Keeping Your Shirt On

Having a great idea and building it out into a viable business could be quite daunting and difficult in a harsh business climate like Nigeria. Any founder who can build a company from the ideation stage to a certain level, surely deserves some accolades. In discussing the challenges faced while building their businesses, founders would often narrate their experience on how they bootstrapped, faced regulatory hurdles, had difficulties accessing funding to build their products, paying themselves little or no salary to keep the business afloat, and working hard to keep their team constantly motivated, even in the face of dissipating revenues. Somehow, these founders are able to surmount the hurdles and achieve a degree of success, while still maintaining complete control and ownership of their companies.