As part of efforts to encourage youth corps members to imbibe entrepreneurship spirit and stop chasing non-existing jobs, proprietors of Lifeforte International Schools recently ask fresh graduates to look inwards
By EUNICE NZE-PETERS
It was an interactive session between Sarah Olubi-Johnson, proprietor of Lifeforte International Schools, Lagos, and members of the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, as she toured the NYSC orientation camps in Lagos and Ogun states recently, mentoring the fresh graduates on entrepreneurship and encouraging them to be self-reliant.
While encouraging the corps members not to allow opportunities pass them by, Olubi-Johnson shared her experience and the steps she took on the journey into the world of entrepreneurs. She explained that as a working mother in 1990, she had longed for a safe place to keep her children while she went to work. But there was none she could trust. The reason was that at that time, stories abounded on how proprietors of such daycare centres often induced children left in their care to sleep by giving them drugs.
As she did not want that to happen to her children, and knowing full well that there were other mothers with similar concerns at that time, Olubi-Johnson, decided to seize that opportunity to start a daycare centre of her own. Today, that daycare centre has blossomed into a group of schools of international repute named, Lifeforte International Schools.
This, she says, was an example of an opportunity that she did not allow to slip her by. Another incident, according to Olubi-Johnson, happened in 1990. At that time, she noted that ice-cream shops were not readily available in Ibadan. “We had to ensure that we wait on endless queues in Lagos to get our own ice cream and take it down to Ibadan. So, we identified another opportunity to sell ice-cream,” she recalld. That led to the creation of Right Choice Ice Cream, another thriving business. Again, in 2010, Olubi-Johnson said her father-in-law wanted to sell off his travel agency, a business that was about a century old and named Biscordint Travel Agency. “The Biscordint name had become synonymous with the family name and we did not want to see it go to strangers,” she said. So, Olubi-Johnson and her husband decided to buy the business, giving it a new lease of life full of integrity, hard work and diligence.
She told the fresh graduates that this is not the time for them to wait endlessly for a 9am to 5pm job. “Don’t be a small fish in a big pond, but a big fish in a small pond,” she encouraged them. Making a particular reference to the opportunities that abound in agriculture, due to the constant need for food and the fact that the soil is fertile, she maintained that it would be a wise venture to grow food, package and distribute it.
In view of this, the entrepreneur observed that she came to change the participants’ mentality. To effectively achieve that, she also sold to the fresh graduates copies of Dare to Dream, her latest book. The book is based on principles such as vision, integrity, hard work, diligence, patience and staying power.
On his part, Olubi Johnson, a pastor and chairman of Lifeforte International Schools, summed it all up. “Successful entrepreneurs are men and women like you. The difference is that they have been able to identify opportunities and had taken advantage of them,” he said. While appreciating the effort of the Lifeforte team for the tips, Adenike Adeyemi, Lagos State NYSC coordinator, told the corps members that they should consider themselves privileged to have the opportunity of listening to such words of wisdom. “The paradigm is shifting fast and that is why NYSC is posting you to education, health and other relevant ministries because that is where the future is,” Adeyemi advised.
On the other hand, Theresa Anosike, the coordinator for Ogun State NYSC, who described herself as an incurable optimist, said that the reason skills acquisition was inculcated into the NYSC curriculum is to expose the fresh graduates to entrepreneurship at an early stage. She gave examples of corps members who have been able to set up fruit juice and bakery businesses among others. She also encouraged the current corps members to learn from all these and make something out of the training they are currently receiving.