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Author: Isreal Oyarinde

The Perpetual Machine: Building Operations Systems That Run Themselves

The idea of a perpetual machine seems exciting. Something that runs on its own without any input. As an entrepreneur reaching this point in my businesses is my ultimate goal. Having resilient and profitable businesses that do not need me slaving away at my desk for the better part of 18 hours a day so I can have time to do other things I love and spend time with the people I care about. In this article, I will be sharing some advice that has worked for me as I am building. I do not purport to know it all as I am still in the process of transitioning from a solopreneur to a CEO myself. So, I would love for you to think of this as an ongoing conversation. Let’s get into it.   Where (or Who) Is the Battery? In science fiction, a perpetual machine is a hypothetical device that operates indefinitely without any external energy source, producing work or motion forever. A perpetual machine is deemed scientifically impossible so why is it something to aspire to in business? I think as entrepreneurs we aspire to this impossible “machine” not because we think we can ignore the laws of physics, but because we want to minimize the “Energy of Supervision.” Simply put, we want to reduce our input to the very minimum while simultaneously getting maximum output out of the business.  So the idea is not that we get to a point where we can completely ignore the business and it just continues to run efficiently on its own. Rather, it is that we are minimising input for maximum output.  The hardest part of building a perpetual motion machine is finding out where to hide the battery. Basic science tells us that a machine cannot run forever without an energy source. But a machine can run without a huge battery or energy pack attached to it. The battery can be tiny and inbuilt and it is the same with businesses too. We look at companies with presence in multiple countries that have existed for decades, long after the original visionary is retired or dead and wonder how they continue to run.  In most Nigerian businesses, the “battery” is the founder. The business runs on them. Remove the founder and the whole thing grinds to a halt like a generator that just ran out of diesel. I have watched it happen more times than I can count. A sharp Oga builds a thriving business, employs 30 people, handles the biggest clients personally, negotiates every major deal, and signs every cheque.  Then he travels for two weeks, and by the time he lands at Murtala Muhammed, three clients have complained, two staff have been fighting, and someone has been helping themselves to petty cash. The business did not collapse because of the market. It collapsed because the entire operation was a one-man show wearing a company costume. In software engineering, there is a concept called the “bus factor.” It asks: how many people on your team would need to be hit by a bus before the project stalls? If the answer is one, you have a problem. In most Nigerian SMEs, the bus factor is literally one: the founder. If they get sick, travel, die, or simply burn out, the business is finished. The Tribal Knowledge Problem The root cause is what I call “tribal knowledge,” information that lives in your head and nowhere else. You know which supplier gives you the best rate. You know which staff member cannot be trusted with cash.  You know that Client A always pays late but Client B will bounce a cheque entirely. You know that LASTMA operates heaviest on Tuesdays on that particular route your delivery trucks use. All of this is critical operational intelligence. And none of it is written down. When you leave, all of that leaves with you. Your replacement, whether it is a hired manager or your own child, starts from zero. They make mistakes you solved ten years ago. They trust the wrong people. They take the wrong route on Tuesday. And they wonder why things are not working. This is the exact pattern that killed countless Nigerian businesses. Ekene Dili Chukwu ran like clockwork under its founder. Within years of his passing, the fleet was in disrepair, routes were mismanaged, and the brand that once dominated the East became a memory. The same story plays out in restaurants, law firms, trading companies, and tech startups. The founder was the system, and when the founder left, the system left too. The Franchise vs Buka Test Here is a simple test for whether your business is a system or a personality cult: could someone franchise it? Think about Chicken Republic. Whether you walk into the one in Lekki or the one in Abuja, you get roughly the same experience. The jollof rice tastes the same. The service follows the same pattern. The menu is the same. That is not because every branch has the same brilliant manager. It is because there is a system, SOPs, checklists, training manuals, supply chain processes, and quality controls that ensure consistency regardless of who is behind the counter. Now think about your favourite local buka. Mama Nkechi’s rice is legendary. People drive across town for it. But what happens when Mama Nkechi is sick? Or when she travels to the village for a funeral?  The rice does not taste the same. Customers notice. Some stop coming. If Mama Nkechi retires, the buka closes. Her recipe, her timing, her seasoning instincts, all tribal knowledge that was never transferred. The difference between a Chicken Republic and a Mama Nkechi buka is not talent, it is systems. And if you want to build something that outlasts you, you need to build systems. The ‘If I Die Tomorrow’ Document The fix is simple, though not easy. It is the “If I Die Tomorrow” document. You need to move knowledge from your brain to a repository. But

