Asher's Blog

Your first business rarely teaches you only how to run that particular business. If you pay close attention, it teaches you how you make decisions, what kind of people complement you, which parts of building a company come naturally to you, and where your instincts are still incomplete. Some of those lessons become obvious while the business is running, but others only become clear years later, when you find yourself using them in another company without initially realising where you learned them.

My first business was Gidijobs, which grew into one of the foremost job platforms in Nigeria and gave me the opportunity to work with hundreds of businesses across different industries. We helped employers find people, but the work eventually became much broader than recruitment because hiring is rarely an isolated problem. Once you begin helping a small business recruit, you soon encounter questions about performance, compensation, employee records, workplace structure, management and the quality of the decisions being made by the founder.

At the time, I knew that I was learning, but I did not fully appreciate the value of the education I was receiving. It is only now, while building Eazipay and working on other ventures, that I can see how much of my present thinking was formed during those years. Many things I now consider to be business principles were initially practical lessons from Gidi Jobs. We learned them while trying to win customers, serve them properly, manage a partnership and keep a growing business moving.

A good co-founder changes what is possible

The first major lesson Gidijobs taught me was the value of having the right co-founder or business partner. My co-founder was one of my closest friends then, remains one of my closest friends today, and we have gone on to work on other ventures together. That history matters to me because business can reveal parts of people that friendship alone may never expose. It introduces pressure, money, competing priorities, unequal workloads, delayed rewards and decisions that can affect one person more than the other. A relationship that appears strong in ordinary life can become fragile when those pressures arrive.

What worked for us was not merely that we were friends. Friendship gave us a foundation of trust, but we also understood that the business had to be treated as a business. When decisions needed to be made, we did not allow personal emotions to become the main standard by which we judged what was best for the company. We could disagree with an idea without interpreting the disagreement as an attack on the friendship, and we could make a difficult commercial decision without allowing it to become a personal conflict.

Our personalities were also complementary. I am naturally logical, structured and sometimes very strict about what needs to be done. I can become deeply focused on the details of a problem, the operations behind it and the standard to which the work must be completed. My co-founder was more extroverted and naturally comfortable with people. He could build relationships, carry conversations and create warmth in situations where my own instinct might have been to go directly to the business at hand.

He did not make me feel that I had to become a different person for the partnership to work, and I did not ask him to behave exactly like me. He allowed me to bring seriousness and structure into the company because those qualities were needed, while he brought the energy, persuasion and social intelligence that the business also needed. That balance reduced unnecessary conflict because we were not competing to occupy the same role. We were contributing different strengths to the same outcome.

This is one of the reasons I now believe that founders should think beyond whether a potential co-founder is intelligent, hardworking or pleasant to be around. Those qualities matter, but the deeper question is whether the relationship improves the company’s total capacity. If two founders think alike, behave alike, avoid the same responsibilities and possess the same weaknesses, their similarities may create comfort without creating enough strength. A productive partnership should expand what the company can do.

Friendship can be a valuable foundation for such a partnership because it helps during moments when a difficult decision affects one of the founders personally. A real friend may know how to communicate an uncomfortable truth without humiliating you, while still refusing to hide what the business requires. However, friendship must not become a substitute for structure. Agreements still need to be written, responsibilities must be clear, equity must be properly documented, and the conditions under which either person may leave should be understood from the beginning.

You should not sign agreements because you distrust your co-founder. You sign them because clarity protects both the business and the friendship when circumstances change. People get married with love and still make legal commitments to one another; founders should be capable of combining genuine trust with responsible documentation. The strongest relationships do not depend on ambiguity to survive.

Sales is not a secondary function

The second lesson was the power of sales and the value of having someone who can consistently close deals. Many founders love building products, designing systems and discussing strategy because those activities feel like the serious intellectual work of creating a company. Sales can be treated as something the company will address after the product is complete, even though a product does not become a business until someone is willing to pay for it.

My co-founder was an excellent salesperson. He could build a relationship and close a deal even when we were miles apart and I was outside Nigeria. That ability gave the business momentum because, while I concentrated on technology, operations and consulting, he concentrated on bringing customers into the company. Our roles were not completely isolated from one another, but the complementary focus meant the company could build and sell at the same time.

That experience changed how I evaluate salespeople today. Activity is important, but I do not confuse activity with the purpose of sales. A salesperson can attend meetings, send proposals, build an impressive pipeline and speak confidently about prospects, but the essential question remains whether those efforts eventually produce customers and revenue. A good salesperson understands people well enough to move a genuine opportunity from interest to commitment without misleading the customer or promising what the company cannot deliver.

Closing is not simply the ability to pressure someone into signing an agreement. In a good business, closing requires the salesperson to understand the customer’s problem, explain the value of the solution, deal honestly with objections and create enough confidence for the customer to act. The best salespeople are not merely persuasive; they are translators who connect what the company has built with what the customer is trying to achieve.

Gidijobs taught me that strong sales can cover distance, open markets and sustain a company while other parts of the business are still being improved. It also taught me that a founder who is not naturally gifted at sales must still respect the function enough to recruit, partner with or learn from someone who is. Building something valuable and assuming that customers will discover it on their own is not a strategy. Someone must carry the value into the market, communicate it clearly and ask the customer to make a decision.

