Eight Lessons From Two Giants: What Fola Adeola and Foluso Phillips Taught Me at FATE Foundation

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

– Isaac Newton

Quick note before we go on: this article also comes with an 11-minute audio Deep Dive, the same eight lessons explored a little further, in an easy, relaxed conversation, like a good podcast. I’d genuinely encourage you to listen as well as read, it adds a layer of perspective the page alone doesn’t fully capture. Press play on the audio version at the top of this post, on your drive to work tomorrow, or a walk in the evening.

Introduction

Earlier this year, CreditPRO Finance Company Limited was admitted into FATE Foundation’s Transformers Programme, a three-year initiative built for high-growth Nigerian businesses ready to scale beyond growth into lasting impact.^[18] That admission is what placed me, personally, in the room on two separate occasions with two icons of Nigerian enterprise: Mr. Fola Adeola, co-founder of GTBank and founder of FATE Foundation itself, and Mr. Foluso Phillips, founder of Phillips Consulting. What follows are eight distinct lessons I personally took away, four from each man, explained in plain English, and, importantly, tested against decades of established global business thinking and real-world examples, from Kodak to Facebook to Nigeria’s own Paystack. These are my own interpretations of what I heard and understood, not verbatim quotes, but I believe every Nigerian entrepreneur will find something here worth applying this week.

What Happened?

I have sat in many business trainings. Most of them blur into each other after a while, PowerPoint slides, generic advice, a certificate at the end. But there are a few rooms you never forget, not because of the chairs or the catering, but because of who was standing at the front, speaking to you like your small business dream was worth their time.

That journey with FATE Foundation began when CreditPRO Finance Company Limited was admitted into the Foundation’s Transformers Programme, a three-year initiative under FATE’s 2024-2029 strategic plan, purpose-built for high-growth Nigerian businesses that have already found traction and now need structured support, mentorship, and capital access to scale into lasting impact.^[18] It was through that programme that I found myself in two rooms, at different times, that I will not soon forget. In one, I met Mr. Fola Adeola, the man who co-founded GTBank, one of Nigeria’s most respected financial institutions, and who in the year 2000 turned his attention to a different kind of wealth creation: building people.^[1][2] That is how FATE Foundation was born, a Foundation that has since worked with well over 250,000 Nigerian entrepreneurs.^[5][6] He has been honoured nationally as an Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic and was appointed to the UK-led Commission for Africa, yet he sat with us and spoke, not as a legend lecturing beginners, but as a builder sharing hard-won scars.

In the other room, I met Mr. Foluso Phillips, the man who founded Phillips Consulting in 1992 and grew it into the largest indigenous management and business consulting firm in Nigeria, a firm that has since shaped strategy, leadership, and human capital decisions for some of the biggest organisations on the continent.^[3] He is a chartered accountant and a chartered management accountant who today sits on boards, mentors executives, and speaks at global platforms from Harvard to Wharton.^[3][4] Yet in the room with us, there was no airs, just a man determined to hand down what took him three decades to learn.

Both men gave their time, freely and generously, to sit with entrepreneurs who, on paper, had nothing to offer them in return. A quick, important disclaimer before I go further: everything below is my own personal interpretation of what I heard and took away from both sessions. It is not a verbatim transcript, and I do not claim that either gentleman would summarise his own advice exactly this way. It is simply how their words landed on me, and how I have since tried to apply them.

Why This Matters

It would have been easy to leave those two rooms with a warm feeling and a few nice quotes for my Instagram caption. But the more I sat with what I had heard, the more I realised something important: these were not just personal anecdotes from two successful Nigerians. Nearly every lesson I took away lines up, almost word for word in some cases, with ideas that some of the most respected names in global management thinking have spent entire careers researching and writing about.

That matters, because it means these are not motivational one-liners that sound nice and fade by Monday. They are principles that have been tested across decades, across industries, and across companies far bigger than Phillips Consulting or GTBank, from Harvard Business School case studies to Silicon Valley boardrooms to roadside stalls in Lagos. Broadly, Mr. Phillips’s lessons speak to the internal architecture of a business, how it is built, structured, and perceived so that it can outlast its founder. Mr. Adeola’s lessons speak to strategic choice, what a business chooses to do, whom it chooses to serve, and, just as importantly, what and whom it deliberately walks away from. Below, I unpack all eight lessons individually, and for each one, I try to show you the real-world thinking and examples that back it up, so you don’t have to take my word, or even Mr. Adeola’s or Mr. Phillips’s word, alone.

