Why I now speak to Interns’ parents before giving offers

After watching a pattern of promising interns abruptly resign, often driven by parental misunderstanding of remote work, I realised we needed a different approach. So I began speaking directly with parents to provide clarity, context, and reassurance about the work their children do here. It’s unconventional, but it’s already improving trust and communication. Whether it ultimately reduces attrition is something only time and data will tell.
How did I even get here? Let me explain before you judge me.

Somewhere between building a company, convincing adults to behave like adults, and trying to run an institution that doesn’t collapse on my head, I now find myself speaking to parents of interns before HR can send out their offers.

If you told me four years ago that I would spend my mornings explaining credit infrastructure to somebody’s mum who still shouts “off the light,” I would have laughed in your face. Yet here we are, and not only am I doing it, I am now the person defending it as innovation.

Even ChatGPT, that digital errand boy that claims it’s here to help, had the audacity to tell me that it wasn’t professional. I told it “gbe enu soun.” A man must draw the line somewhere.

But there’s a story behind all this, and before you assume I’ve lost the plot, come closer and let me run the full gist from the beginning.

One year, several disappearing acts, and an HR team that aged ten years

Over the last one year, I noticed a very strange pattern. It was mostly the girls, though not exclusively, and it always happened the same way. A bright, high-performing new hire would do well, collect praise, get on everyone’s good side, show promise, and then out of nowhere, vanish over a weekend. No warning. No conversation. Nothing.

A resignation letter would drop like a bad network, phones would go off like NEPA took light, and the entire HR team would turn to Sherlock trying to track them or the guarantor. And when someone finally surfaced, usually the parent, the explanations would start flying. The child was sick. The workload was too much. The job was stressing them. The sun was too hot. The moon was misaligned. Pick any excuse; I’ve heard them all.

But nothing prepared me for Jane Doe. Jane was the kind of intern you don’t forget. She came in the first time, did an incredible job, and left everyone impressed at how fast she picked things up. She wasn’t a pity hire. She earned every bit of the respect she got, and when she asked to come back for a second internship, we were genuinely happy to have her. She was one of those interns you imagine eventually hiring full-time with no hesitation.

So imagine our surprise when, less than a week into her reemployment, a short, vague email landed in my inbox. She was resigning with immediate effect. No clear reason. Something about “undisclosed health issues.” She didn’t tell her team lead. She didn’t inform HR. She didn’t say anything to her colleagues. She simply vanished.

We spent 24 hours trying to reach her. Nothing. Calls went nowhere, messages were ignored, and the entire thing felt like a ghost story. When we eventually got through, she had no coherent explanation. No clarity. Nothing that matched her initial eagerness or the brilliance she had shown in her first internship.

It was confusing, painful, and downright frustrating. And it wasn’t just her. She was simply the incident that snapped everything into focus.

At first I was furious. Actually, scratch that, I was livid. I kept asking myself how someone could come into a serious workplace, learn, get paid, grow, and then exit the building like a thief in broad daylight with no courtesy of a conversation. But when anger doesn’t solve the problem, wisdom must step forward. So, as usual, I went to lease some sense.

The ‘leave that job now’ parenting era is wreaking havoc

When we finally made it easier for people leaving to open up without fear of consequences (nobody dies on this job, so there’s no point holding anyone hostage), things became clearer. A pattern emerged across the stories, and it was almost too obvious once I saw it.

Parents, particularly those who grew up with traditional workplaces where people wore ties, carried files, and lived inside offices, were seeing their children work hard in a remote setting and deciding that it was slavery.

Many of these young hires still lived at home. So the parent was watching them glued to a laptop, joining meetings, taking feedback, working long hours, dealing with the normal chaos of tech, and they couldn’t process it. Their reaction was simple:

“This job is stressing my child. Leave immediately.” And when your parent gives that instruction in a home where you aren’t paying rent, feeding yourself, or contributing significantly, what power do you have to argue? Your father has spoken. Your mother has spoken. You pack your bag and run.

Even the children themselves weren’t saying the work was too much. They were complaining like normal adults do. Only psychopaths don’t complain about their jobs. But to the parents, the grumbling meant their child was suffering spiritual torment in a workplace run by sadists.