Build so the company can continue without you

One lesson became clearer after Gidijobs was no longer receiving the attention we had once given it. We did not build the company with a sufficiently deliberate exit or continuity plan in mind. When I moved on to start Eazipay, Gidijobs gradually became less active because the business had depended too heavily on our direct energy and attention. We had created value, built a recognisable platform and invested years of work, but we had not sufficiently designed what should happen when the founders became focused on something else.

When I say founders should build with an exit in mind, I do not mean that every company must be started for the purpose of selling it as quickly as possible. An exit can mean an acquisition, but it can also mean appointing a competent operator, transferring ownership responsibly, merging with a stronger business, turning the product into a sustainable division, licensing the technology or deliberately winding down the company in a way that preserves whatever value remains.

The important thing is to recognise that a business should not become useless simply because the founder’s attention has moved. If the company has customers, technology, a brand, data, relationships, intellectual property or infrastructure, those things represent accumulated value. They should not be allowed to disappear through neglect when they might still be useful to someone else.

We still pay for some infrastructure connected to that first business today, which is a quiet reminder that companies can continue to carry costs long after they stop receiving serious strategic attention. A founder can spend years building an asset and then unintentionally reduce its value because no clear decision has been made about its future. Keeping an inactive business alive indefinitely is not the same as preserving it.

Building with an exit or continuity plan in mind forces useful discipline from the beginning. It encourages founders to document processes, maintain clean financial records, protect intellectual property, understand customer contracts, separate the company’s assets from the founder’s personal life and create a business that another capable person can understand. These practices make a company easier to acquire, but they also make it easier to manage, finance and scale even if the founder never sells it.

This lesson now shapes how I think about every venture. Before committing years to a business, I want to understand not only how it can begin and grow, but also what a good ending could look like. Every founder should try to end the story well, whether that ending is an enduring independent company, a successful transfer of ownership, a merger, an acquisition or an orderly closure that respects employees, customers and investors.

Customers can educate a founder better than theory

Another gift Gidijobs gave me was direct access to the realities of Nigerian small businesses. We worked with hundreds of companies, many of them growing businesses owned and closely managed by their founders or high-net-worth individuals. By helping them recruit and manage people, I saw how they operated from the inside rather than merely reading about small businesses as an economic category.

I saw the problems they faced with payments, employee records, recruitment and human-resource management. I watched companies struggle because important information was scattered across spreadsheets, paper files, messages and the memory of one trusted employee. I saw founders making nearly every significant decision because the organisation had not developed enough structure for authority to be delegated safely.

In many small businesses, centralised decision-making begins for understandable reasons. The founder started the company, knows the customers, controls the cash and has often been disappointed by people in the past. It can therefore feel safer for every decision to return to the founder. However, as the company grows, the same habit that once protected it begins to slow it down. Employees wait for approvals, managers avoid responsibility, customers experience delays, and the founder becomes the main constraint inside the organisation.

Those observations later became part of the foundation for the work I do today. I did not arrive at the problems Eazipay addresses only through abstract market research. I had spent years speaking with businesses, observing their lapses and understanding the practical consequences of weak payroll, payment and employee-management systems. Gidijobs gave me a front-row education in how Nigerian businesses actually operate, including the difference between the formal process a company claims to follow and the informal process by which work is really completed.

That kind of customer exposure is one of the most valuable assets a founder can acquire. A founder who spends enough time inside a market begins to recognise patterns that individual customers may not be able to name. One customer may complain about a delayed payment, another about poor employee records and another about a compliance problem, but repeated exposure can reveal that they are all experiencing different consequences of the same missing infrastructure.

This is why founders should not treat customer conversations merely as opportunities to sell. Every serious interaction is also research. The complaints customers repeat, the workarounds they have invented, the tasks they still perform manually and the decisions that must always return to the owner can reveal businesses waiting to be built. The market often explains what it needs long before it produces a neat description of the solution.

Your first business can become your real business education

People sometimes describe an early venture as though it were merely a rehearsal for the company that later became larger or more visible. I do not see Gidijobs that way. It was a real business that served real customers, created opportunities and taught me lessons that no classroom could have delivered in the same form. It was where I learned how my personality behaves inside a partnership, why complementary strengths matter, how much a company depends on sales, what happens when continuity is not designed deliberately, and how closely serving customers can uncover the foundations of another business.

The value of a first business should therefore not be judged only by how much money it eventually made, whether it raised venture capital or whether the founder remained there forever. Some ventures produce financial returns, while others also produce judgement, relationships, reputation, market knowledge and the self-awareness required to build something more substantial later. Those assets are easy to overlook because they do not always appear on a balance sheet, but they can influence every important decision a founder makes afterwards.

There are things I took for granted at Gidijobs that I appreciate more now. I appreciate the rarity of working with a co-founder whose strengths genuinely complemented mine and with whom difficult business decisions did not destroy a valuable friendship. I appreciate what it meant to have someone who could sell while I concentrated on technology, operations and consulting. I also appreciate the access we had to hundreds of businesses whose challenges quietly taught me what Nigerian employers needed.

At the same time, gratitude should not prevent honest reflection. We should have thought more deliberately about continuity and what would happen to the business when our attention changed. That is precisely what makes experience useful: you preserve what worked, admit what did not, and carry both lessons into the next thing you build.

Your first business does not have to become your biggest business to become one of your most important teachers. The real loss would be to spend years building it and leave without converting the experience into better judgement. If you pay attention, the company will teach you about people, markets, money, structure and yourself. Years later, you may discover, as I have, that much of what is helping you build today was learned in a business you thought you had already left behind.