The Enshittification of Brands: When Growth Becomes Rot

When Did This Start Tasting Different? You know that moment when you open a pack of something you have been buying for years and something feels… off? The biscuit is smaller. The flavour is thinner. The packaging looks the same, maybe even fancier, but the product itself has quietly, subtly, become worse. You ask yourself: “Did my taste change, or did they change the recipe?” The answer, almost always, is that they changed the recipe. And they are hoping you will not notice. There is something called “Enshittification” where sellers create more products, stuff in more features, add more flavours, and advertise, but then slowly erode the quality of those products to increase profit margins. The term was coined by Cory Doctorow, the Canadian-British writer and digital rights activist, in a 2023 essay. He originally used it to describe how technology platforms degrade over time: first they are good to users to attract them, then they are good to business customers at users’ expense, then they are good to nobody except shareholders. But the concept applies far beyond tech. It is a universal disease of capitalism, and Nigerian brands are not immune. The Lifecycle of Enshittification Every enshittified brand follows roughly the same trajectory: Phase 1 – The Honeymoon: The brand launches with genuine quality and value. They need customers, so they deliver their best. The product is excellent, the price is fair, the customer service is responsive. Think of Nigerian banks when they first launched mobile banking, zero charges, instant transfers, 24/7 customer support. Remember when GTBank was actually innovative? Phase 2 – The Squeeze Begins: Growth slows. Investors want returns. The CFO starts asking uncomfortable questions. So the brand starts making small changes. A little less product for the same price. A fee here. A surcharge there. Reduced customer service hours. They test how much they can take before customers notice. Phase 3 – The Extraction: Now the focus has fully shifted from “how do we make this better?” to “how do we make more from this?” Quality drops. Costs are cut. The brand coasts on its reputation while actively depleting it. Every decision is a spreadsheet exercise. The customer is no longer the priority; the shareholder is. Phase 4 – The Exodus: Customers start leaving, slowly at first, then all at once. The brand wonders what happened. But by this point, the damage is done. The trust account is overdrawn. Nigerian Case Studies in Enshittification The Indomie Debates: Ask any Nigerian over 25 and they will swear that Indomie used to taste better. The noodle strands were thicker, the seasoning was more potent, the portion was bigger. Is it nostalgia? Maybe partly. But the objective reality is that the product has been reformulated multiple times, portion sizes have been adjusted, and ingredient quality has shifted. The brand remains dominant because of its distribution power and brand loyalty, but the gap between what Indomie was and what it is now is a textbook example of incremental enshittification. Bank Service Degradation: Nigerian banks are a