CVS Health.

He favored companies and businesses he understood. He reinvested his dividends. And he held many of his investments for years, even decades, through multiple market cycles. (CNBC, 2016; The Big Picture, 2015)

There was no strategy meeting, no pivot, no dramatic moment of insight. There was a man in a flannel shirt, reading the Wall Street Journal, making patient decisions that no one around him could see adding up to anything.

Wealth built slowly produces very little worth showing while it is being built. There is no dramatic before and after. No funding round. No exit. No single milestone that looks particularly significant from the outside.

There is only the long, quiet accumulation of good decisions made consistently across a timeline that many people are not willing or patient enough to hold.

And perhaps that is one reason stories like Ronald Read’s matter.

We are surrounded by the visible moments of wealth: the company sale, the investment that exploded, the property portfolio, the person who seemingly became successful overnight.

We see the outcome because outcomes make a scene. What we don’t see are the years of small, ordinary decisions quietly compounding into something significant

Getting rich slowly is one of the most established paths to building wealth, and one of the least glamorous.

No one is going to congratulate you every month for buying another investment, reinvesting another dividend, leaving the money alone and doing it again. The account does not care whether anyone is watching and that may be the bigger lesson in Ronald Read’s story.

Wealth does not need to look impressive while it is being built.

Sometimes it looks like the same ordinary decision, made over and over again, for an extraordinarily long time.

Start somewhere, regardless. Stay with it long enough to see what it becomes.

Until the next note,

– STB

References:

  • NBC News (2014), Vermont ex-janitor bequeaths secret millions to library and hospita
  • TODAY (2015), Secret millionaire: Vermont janitor bequeaths fortune to hospital, library
  • CNBC (2016), A janitor secretly amassed an $8 million fortune and left most of it to his library and hospita
  • The Big Picture / Ritholtz (2015), The Remarkable Life and Investing Lessons of Ronald Read

The Brief Network: Inspiring Stories and Empowering Lessons.

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