What SMEs Should Do

From Mr. Foluso Phillips: The Internal Architecture of a Lasting Business

1. Lesson 1: Run and prepare your business as if someone is coming to buy it in 10 years. This is about building a sellable asset, not a glorified job. If a serious buyer walked into your shop, salon, or office tomorrow with cash in hand, could you hand them a business that runs without you standing there every single day? A fashion designer whose entire client list lives only in her head and her phone is not running a sellable business, she is running herself. This exact discipline, of building a company that can transfer to new ownership without collapsing, is a recurring theme in the world of small business ownership and exit planning globally: document your processes, separate personal and business money, and build a brand that means something without your face permanently attached to it. You may never actually sell the business. But building it as though you will is what turns a hustle into an asset with real, transferable value.
2. Lesson 2: Manage the perception, or people will not follow you. Visual is important. People buy confidence before they buy the product itself. Picture two roadside food vendors selling equally delicious food, one with a clean apron, neat branded packs, and a legible signboard, the other without. Customers will often queue for the first one and pay a little more without blinking. This is not about pretending to be something you are not, it is about signalling seriousness and trustworthiness. Your WhatsApp Business display picture, how you dress to meet a client, the tidiness of your shop, and the quality of your invoice, are all silent salesmen working for or against you every single day.
3. Lesson 3: Systems above founders. A business that cannot survive one week without you personally is not a business, it is a beautifully disguised risk. This is precisely the warning at the heart of Michael Gerber’s influential small-business book, The E-Myth Revisited: most small business owners are excellent technicians (bakers, tailors, mechanics) who mistakenly believe that being good at the craft is the same as being good at running a company, and they get trapped working IN the business instead of ON it.^[10] The fix is systems, simple checklists, written steps, a trained second-in-command, that let the business breathe when you step away, whether for rest, illness, or growth. The world’s most obvious real-life proof of this is McDonald’s: Ray Kroc’s genius was not the burger recipe, it was building an operations system so rigorous that any franchise, anywhere in the world, could deliver the same product without him ever setting foot inside. That is systems above founders, at global scale.
4. Lesson 4: Know the business you do versus the business you are in. This one is distinct from Lesson 3. Where ‘systems above founders’ is about HOW your business runs without you, this lesson is about WHAT your business is actually for, at a deeper level than the product on the shelf. It is a near-perfect echo of Theodore Levitt’s landmark 1960 Harvard Business Review essay, Marketing Myopia, where he argued that America’s railroads declined not because demand for transportation fell, but because they wrongly believed they were in the ‘railroad business’ rather than the broader ‘transportation business,’ and so they never adapted as cars and airplanes rose.^[8] Kodak fell into the same trap decades later: Kodak’s own engineers invented the digital camera in 1975, but the company clung to film because it saw itself as being ‘in the film business’ rather than the ‘memory-capturing business,’ and by the time it took digital seriously, the moment had passed.^[9] A Nigerian baker might think the business she does is ‘baking cakes,’ but the business she is really in could be ‘celebrations and unforgettable moments,’ once she sees that, new doors open: event styling, delivery, gifting, and partnerships with event planners.

From Mr. Fola Adeola: The Discipline of Strategic Choice

Before the next four lessons, it’s worth pausing on something that can look confusing at first glance: Lessons 5 and 6 below can sound similar, but they are answering two completely different questions. Lesson 5, ‘strategy is what-not-to-do,’ is about which ACTIVITIES, projects, and opportunities your business says no to. Lesson 6, ‘the danger of wanting to satisfy everyone,’ is about which CUSTOMERS and market segments your business says no to. One is about what you do. The other is about who you do it for. Keeping that distinction clear is, in my own interpretation, exactly why Mr. Adeola presented them as two separate ideas rather than one.