Remote work fooled us all

I knew deep down that if we weren’t a remote company, this whole parental intervention problem wouldn’t exist. If these kids were leaving the house every morning, catching crowded buses, dealing with Lagos traffic, getting shoved around by conductors, occasionally having money or items stolen, their parents wouldn’t see any of it. They would only meet a child who left home early and returned tired, and that would be the story they would take home. They wouldn’t see the work itself, the deadlines, the meetings, or the mental load, so they wouldn’t panic.

Instead, parents see their kids at home, glued to screens (an age-long beef still exists between parents and screens), typing away, attending back-to-back calls, and solving problems they don’t understand. When a young hire complains about a tough day, which any normal person would, they interpret it as suffering or exploitation. Because the kids live at home, the parents feel entitled to intervene. And most of the time, there’s nothing the child can do about it.

Remote work has turned parents into accidental supervisors in their children’s careers. They see everything, but they don’t have the context or experience to understand what’s actually happening. And without that context, even normal complaints or adjustments get blown out of proportion, which ends up creating a whole new HR headache we never signed up for.

The idea that sounded ridiculous until it made perfect sense

So one day, I asked myself a genuinely mad question: “What if I talk to the parents?”

What if I picked up my phone like the responsible adult that I am and explained the job to them man-to-man or man-to-woman? Tell them what the internship involves, the six-month structure, the pay progression, the job rotation system, the technical skills the children will pick up, the growth they can expect, and the general madness of early-career tech work.

If someone called me regarding my daughter, wanting to explain her opportunities and what the journey would look like, I would appreciate it. So why wouldn’t I extend the same courtesy to other parents?

That’s how this experiment started. It wasn’t a grand strategic initiative. It wasn’t something I wrote on a whiteboard and presented to the team. It was simply me deciding to try something different instead of sitting down complaining about a problem that kept repeating itself.

Talking to parents is now a full-blown pastime I didn’t know I needed

Let me confess: I don’t even know if this will work in the long run, but I’m enjoying the process more than I expected.

When I call these parents, the first thing I hear is pride. Genuine pride. They talk about how well their children did in school, how they graduated at the top of their class, how they have always been hardworking and responsible. 

We take mostly first-class candidates, so you can imagine the warmth of these conversations. Nobody raises a child to be mediocre, and hearing it from the parents reminded me that these young people are more than their weekend disappearances.

I also explain everything we do at Lendsqr. Not the usual corporate website talk, but real explanations of how digital lending works, how we serve lenders, the engineering that goes into the product, the skills their children will learn, and why the early stages of a tech career can feel heavy before it becomes rewarding.

It has become unexpectedly fulfilling, in a very odd way.

Will all this reduce attrition? Even I don’t know yet

I wish I could stand here and tell you confidently that this initiative is going to fix attrition once and for all. The truth is, I don’t know. We’re still collecting data, watching patterns, and seeing how it plays out over time. Some of these things can’t be rushed or predicted.

If it does work, I’ll be the first to come back and brag about my brilliance in figuring it out. Don’t take that as a promise though, I’ll probably exaggerate anyway. Innovation is rarely neat. Most of the time it’s just frustration meeting desperation, refusing to give up, and then hoping it sticks.

In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I started. I’ll keep picking up the phone, talking to parents, listening to their concerns, reassuring them that their children are learning, growing, and not being worked like field labourers. I’ll explain what we do, what they gain, and why the early struggles are part of the process. And I’ll do it gladly, because these conversations are worth it, until the company grows so big that I can’t possibly make the calls myself.

When that day comes and I’m sure it will, we’ll figure out a new way. That’s what we do. We adapt, we experiment, and we keep moving forward.

African fintechs are robbing the poor blind

African fintechs were supposed to make payments and finance fairer and cheaper. Instead, many are quietly and mercilessly gouging out the eyes of the most vulnerable Africans across the continent. After reviewing public pricing data from fintechs across 54 African countries, what I found was alarming. The same companies claiming to drive financial inclusion are, in many cases, profiting off the people they promise to help.

If there are a few things that everybody agrees on, it’s that Africans need a helping hand. That also includes financial inclusion. Globally, we’ve seen DFIs and other government and non-governmental organizations pouring billions of dollars to help Africans. From the Gates Foundation to the Germans at KfW and DEG. Everybody’s trying to help build a world where being born African doesn’t mean you’re automatically shut out of finance.