masterclass in enshittification. They once competed fiercely on service quality. Now they compete on who can charge the most fees while providing the least service. SMS alert charges. Card maintenance fees. Transfer charges. Stamp duty. USSD charges. Meanwhile, the apps crash during salary week, the customer care lines play hold music for 45 minutes, and branch visits feel like a punishment. They have monetized every touchpoint while degrading the experience at every touchpoint. Revenue is up. Customer satisfaction is in the gutter. Ribena and the Quiet Reformulation: When Suntory acquired Ribena from GlaxoSmithKline, the formula changed. Sugar was reduced (partly due to UK sugar taxes), and many consumers, including Nigerians who grew up on the brand, noticed the taste difference immediately. The brand kept the same packaging, the same marketing, the same price, but the product was fundamentally different. That is enshittification with a health-washing veneer. The Global Disease: Boeing, Twitter, and the Rest This is not just a Nigerian problem or a consumer goods issue. Some of the biggest brands including digital businesses and SAAS companies in the world have enshittified themselves into crisis: Boeing: Once the gold standard of aviation engineering, Boeing shifted from an engineering-first culture to a finance-first culture after the McDonnell Douglas merger. Cost-cutting, outsourcing critical engineering, and prioritizing shareholder returns over safety led to the 737 MAX disasters that killed 346 people. The stock price had been going up for years. On a spreadsheet, Boeing looked like a success. In reality, they were extracting from their most valuable asset: their engineering reputation. Twitter/X: The platform that once prided itself on being the “global town square” has been systematically stripped of the features and people that made it valuable. Verification became a paid product rather than a trust signal. Moderation was gutted. APIs were locked behind paywalls. The result? Advertisers fled, power users migrated, and the platform’s cultural relevance has eroded steadily. Amazon: Search for any product on Amazon today and the first page is dominated by ads and sponsored listings. The search experience has degraded so much that many users now add “reddit” to their Google searches to find genuine product recommendations. Amazon prioritized ad revenue over search quality, and users are finding workarounds. The Spreadsheet Illusion: When Metrics Mask Decline There are also some pricing innovations where brands try to make more from existing customers, increasing pricing bit by bit, more features. But the thing that comes to the fore is when the focus changes from “how do we make this better?” to “how do we make more from this?” And that is where the first sign of the quiet, subtle decline begins. On a spreadsheet, enshittification looks like success. Your margins look good. Revenue is up. Cost per unit is down. Efficiency ratios are improving. The quarterly report is beautiful. But here is where they move from value to tactics for some squeeze to extract. The issue is that you are extracting value from the