1. Lesson 5: Strategy is not your to-do list, it’s more of what-not-to-do. This is about activities and opportunities, not customers. Most of us confuse being busy with being strategic. A to-do list can grow forever, there is always another opportunity, another trend, another ‘hot’ idea worth chasing. This is, almost word for word, the core argument of Michael Porter’s celebrated 1996 Harvard Business Review article, ‘What Is Strategy?’, where he states that the essence of strategy is choosing what NOT to do, and that trying to do everything your rivals do simply cancels out any advantage.^[7] Porter’s favourite real-world proof is Southwest Airlines, which built a hugely profitable, decades-long strategy specifically by refusing to do things most airlines considered standard: no assigned seating, no meals, no interline baggage transfers to other airlines, deliberately, so it could turn planes around faster and keep fares low.^[7] When a rival airline tried to copy only a few of those choices while keeping everything else (a strategy called ‘Continental Lite’), the mixed, half-committed approach failed badly.^[7] Imagine a small Nigerian logistics business that starts moving parcels, then gets asked to also move furniture, then rent out event equipment, then manage warehousing. Say yes to everything, and in two years you are mediocre at five things instead of excellent at one.
2. Lesson 6: The danger of most business people is wanting to satisfy everyone. This is about customers and market segments, not activities. Trying to please every single customer, every taste, every budget, is one of the quiet business killers, and it is the founding idea behind Al Ries and Jack Trout’s marketing classic, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, which argues that a brand trying to be everything to everybody ends up being nothing, memorable, to anybody, because the human mind resists a blurry, undefined message.^[13] Picture a restaurant trying to serve continental dishes, Chinese food, local Nigerian delicacies, and fast food all on one menu, all to please ‘everybody.’ The kitchen gets confused, quality drops everywhere, and the brand loses its identity. Choosing a lane isn’t a limitation, it is what finally lets you be excellent at something specific enough for people to remember and recommend you for.
3. Lesson 7: Start narrow, then go deep. This is a growth sequencing lesson, how big, successful companies actually began. It mirrors Geoffrey Moore’s well-known ‘beachhead’ strategy from his book Crossing the Chasm: rather than trying to conquer an entire market at once, a business picks one small, specific niche, dominates it completely, and uses that foothold, and the word-of-mouth and credibility it builds, to expand outward.^[14] The examples are almost too famous to need repeating: Facebook launched exclusively for Harvard students before it ever reached a second university, let alone the world.^[11] Amazon sold nothing but books for its first several years before it became ‘the everything store.’^[12] Closer to home, Nigeria’s own Paystack built its earliest product specifically for developers integrating payments with a few lines of code, a genuinely narrow beachhead, before expanding into the broader small-business payments tool it is known for today, a journey that eventually led to its $200 million acquisition by Stripe.^[15] Start narrow, master that small pond, and only then think about the ocean.
4. Lesson 8: Identify who isn’t your customer. This is the natural, practical partner to Lesson 7, it is HOW you find your narrow starting point. Knowing exactly who you are not for is often what sharpens who you truly are for. A skincare brand trying to serve ‘everyone with skin’ ends up serving no one particularly well. But a brand that boldly says, ‘we are not for teenagers with oily skin, we are for women over 35 managing menopause-related skin changes,’ suddenly becomes deeply relevant to that group, earns word-of-mouth, and can charge a premium because it actually understands its customer. Paystack’s own early team has spoken about learning this lesson the hard way: their first instinct was to assume every Nigerian business was like them, technical and developer-led, and only after realising many business owners had no developer at all did they build a simpler, no-code tool for that different, previously unserved customer.^[15] Deciding who a product is emphatically NOT for is, paradoxically, one of the fastest ways to discover who it truly is for.

Risks to Watch

• Over-systemising too early. Building rigid systems and SOPs before you have even proven your idea can slow you down when you should still be experimenting and adapting quickly. Systems matter most once a model is already working.
• Mistaking a narrow start for a permanent ceiling. ‘Start narrow, then go deep’ is a sequence, not a life sentence. Amazon did not stay a bookstore forever, and Facebook did not stay at Harvard. Treat your niche as a launchpad, not a cage.
• Letting perception management slide into pretence. Managing perception is about signalling real seriousness, not manufacturing a false image you cannot back up. Customers eventually discover the gap between packaging and substance, and it costs more trust than it earns.
• Saying no so often that you miss genuinely adjacent opportunities. The discipline of a ‘no’ list can tip into rigidity if you refuse to ever revisit a decision as your business, your team, or the market changes.
• Defining ‘the business you’re in’ so broadly that you lose focus entirely. There is real tension between Lesson 4 (know the deeper business you’re in) and Lesson 5 (say no to most things). The deeper business you’re in should sharpen your choices, not become an excuse to chase every tangentially related opportunity.

Opportunities

I did not walk into these rooms by accident, and neither did the access to these two remarkable men happen by chance. It happened because FATE Foundation, quietly and consistently, has spent over two decades building a bridge between Nigeria’s most accomplished business minds and everyday entrepreneurs hungry to learn and grow.^[5] Since its founding by Mr. Fola Adeola in 2000, the Foundation has trained well over a quarter of a million entrepreneurs across Nigeria, through structured programmes like the Aspiring Entrepreneurs Programme for those just starting out, and the Emerging Entrepreneurs Programme for established business owners ready to scale.^[6][16][17] These are not one-off seminars, they are structured, months-long journeys of learning, mentorship, and accountability, delivered by people who have genuinely built what they teach.

For businesses that have already moved past the early stages and are pushing to scale further, FATE Foundation also runs the Transformers Programme, the very programme CreditPRO Finance Company Limited is proud to be part of. It is a three-year, more intensive engagement for high-growth Nigerian businesses, offering structured access to talent, mentorship, capital, and market opportunities tailored to each business’s specific scaling needs, as part of FATE’s stated ambition to help create 10,000 jobs by 2030 through the businesses it supports.^[18] I mention our own admission not to advertise CreditPRO, but because it is the clearest proof I can offer that this ecosystem is not just theory to us, we are walking through it ourselves, and the value has been real. If you are running a business in Nigeria today, whether it is a small shop, a growing company just past its early stage, or just an idea you are nursing, a FATE Foundation cohort, at whichever stage fits you, is, without question, one of the most transformative decisions you can make for yourself and your business this year.