In fact, the M-Pesa that we all love was actually created and funded by the British government. And that’s good. You’d think that with all this effort and money, everybody would agree on one thing: you don’t profit off the vulnerable, at least not in a direct and blatant way. But guess what? You’d be wrong. I didn’t realize just how bad Africans, especially the poor ones, were being taken advantage of until I started growing Lendsqr across the continent.

The moment it hit me

Of course, before Lendsqr went continental, I already had a fair share of exposure to different African markets. I’d seen the good, the bad, and the bureaucratic. Payments systems were mostly similar. The card networks were familiar, the central banks often looked to one another for regulatory cues, and we all complained about the same things — settlement delays, interchange fees, and poor infrastructure.

But as we began expanding Lendsqr into other countries, the numbers started telling me a story that was too outrageous to ignore.

Let’s start with Nigeria;  a country that, for all its chaos, somehow manages to have one of the most efficient and affordable digital payment ecosystems in Africa. Moving money in Nigeria costs next to nothing. Transfer ₦10,000, and your fee is usually capped at ₦10. Transfer ₦100,000, and it might rise to ₦25. Even for big business payments moving billions, it rarely crosses ₦50  and that’s barely $0.03.

Platforms like Paystack, Flutterwave, Monnify, and Quickteller all hover around 1.5%, and even that is capped at ₦2,000 (around $1.33). In fact, for micro-transactions, some banks and fintechs absorb the fees entirely. The Central Bank, for all its overreach, has at least tried to protect the little guy by mandating free ATM withdrawals for the poor, capping transfer fees, and pushing interoperability so you can send money without burning your pocket.

So naturally, I assumed this was the norm across Africa. How very wrong I was.

When 2.5% (uncapped) feels like a victory

The first shock came when one of our customers in East Africa called to share “good news.” They had just secured a disbursement deal capped at 2.5% per transaction. I remember them sounding so happy, as if they had just won a grant.

I was confused. I asked them to repeat it. Two point five percent? They confirmed it proudly. That means if you move $100,000 through a system like that, you lose $2,500 instantly to transaction fees. That’s money that creates no value. It doesn’t make systems faster or safer. It just disappears into someone’s pocket.

I could not believe it. I even joked that at this rate, they might as well throw a street party and call in King Sunny Ade to celebrate being robbed.

I remember spending days thinking, what kind of daylight robbery is this? But it didn’t stop there. I dug deeper and the numbers got uglier.

The more I looked, the worse it got

Across Africa, fintechs and payment providers are quietly making the poor pay some of the highest transaction costs in the world. The more I dug, the more absurd it became. I even got my team to scour the web: pricing pages, documentation, and payment terms across 54 African countries, just to be sure I wasn’t overreacting. Every single number we found was public information, sitting in plain sight. And we’ll be releasing all that data soon. For now, let me give you a few examples.

In Rwanda, KPay charges 5% for collecting money whether by card or mobile money. Five percent. That’s $25 in fees for every $500 transaction. In a country where average monthly income barely crosses $150, that’s criminal.

In Benin Republic, PayPlus also charges 5% on card collections. Flutterwave, which charges around 2% in Nigeria, charges 4.8% in countries like Malawi and Rwanda, and the same 4.8% in South Africa. PesaPal charges 3.5% in Rwanda.

Now compare that with Stripe or Square in the US or UK, both of which charge 2.9%, and that’s in countries with far better infrastructure, faster reconciliation, and clearer consumer protection. Even PayPal, notorious for its greed, caps its domestic fees around 2 to 4%.

So why should a small business in Kigali or Cotonou pay almost double what a startup in California pays just to move money from one account to another?

The same Africa, different rules

It gets even crazier  when you realize that these fintechs are often the same companies operating across multiple African countries. Flutterwave, Paystack, PawaPay, and others have the same brand, same technology stack, same continent, yet wildly different fees.

For instance, Flutterwave in Nigeria charges 2% capped at ₦1,500 ($10). The same company in Rwanda charges 3.5%, and in Malawi it goes up to 4.8%. KPay in Rwanda sits comfortably at 5%. Meanwhile, Wave, which operates in Senegal and Burkina Faso, charges just 1%, which may or may not be proof that fair pricing is absolutely possible on this continent.

