Today marks exactly eight years since an event that kickstarted one of the most pivotal experiences in my professional career—and for many reasons, one of the most magical periods of my life. In this blog, I will take you through part of this experience and share some of my reflections. In many ways, this is also a story about telling stories.
This event single-handedly changed the professional career trajectory of me and my friends. If you have 5-6 minutes to spare, I will share some lessons from this experience. I hope you enjoy and learn a thing or two from our story.
I’ve always loved telling stories for as long as I can remember. Even as an engineering student during my undergraduate days, my classmates and friends were aware of my ability to craft compelling narratives. I used to blog much more actively back then—writing poems, short stories, music reviews, and more.
When the opportunity to enter a business case competition arose, and the first task was to develop an advert script for Closeup, the biggest toothpaste brand in Nigeria by market share, my friends recruited me to join their team. Our team consisted of Laolu, Feranmi, and me.
I wrote the advert script half-heartedly on the day of the submission deadline and handed it to Laolu to do the final editing and submit. I didn’t give much thought to the idea of advancing to the next stage, but to our surprise, we got an email! Our next task was to convert our advert script into a video ad.
Lesson: Make sure you take that first step, meet that deadline. Make that move! Enter the race! You can only win the fight if you step into the ring.
At the time, I was teaching other students how to play the guitar with a close friend, Dotun. One evening, after our class, we decided to recruit some of our students—who also happened to be our friends—for our video ad. We all headed to a famous park in our university, Motion Ground, and tried to shoot a video ad.
Lesson: Make the best of your current situation. Many times, everything you need is already around you!
Laolu and I returned to my room to edit the video. While editing, we realized it would take much more time than expected, and we weren’t confident that the video would turn out well, even with the exciting clips we had. So, I decided to convert our video into a picture story format. After some time editing and incorporating feedback, we produced the final video.
Again, half-heartedly, we didn’t expect much—but once more, we got an email! This time, we were invited to a bootcamp in Lagos, Nigeria! The competition is typically held annually, with the African rounds called the Unilever Africa Idea Trophy, which eventually feeds into a global case competition known as the Unilever Future Leaders League. We were going to represent our university and compete against some of the best universities in Nigeria for a chance to represent the country at the African finals. Only two teams would make it through.
We were handed our first business case to work on in the weeks leading up to the bootcamp. As three engineering students, we approached the case very technically. We produced a voluminous Word document and a ‘text-heavy’ PowerPoint presentation that showcased our tireless efforts. We were proud of what we had done and thought we stood a good chance—how wrong we were!
The first day of the week-long bootcamp arrived, and we soon found ourselves in Lagos. Unilever, the competition sponsors, lodged us in a premium hotel. As an undergraduate student, I remember feeling so thrilled. During the bootcamp, we had the opportunity to connect with current brand marketing managers at the company, and I remember thinking how awesome they were and how cool it would be to become a brand marketing manager someday. Interestingly, that thought eventually became a reality for all three of us.
There were about 12 teams representing qualifying universities from across Nigeria at the Lagos bootcamp. Each team member was assigned a mentor—an accomplished professional—to provide expert guidance on our case. Interestingly, our mentor was out of the country, making us probably the only team at the bootcamp without one. However, we used that opportunity to interact with other people at the bootcamp willing to help us.
During a conversation with one of Unilever’s staff members, Demola, he had the opportunity to briefly review our work and was very impressed. He even mentioned that our work could win an actual business pitch based on the amount of effort and detail involved. However, he noted that while our work was impressive, we needed more compelling ways to present it. He left us with three words: “Tell a story.” And those were the only three words we needed to hear.
Lesson: Feedback! Always be open to feedback. This is a guiding principle in my life. There are more experienced people who have gone ahead of you and you should always be willing to learn from their experiences.
We returned to the hotel and pulled all-nighters, starting our presentation from scratch. Abandoning four weeks’ worth of work to start fresh was probably the craziest thing we did. But it was also one of the best decisions we made, as we were able to incorporate a lot of what we had learned at the bootcamp into our new presentation. We built a compelling story that we knew could win!
We already understood the problem, but we needed a compelling way to sell it and win the business case competition. At the time, I wasn’t very familiar with PowerPoint, so with the help of my friends, I used Adobe Photoshop to create our presentation.
Despite the time constraints, we managed to pull off a miracle, and our final presentation video is shown below.
We came in second place and qualified to represent Nigeria at the African finals the following year in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Lesson: Don’t be afraid to start over. Don’t be scared to do crazy things. Sometimes it may not work out, but when it does, it’s the most magical feeling in the world.
South Africa was a whole other experience, and I plan to blog about it sometime soon. Don’t miss it. Subscribe to my blog below :
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This experience truly transformed our lives. Eight years later, the three of us have collectively gone on to work for six multinational companies, manage marketing strategies and campaigns for over 15 global brands, and have so far won over a dozen internationally acclaimed awards for our work. We’ve also earned or are in the process of earning three graduate business degrees. It’s been an exhilarating journey, and the most exciting part is that it’s only just getting started. The lessons we learned, the risks we took, and the stories we told and still tell continue to shape our paths, and I can’t wait to see where this adventure takes us next.
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