To Rent or To Buy a House: The Nigerian Housing Dilemma

The first time someone told me I was “wasting money on rent,” I was sitting in a rented apartment in Ajah, eating jollof rice I could actually afford because I hadn’t sunk my entire net worth into a building. The person giving me the advice? A landlord who had been trying to sell a property in Lekki for eight months with zero offers. The irony was thicker than Lagos traffic on a Friday evening. The rent-versus-buy debate in Nigeria is one of those conversations that generates more heat than light. Everyone has an opinion, most of them inherited from parents who built houses in the 1980s when a plot of land in Ikeja cost less than a Toyota Corolla costs today. But the Nigeria of 2026 is not the Nigeria of 1985.  Inflation is different. Interest rates are different. Urbanisation has changed our desires of what a good home is. The entire structure of how wealth is built and preserved has also shifted. So let us actually do the math, strip away the emotions, and figure out when renting wins, when buying wins, and when you should just mind your business and ignore your uncle’s WhatsApp forwards about “landed properties near Dangote refinery.” The Nigerian Dream of Owning a House Interesting topic because while the capitalist in me wants to make bank like Lagos and Abuja landlords, the socialist in me balks at the high price. As such, the realist in me definitely prefers the lower-priced rent and ample space of Arepo, or Magboro and Mowe. But of course, there’s always our parents’ voice in our head that says “Why are you paying rent? You’re making your landlord rich” “Buy your own land, start building your house” “This money you just paid as rent can build the foundation”  It’s like the Nigerian dream, if one ever existed. In fact, many of our parents started with one or two rooms in an uncompleted building before building out the rest. But times have changed. You certainly can’t do that in most parts of Lagos, that is even if you can afford to buy a quarter plot and build, or buy a house that can see into your neighbour’s bedroom. To put it in perspective, the average price of a 3-bedroom flat in Lekki Phase 1 now sits between N80 million and N200 million depending on the estate. In Abuja’s Maitama or Asokoro, you are looking at N150 million to N400 million for a decent detached house. Meanwhile, the median income in Lagos is roughly N150,000 to N250,000 a month. The gap between what people earn and what houses cost is not a gap; it is the Grand Canyon. According to the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa, Nigeria’s housing deficit stands at approximately 17 to 28 million units, depending on who you ask. The National Bureau of Statistics puts home ownership at about 25% in urban areas. Compare that to South Africa at around 65%, Kenya at 26%, and even Ghana at about 47%. We are not just behind; we are running the race in the wrong direction. The Math Behind Renting To take another look at our parents’ advice, for most people in the building phase of wealth, buying a house is making a financial mistake, except, of course, it is for investment purposes. The main argument is always: “Rent is a waste. At the end of the year, you have nothing to show for it.” Let’s test that. Imagine you want to live in an apartment in Lekki/Ajah worth N200 million. The rent for that house, a Phase 2 apartment, likely costs 4 million to 5 million a year. That is a rental yield of 2% to 2.5% per year. If you buy the house and live in it, you’re locking down N200 million of capital to save N5 million in rent, but that means that N200 million is working for you at a 5% return. In an economy with almost 30% inflation (yeah, it’s going down), that is a CAPITAL DISASTER. If you took the same N200 million and put it in a safe instrument, even a simple Treasury Bill or a Eurobond fund doing 10%, you’ll make N20 million a year. You could pay your N5 million rent and still have N15 million leftover. In this scenario, renting is actually profitable. Also, if you’re a business owner, putting in N200 million into inventory or expansion should yield 20-30%. Turning your capital into concrete means you are killing your business growth to satisfy your ego. Let me put it even more starkly. Nigerian rental yields are among the lowest in Africa: This means that as a landlord in Lagos, the rent you collect barely covers 2-4% of the property value per year. As a tenant, you are getting an incredible deal relative to the asset value you are occupying. The math favours renting in Lagos more than almost any other major African city. The Math Behind Buying Now that I’ve badmouthed buying a house enough, that does not mean you should never buy. Buying is not always a bad deal. It depends entirely on your situation, your goals, and your capital structure. For example, a house can be a financial investment. Say you get a mortgage at 9.75%, and you buy a house in an area giving you at least 10%, even if you’ll still be adding some money. If you rent out the whole house and are able to use the rent to offset the mortgage cost for a period of 10 years, you essentially get a 100 million property for 10 million plus the returns for 10 years.  Only a few asset classes can turn 10 million to 100 million in 10 years, possibly more because the house could appreciate as much as 150 million plus you’d still be collecting rent. Of course, maintenance costs apply too. The challenge, however, is that Nigerian mortgage rates are among the harshest in the world and they are

Solopreneur to CEO: A Lazy Founder’s Practical Guide to Building and Leading Teams