In some cases, moving $100,000 through certain fintechs in West Africa could cost $3,000 in fees, while the same transaction through Stripe in the US would barely touch $1,000. And remember, most of these African countries are poorer, less industrialized, and more dependent on small-scale entrepreneurs, traders, and hustlers trying to survive.

When you factor in how many of these payments happen daily; school fees, remittances, salaries, small business transactions, you start to see the scale of the bleed. We’re talking billions of dollars lost every year to “financial inclusion” intermediaries that promise to help the poor, but instead charge them for breathing.

We can’t keep blaming “the West”

What makes this even more painful is that we’ve built a culture of blaming the West for our exploitation while turning a blind eye to the predators among us. It’s fashionable to say “colonialism” or “IMF” whenever Africans are suffering, but at some point, we have to admit that a lot of the exploitation today is homegrown. 

It’s Africans charging Africans outrageous rates to send money within Africa. It’s African fintechs, armed with DFI grants meant to “empower inclusion,” who’ve decided the best way to grow is to tax the poor until they collapse.

I’ve seen fintechs brag about “connecting Africa” while charging 3 to 6% on every mobile money transaction. That’s not inclusion. That’s extortion smartly coiffed and dressed up as innovation.

And don’t get me wrong, I know infrastructure costs a whole lot of money. Integrations, agent networks, regulatory licenses, none of it is free. But there’s a difference between sustainable pricing and sheer greed. The reality is, we’ve normalized gouging because the victims don’t have a voice.

The hypocrisy of “financial inclusion”

The biggest irony is that fintech was supposed to fix this. We came to make finance fairer, cheaper, and faster. Yet, here we are, with local fintechs charging fees that would get Western CEOs crucified in the press.

In the US, if Stripe decided to raise its fees from 2.9% to 5%, it would make headlines on TechCrunch, analysts would shred them in opinion pieces, and regulators would swarm. Customers would revolt immediately. But in Africa, we quietly call it “market dynamics” and move on, as though poverty itself justifies exploitation.

When you see fintechs like KPay in Rwanda taking 5% per transaction, you start to realize this may likely be exploitation disguised as “financial inclusion”. At that rate, the poor can’t save, can’t scale, can’t breathe. 

Take a moment to think about this; If you were to move $100,000 through a 5% network, you would lose $5,000. Do it ten times a month, and that is $50,000 gone just for moving money that already belongs to you. Imagine a small business trying to pay its staff or suppliers under such conditions.

And the worst part? These same fintechs often use the language of inclusion and empowerment to raise money from global investors and DFIs. They pitch themselves as saviors of Africa’s unbanked population while quietly charging the unbanked three to four times what a London café owner pays on Square.

Where do we go from here?

Moving money around Africa shouldn’t cost an arm, a leg, and your firstborn. If M-Pesa can process transactions for 0.5% in Kenya and Wave can charge 1% in Senegal, then the excuse of “infrastructure cost” doesn’t hold water.

It is time for fintech founders and investors to take a hard look at their pricing models and ask if this is the Africa they claim to be building for. Regulators must begin to link licensing approvals to transparent, fair pricing.

If we are truly building for Africa, then let’s prove it by pricing fairly. Let’s stop pretending that charging 5% fees in a continent still struggling with poverty is acceptable. We’ve got to stop pretending this is okay. African fintechs can’t keep shouting “financial inclusion” while fucking robbing the poor blind.

All I want from these damned AI things

I’ve spent enough time with AI to know it’s helpful in theory but still missing the point in practice. I don’t need it to act smart or predict the future. I just want it to deal with the things that actually slow me down, the everyday stuff that eats up time and sanity. Here’s what I really want AI to handle for me.

I’ve been around long enough to remember when ChatGPT first landed, and everyone lost their minds. I was one of those early adopters who couldn’t resist trying it on every and anything. I used it to write, to test ideas, to have conversations, even arguing just to see how it would respond. 

And at the start, it was like discovering rare earth metal. You could ask it to write an email, and it’d come out sounding polished, polite, and just the right amount of corporate. Of course, that also meant people suddenly became “thoughtful communicators.”