CreditPRO Insight

At CreditPRO, we see the fingerprints of these exact eight lessons on the SME clients who go on to grow sustainably. The businesses that impress us most are rarely the loudest, they are the ones with documented processes that don’t collapse when the owner travels, a clearly defined customer they can describe in one sentence, and the discipline to say no to opportunities that don’t fit. That kind of clarity doesn’t just make a business easier to run, it makes a business easier to finance, because it is easier for a lender to understand exactly what we are backing and why. If Mr. Adeola’s and Mr. Phillips’s lessons resonate with you as they did with me, know that building that clarity is also, quietly, one of the best things you can do for your access to responsible, sustainable financing.

Final Thoughts

Eight lessons, two rooms, two generous men who didn’t have to show up but did anyway. If there is one thread that runs through everything Mr. Phillips and Mr. Adeola shared, as I have come to understand it, it is this: lasting businesses are built with intention, not accident. They are built by people willing to document what’s in their head, say no more often than they say yes, know precisely who they serve and who they don’t, and care as much about how the business runs without them as how it runs with them. I am grateful to have sat, even briefly, in the presence of these two icons of Nigerian enterprise, and I want to be clear one final time: the eight lessons above are my own interpretation and application of what I heard, not a transcript of their words. I hope that sharing them, validated against real business thinking and real companies, will inspire a few more entrepreneurs reading this to seek out a room like that for themselves, starting, perhaps, with a FATE Foundation cohort.

Sources & References

[1] Nairametrics, “Everything you need to know about Fola Adeola, Co-founder, GTBank Plc.” https://nairametrics.com/2020/07/17/everything-you-need-to-know-about-fola-adeola-co-founder-gtbank-plc/

[2] Wikipedia, “Fola Adeola.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fola_Adeola

[3] Businessday NG, “Meet Foluso Phillips, the economist who built a consulting institution and never stopped believing in people.” https://businessday.ng/life-arts/article/meet-foluso-phillips-the-economist-who-built-a-consulting-institution-and-never-stopped-believing-in-people/

[4] DAWN Commission, “Foluso Phillips: Building Institutions That Outlive Their Founders.” https://dawncommission.org/foluso-phillips-building-institutions-that-outlive-their-founders/

[5] FATE Foundation, “About.” https://fatefoundation.org/about/

[6] Businessday NG, “FATE Foundation trains 256,277 entrepreneurs in 26 years.” https://businessday.ng/markets/article/fate-foundation-trains-256277-entrepreneurs-in-26-years/

[7] Michael Porter, “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review, 1996. https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy

[8] Theodore Levitt, “Marketing Myopia,” Harvard Business Review Classics. https://store.hbr.org/product/marketing-myopia-harvard-business-review-classics/2601

[9] Forbes, “How Kodak Failed.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2012/01/18/how-kodak-failed/

[10] Michael E. Gerber, “The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.” https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-e-myth-revisited-michael-e-gerber/1100249444

[11] Harvard Magazine, “How Facebook Escaped Harvard.” https://www.harvardmagazine.com/technology/harvard-facebook-history-mark-zuckerberg-winklevoss

[12] HistoryLink.org, “Amazon: The Early Years (1995-1999).” https://www.historylink.org/File/23230

[13] Al Ries, “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.” https://www.alries.com/positioning

[14] Lenny’s Newsletter, “Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market.” https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/geoffrey-moore-on-finding-your-beachhead

[15] Today Africa, “Inside Paystack’s Journey: From Lagos Startup to a $200M Stripe Acquisition.” https://todayafrica.co/inside-paystacks-journey/

[16] The FATE School, “Aspiring Entrepreneurs Programme (AEP).” https://thefateschool.org/aep/

[17] The FATE School, “Emerging Entrepreneurs Programme (EEP).” https://thefateschool.org/eep/[18] The FATE School, “The FATE Transformers Programme.” https://thefateschool.org/transformersprogram/

About the Author
Anthony Jiboye is the Head of Growth and Customer Experience at CreditPRO Finance Company Limited. With a proven track record in driving business expansion, customer retention strategies, and service excellence, Anthony leads CreditPRO’s growth initiatives to deliver seamless, customer-centric financial solutions. He is passionate about scaling innovative financial products, enhancing user journeys, and empowering businesses across Nigeria to access reliable funding and growth opportunities.