People close to me hold two ironic views of me. One is that I am lazy and I delegate too much. The other is that I am somehow hardworking. Both are true. And that contradiction is the entire philosophy of this essay. You Are the Problem (And That’s OK) I am probably a bonafide member of the hustle culture club —you know, the one that sleeps by 3am-4am, up by 8am at most, running on caffeine and persistent burnout. But I also believe it is madness to do the same thing by yourself over and over again. Here is the uncomfortable truth: if you are still the smartest person in the room, and if your business grinds to a halt when you leave, you are not a CEO. You are a glorified freelancer with overheads.  To transition from solopreneur to CEO, you must embrace what I call the “Lazy Founder Methodology” which is really about finding the smartest, most leveraged way to set things up so they run without you. Leverage is the keyword here. And the first step? Admitting that you are the problem. If you have created a monopoly where you are the only provider of solutions, you probably have a founder-dependency disease. The good news? It is curable. The bad news? The cure requires you to let go. The SPOF Diagnosis: Are You a Single Point of Failure? I have spoken extensively about “Single Point of Failure” (SPOF) in engineering and business. In most businesses —including, at various points, my own — the founder is the SPOF. You are the Chief Marketing Officer, the Head of Sales, the Customer Support Lead, and the only person who can sign off on anything. You are the bottleneck disguised as a leader. Here is a quick self-diagnosis. Answer honestly: If you answered “no” to more than two of those, congratulations —you are a SPOF. Your business is not a business; it is a job that you created for yourself with extra steps. And the irony is that this job has no leave days, no pension, and the HR department (also you) is terrible. The Eisenhower Matrix is your friend here. Categorize every task you do into four quadrants: The fear of delegation is real. If a task requires your specific skill like strategy or closing high-value clients, you can keep it. But everything else? Start looking for what you can let go of. It is not about burning yourself out less. It is about building something that does not require your fire to stay warm. The next natural step after this is finding qualified and trustworthy people who can take up the things you are letting go of. So, to the next big question, how do you hire?  Hiring in Nigeria: A Nightmare With Solutions Let me be honest: hiring in Nigeria is a nightmare. I have had bad hires that did the worst damage to projects precisely because the role was fully remote and unsupervised. In the early days of running Contentika, I found it really hard to find and retain talents.  The good ones get entrepreneurial fast or get poached by international companies paying in dollars. The mediocre ones come with inflated CVs, fake experience, and LinkedIn profiles that read like fiction. And let me add, we do not have a robust system to verify credentials the way some countries do. There is no centralized background check database. Reference checks are often a formality where the “referee” is the candidate’s cousin using a different phone number.  In short, I would not sugar coat what it takes by simply saying “hire the best people”. The truth is hiring the best people is very hard and keeping them is even harder. But it is not impossible. Here is what I have learned about finding and keeping them: Where to Find Talent How to Filter Do not hire cheaply. When I interview somebody, I run rigorous assessments regardless of their CV. I have seen first-class graduates who cannot write a coherent email and HND holders who can architect entire systems. The paper means less than the proof. Smart people do not come cheap. When you get them “cheap,” you get the enshittification of your product and service. It is a false economy. Budget for talent the way you budget for infrastructure —it is not optional. Documentification: The Ultimate Legacy This is the first thing I did when I started managing people instead of just managing myself: I wrote everything down. Everything. “Documentification” is my term for the obsessive documentation of every process, decision, and standard in your business. It is the single most important thing you can do to transition from solo operator to CEO. Here is why: if the knowledge of how your business operates lives only in your head, it dies when you step away. Every. Single. Time. When starting (or restructuring) a business, script everything: The tools for this are abundant and mostly affordable: This protects against the enshittification of your business. Everything about the decline of your service quality starts with undocumented processes. When the person who “knows how” leaves — and they will leave— the knowledge leaves with them. Documentation is your insurance policy against brain drain. Note that it is not just enough to document, draw data from what you have documented and apply them to improve your processes.  No-Trust Architecture: Trust the System, Not the Person “No-Trust” is not about being paranoid or treating your employees like criminals. It is about building systems where consistency does not depend on any single person’s goodwill, competence, or presence. If the quality of your product or service is dependent on your physical presence or specific salespeople, that is a red flag. Build a quality culture instead. SOPs ensure consistency. Consistency builds trust. And trust is cumulative. Every time a customer has the same positive experience regardless of who serves them, your brand equity goes up. Theft is a silent killer, invisible when starting a business. Inventory