You know those resignation emails that start with “After much reflection and gratitude…”? Yeah, all ChatGPT. Fuck that! Because the same people who can’t even be bothered to reply to a Slack message without sounding rude are suddenly reflecting, meditating, and evaluating life choices in neatly formatted paragraphs. They didn’t suddenly become kind; on the contrary they became better at outsourcing sincerity. But that’s beside the point.

If I could actually build the kind of AI I need (one that truly gets how my life works), it wouldn’t be some poetic, godlike assistant that quotes philosophy at me. It would be practical, useful, maybe even nosy. Because honestly, there are so many small but painfully repetitive things I wish AI could just handle.

I want my cameras to come with brains

Everyone that knows me knows that, despite my disciplined demeanor, I can live and die for gist. Proper amebo wearing cap!

Let’s start from my home  shall we? I use cameras around my house; Ring cameras, mostly. They’re great, but they’re dumb. All they do is record and notify. Half the time it’s just my neighbor arranging hookups or a delivery guy I already know.

I don’t want constant pings for nothing. What I want is an AI that actually reviews the footage, figures out what matters, and sends me a proper summary. Something like, “Between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., these are the people who came by. Your daughter stopped in around noon. A delivery guy dropped a package. Your neighbor has a new side-chick. Everything else looked normal.”

Basically, a camera that has common sense. If the AI notices someone showing up who has nothing to do with me, or keeps hanging around the elevator, then, sure, alert me. But if it’s just the usual people, don’t bother me. I want to open my email at the end of the day and see a neat, readable recap, not a dump of random clips.

The irony is, AI right now can draw a photorealistic picture of a cat playing poker in Venice but can’t tell me whether the guy pacing around my driveway is harmless or suspicious. Priorities, right?

And if things look bad, let the AI call me on the phone and say, “Bro, something dey happen for your side oh! Your delivery man just ate out of the pizza”

Or it could just talk to people looking for me on my behalf and carry an intelligent conversation. It might even check my contact to compare their details. 

AI that fixes Gmail for real

Now, let’s talk about Gmail. I’ve been using Gmail since April 2004, that’s 21 years. My entire digital life is tied to it. And every time Google announces some “intelligent feature,” I brace myself because it usually means I’m about to be disappointed again.

Gemini for Gmail, for instance, is absolute garbage. I don’t know who approved it, but it’s like watching a genius baby drool on itself. It doesn’t understand tone or read context. It’ll suggest the same robotic reply no matter who I’m emailing.

What I actually need is an AI that reads my backlog, understands how I write, and drafts responses in my voice. One that knows when to be polite, brief, or nudge someone for a deal, and when to ignore nonsense entirely. My inbox is like a graveyard of half-read opportunities;  emails from partners, deals, employees, investors, all sitting there waiting for a reply I never had time to write.

If I had an AI that could manage that with real understanding, it’d be gold. It could handle follow-ups, highlight urgent conversations, and maybe even warn me about potential miscommunications before they blow up. Imagine it saying, “Hey, this customer’s tone has shifted in the last three messages, something’s off.” That’s the kind of intelligence I want. 

AI that knows when trouble’s coming

The amount of data, communication, and product feedback that flows through my company (Lendsqr) daily is massive. And sometimes, problems don’t show up in one big email. They show up as a pattern;  a customer getting colder in tone, a project team replying slower, an internal chat thread that suddenly goes quiet.

I want an AI that can notice that. Something that reads patterns across Slack, email, and tickets and quietly tells me, “Hey, this customer looks like they’re about to churn,” or “this project smells like a delay.” or “Rebecca is about to drop an outsourced sincerity email”

That kind of early-warning AI could very well save businesses. Because by the time someone’s frustrated enough to say it, it’s already too late. I’ve seen deals fall apart not because of big failures, but because small signs were ignored. Humans get tired, distracted, or emotionally checked out. Machines don’t. So if AI could flag brewing tension before it turns into chaos for me, that would actually be useful.

The AI sales assistant that actually works

You’d think with all the noise in the market: the AISDRs, the automations, the “AI-driven lead generation platforms”, someone would have built a real sales assistant by now. But most of what’s out there is fluff. Half-baked dashboards that promise to find “warm leads” but end up recommending people who haven’t run a business in years.

I want AI that can search the internet properly, crawl LinkedIn, Crunchbase, even company websites and evaluate potential customers intelligently. Not by counting how many buzzwords they use, but by actually understanding who they are, what they do, and whether they’re a good fit for my product.

Then, I want it to rank them by potential deal size, suggest an appropriate pricing structure, and prepare me for the conversation. Like, “This customer looks promising, but they tend to negotiate hard. Start from this range.” That’s the kind of AI sales agent that would make me loyal forever.

Or even as agents, it goes to do that by itself. I’ve always wanted many Dejiolowes to start with

Right now, though, what we have are glorified scraping tools pretending to be smart. If someone ever builds one that truly works, I’ll probably be the first to pay for it.

AI that makes my website smarter

You know how people visit your site, click around and half the time, leave without getting what they came for. You could have the best content, best product, and the most expensive design, yet users still bounce because they can’t find the one thing they’re looking for. It’s painful to watch, especially when you know the information exists somewhere on your site, buried under layers of pages nobody wants to dig through.

What I want is AI that fixes that kind of nonsense. Not something that throws random recommendations, but an actual system that understands who’s visiting and why. If someone lands on the homepage, I want it to quietly figure out whether they’re a lender, a borrower, or a developer and immediately serve what’s relevant.

Basically, I want the website to feel alive, like it’s paying attention. Not in a creepy way, just in a smart and helpful way. Most websites today are static. They treat every visitor like a stranger even if it’s the same person coming back for the fifth time.

AI could fix that easily if it focused less on trying to be profound and more on solving simple, practical problems like personalization. A system that adapts content dynamically, learns from traffic behavior, and fine-tunes the experience based on what actually works.

Because at the end of the day, that’s what makes a website truly smart. It should feel like it knows what you need and quietly gets it done without asking for a thousand clicks in return.

AI that helps me keep in touch (without pissing people off)

I have close to 6,000 contacts saved on my phone, and over the years, I’ve spoken to more than 5,000 people on WhatsApp. That includes friends, colleagues, partners, former employees, and people I met once and promised to stay in touch with. The truth is, anyone who really knows me can confirm that I’m terrible at keeping up with people.

It’s never something I do deliberately. Life simply moves fast, work never stops, and messages have a way of piling up faster than you can respond to them. I keep telling myself I’ll get better at it, but it never really happens. That’s where I imagine AI could actually help.

I want an AI that can quietly go through my WhatsApp and LinkedIn chats, learn my style of speaking, and remind me when it’s time to reconnect. Something that can help me continue a conversation naturally and only notify me when something interesting or important comes up. 

It could say things like, “You mentioned this guy’s product launch a while back, maybe check how it went,” or “It’s been a while since you reached out to your old colleague, should I draft something?” I wouldn’t even mind if it helped me start the conversation, as long as it got the tone right and didn’t sound like a robot pretending to be nice.

The only rule is that it has to stay invisible. No one can ever find out that an AI is helping me manage my social life because that would be awkward for everyone involved. I can already imagine the outrage if people discovered they’ve been chatting with software instead of me.

What I want is something that helps me stay in touch without drawing attention to itself. Because as much as I enjoy connecting with people, there are only so many conversations one person can realistically maintain.

AI that fixes code while I sleep

Not too long ago, we needed to add a small feature to our documentation site, docs.lendsqr.com. Normally, this would have been a two-week cycle, create a ticket, assign it to an engineer, review the code, test it, deploy it, and go through all the usual back-and-forth that comes with production changes. But that day, I was feeling curious, maybe even a bit impatient. Instead of following the process, I decided to see what AI could do.

I gave it the task half-expecting it to fail, or at least make a mess I’d spend hours cleaning up. But within an hour, the feature was written, fixed, and live. No meetings, no tickets, no Slack messages. Just code that worked. It took less time than it usually takes to send a message asking someone to review a PR. That one small experiment completely shifted how I think about AI in engineering.

Our engineers are genuinely brilliant, and I say that with some exaggeration. They do incredible work every single day. But like every engineering team that deals with large systems, there is always more code to refactor than there are hours available to get it done.