Employee Theft and Protection: The No-Trust Architecture

The Day I Caught My Own Cashier I remember the exact moment I knew something was wrong. It was a Thursday evening in 2019, and I was going through the day’s sales records at one of our retail outlets in Lagos. The numbers looked fine on paper. Actually, they looked a little too fine. Every transaction was perfectly rounded. No kobo balances, no odd figures. Just clean, whole numbers. And if you have ever sold anything in Nigeria, you know that is not how reality works. Reality is messy. Reality has N3,475 and N11,250 and change that nobody wants to carry. But this ledger? This ledger was fiction. I stayed back that night and told the team I had a meeting. Then I sat in the back office and tried to make sense of the accounting. What I discovered made my stomach turn. My cashier, a young man I had trained, personally vouched for, and even given a salary advance just two months earlier had developed a system. He would ring up items at a lower price, pocket the difference, and at the end of the day, adjust the books. He had been doing it for at least three months. The total? Over N800,000. That is not petty theft. That is a second salary. Although, I felt really betrayed, I did not shout. I did not fight. I sat with the pain for about two days before I acted. Because the truth is, it was not just about the money. It was the betrayal. You bring someone in, you trust them, you build something together and they are quietly bleeding you dry. That experience changed how I think about business security forever. It is what led me to what I now call the No-Trust Architecture. And no, it is not about being heartless. It is about being smart. As the Yoruba elders say, “Ẹni máa jẹ oyin inú àpáta, kì í wo ẹnu àáke” -the person who wants to eat honey embedded in a mountain will not be bothered about the effect on the axe. If you want to protect your business, you cannot be afraid to look closely at the people running it. This post is going to be long. It is going to be detailed. It is going to make some of you uncomfortable, because you will recognise your own businesses in this post. But I would rather you be uncomfortable now than bankrupt later. Let us get into it. Why Nigerian Businesses Are Bleeding Money Silently According to SMEDAN, over 80% of small and medium enterprises in Nigeria fail within their first five years. We like to blame the economy, the government, the exchange rate, NEPA sorry, PHCN or whatever they are calling themselves this week. But the truth that nobody wants to say out loud is this: a significant percentage of these businesses die because the owner’s own staff killed them from the inside. Employee theft in Nigeria is not an occasional problem. It is an epidemic. It is so normalized that some business owners have simply built it into their cost structure. I have heard people say, ‘just add 15% to your pricing to cover what staff will steal.’ Budgeting for robbery is not a business strategy. That is Stockholm syndrome. The EFCC deals with the big fraud cases, the million-naira corporate theft, the politicians, the Yahoo boys driving Benz. But who is dealing with the cashier that takes N5,000 a day? Who is tracking the warehouse manager that ‘damages’ three cartons of stock every week? Who is watching the procurement officer that inflates every invoice by 20% and splits the difference with the supplier? Nobody. Because we have accepted it as the cost of doing business in Nigeria. Here is what makes it worse, most business owners do not even know they are being stolen from. They see declining profits and blame the market. They see shrinking inventory and blame the supplier. They see rising costs and blame inflation. Meanwhile, the thief is sitting right there in the office, greeting them ‘Good morning, Oga’ every day with a smile that costs them millions. Here is what makes it worse, most business owners do not even know they are being stolen from. The people stealing from you will not look like thieves. They will look like your most loyal employees. The Seven Faces of Employee Theft Before we talk about solutions, we need to understand the problem. Employee theft in Nigerian businesses is not one thing, it is at least seven different things, and each one requires a different approach. Let me break them down. 1. The Classic Cash Theft – This is the most straightforward form. The cashier takes money directly from the register, the sales person underreports daily takings, or the accountant siphons funds through fake expenses. In a country where cash is still king, despite everything the Central Bank has tried to do with the cashless policy. I have seen cashiers develop systems so sophisticated that they could teach a masterclass on creative accounting. One woman I heard about would ring up every tenth transaction without recording it. Just skip it entirely. At the end of the day, she would reconcile by adjusting quantities on other transactions. Genius, honestly. Evil, but genius. 2. Inventory Theft (The Warehouse Ghost) – This is where products simply disappear. They walk out of the warehouse in staff bags, in delivery trucks making unauthorised stops, or they get ‘damaged’ with alarming frequency. A friend of mine who runs a provisions store in Surulere told me he was losing an average of N150,000 worth of stock every month to ‘breakage and spoilage.’ When he installed cameras, the breakage mysteriously dropped to almost zero. 3. Time Theft (The Invisible Drain) – This one does not show up on any ledger, but it costs you just as much. Staff who clock in and then disappear for hours. Drivers who take personal detours on company fuel. Employees who run their

The Band and Bandwidth Test

Bandwidth

If you struggle to balance how much help you give others, here’s a framework I use that might help you triage who you need to help, and how much help you should offer.

Much of it comes from my experience navigating interpersonal relationships over the years.