What I really want now is an AI that can take on that kind of work every day. One that quietly refactors and optimizes code in the background while everyone else is asleep. Something that goes through the system, cleans up inconsistencies, simplifies functions, and improves performance little by little without needing instructions.

If that existed, I’d probably wake up every morning happier than any cup of coffee could make me.

So what do I really want from AI?

There’s enough chaos in my daily life already. The back-to-back meetings, the half-read emails, the never-ending WhatsApp messages from people who “just wanted to check in.” If AI can step in to handle some of that chaos, I’ll take it. I don’t want it to think for me; I want it to help me think better.

Imagine an AI that knows when you’ve been staring at the same bug for too long and suggests, “Hey, maybe this line isn’t the issue.” Or one that organizes your inbox so well that you never again lose an important message to the black hole of “unread” emails.

If AI can handle the boring stuff then I can focus on the parts of life that are actually human. The parts that make me feel alive. Building, thinking, laughing, arguing, experimenting, and maybe even replying to my WhatsApp messages before everyone assumes I’ve died.

That’s really it. I don’t want an AI that tries to be me. I want one that quietly helps me be a slightly better, less exhausted version of myself.

How SMEs can use AI to build and grow their business

Small businesses no longer need deep pockets to compete. With AI, they can build websites, create content, manage customers, and keep proper financial records at a fraction of the old cost.

When I talk to small business owners in Nigeria and across Africa, I keep coming back to the same thought: this is one of the best times in history to start something useful, because tools that once felt out of reach are now affordable and effective. I said something similar when I spoke at FATE Foundation some weeks ago, a non-profit started by Fola Adeola in the early 2000s to support entrepreneurs, and I meant it. I have seen what determined founders can achieve with limited resources, and I have also seen how technology has lowered the cost and effort needed to get results. 

For small and medium-sized businesses, AI is one of the clearest opportunities to compete, but only if you are willing to pick up the tools and use them with discipline. That discipline comes from building small habits. It starts with learning the basics of one or two AI platforms instead of trying to master everything at once. From there, the focus should be on applying AI to repetitive or time-consuming work where you can measure the benefit. If you can see the hours saved or the increase in leads, you know you are moving in the right direction..

When I share this with founders, I always stress that it is not a magic solution but a realistic approach that turns effort into results you can track. Let me walk you through the simple ways I encourage business owners to use AI and affordable software to raise their game. Everything comes from real conversations with entrepreneurs and from the experiments I run with teams to test what works.

Your web presence is non-negotiable and it does not need to be fancy

What did you do the last time you heard about a business you wanted to work with? You probably Googled them. That’s what people do with you too. When someone hears about your business, their first move is almost always an online search. If nothing comes up, many assume your business does not exist. I have met plenty of business owners who think a website is complicated, expensive, or only for big companies. That mindset holds them back because a simple website that explains who you are, what you do, and how to reach you is the minimum requirement, and setting one up today is easier and cheaper than most realise.

A basic WordPress installation or a simple Webflow site is enough to start. Buy a domain name, pay for hosting, pick a clean template, and within a few hours you can have a professional-looking page live. Hosting can cost as little as $5 a month on platforms like Bluehost, Hostinger, or Namecheap, which works out to about $60 a year. For what you gain in credibility and customer trust, that cost is small. Treat the site like a digital business card that people can always rely on when they need to verify you or learn more about your services.

The mistake I see often is businesses delaying because they cannot afford a glossy, custom-built site. That delay costs them opportunities. Customers rarely care about flashy animations or advanced features. What matters is that your site is clear, functional, and easy to use. If you are serious about growth, this is one of the simplest first steps. A clean, functional site signals that you are ready for business. It is an investment that pays for itself every time a potential customer looks you up and finds what they need.

Make your content pull customers to you, and let AI do the boring heavy lifting

Getting a website up is only the first step. What keeps it alive and valuable is the content that goes on it. This is where most business owners slow down or give up, because creating content is extremely difficult and mind numbing. It is one thing to build a site, but it is another thing entirely to keep it stocked with the type of material that brings people back or convinces them to reach out.

This is exactly where AI can become a practical tool. Tools like Jasper, Copy.ai, Rytr, Perplexity, Claude and Writesonic can help you create service pages, blog posts, and sales material that are clear, structured, and search-friendly. To get the best out of them, you still need to provide context. A few notes on your tone, facts about your business, and maybe a short customer story to give the tool enough material to produce something close to your voice. Once you have a draft, your job is to edit it, strip out anything unnecessary, and make sure it reflects your brand.

Once the heavy lifting is done by AI, your responsibility shifts to deciding which pages or materials will make the biggest difference. A polished “About Us” page, a clear set of FAQs, or one or two detailed case studies can go a long way in convincing potential buyers. When you take this approach, content becomes an asset. Instead of worrying about how to constantly create from scratch, you now have a reliable way to generate material, refine it, and publish it with confidence that it will actually move people closer to doing business with you.

Make your images and videos work for you without hiring a studio

For a long time, photography and video were stumbling blocks for small businesses. Getting professional visuals meant booking a photographer, paying for models, and renting a studio, which added up quickly. Many brands either settled for low-quality images or drained resources trying to keep up. Now, AI tools give you a plethora of options for free. You can generate or edit visuals that match your brand without needing a full creative team or expensive equipment.

Tools like Google’s image model (Nano Banana), Pictory, Runway and CapCut make this process straightforward. With them, you can create product shots in a variety of settings, show how an item might look in someone’s hand, or design a clean hero image that tells your story at a glance. You can also repurpose existing photos by editing the background, adjusting colors, or adding missing details so that everything looks consistent. If you are unsure how to guide these tools, there are plenty of free resources with prompt libraries and lessons from places like Google and ChatGPT that can help you get started.

Nevertheless, It is important to use visuals responsibly. If you are selling a product, the image or video should be an honest representation of what the buyer will actually receive. Customers can spot exaggeration, and misleading visuals usually create more problems than they solve. The real goal is to use these tools to highlight the best parts of what you already offer, so the right people are drawn in and feel confident about choosing you.

Keep customers with good support and simple CRM tools

The mistake many small businesses make is treating customer support as an afterthought. They rely on memory, scattered notes, or informal follow-ups, which usually leads to missed messages, slow responses, and customers quietly moving on to someone more reliable. A simple structure, even with basic tools, changes that outcome completely.

There are plenty of free or very affordable platforms that can make customer support feel intentional without overwhelming you. Freshdesk, for example, has a free plan that comes with ticketing, a basic knowledge base, and simple reporting. For most SMEs, that is more than enough to get started. Others like Zoho Desk and HubSpot Free CRM allows you to track conversations in one place instead of jumping between emails, calls, and social media DMs. If you add a few well-written response templates and a small FAQ section on your site, customers can get answers quickly, and your team spends less time repeating the same explanations over and over.

Live chat is another area where businesses often overestimate what is needed. Many assume they have to pay for enterprise software to add a chat feature, but that is not the case. Free options like tawk.to, Crisp, and HubSpot Chat give you a free chat widget that you can install on your site in minutes. It works well for capturing leads and answering questions in real time, and it also keeps a history of conversations so you can follow up properly.

Use accounting tools to understand your numbers

When you start to pursue bigger opportunities, whether with large clients, investors, or lenders, the first area that gets examined is your financial records. No matter how strong your product or service is, a messy set of books makes it difficult for anyone to take you seriously. Larger buyers want to know they are dealing with someone who has structure, and investors want to see that money is being managed responsibly. If you cannot produce clear invoices, expense records, and basic financial statements, you immediately weaken your chances of moving forward with them.

The good news is that you don’t need to wait until your business is established or hire a full-time accountant before putting some structure around your numbers. There are free or very affordable accounting tools built specifically for small businesses that help you stay organised. Zoho Books, for instance, has a forever free plan that allows you to send invoices, track expenses, reconcile bank transactions, and generate standard reports like profit and loss. Wave Accounting is another strong free option, while QuickBooks, Xero, and FreshBooks provide inexpensive upgrades as your needs grow. Even mobile-first apps like Bookkeeping.com, Kashoo, or Sage Business Cloud can keep you organized on the go. 

Starting with a system like this from day one means you build the habit early, and you avoid the scramble of trying to clean up records later when an opportunity comes knocking. Even a simple set of financial records shows partners, lenders, and clients that you run your operations in a disciplined way. It communicates that you take the business seriously and that you can be trusted to deliver. Over time, that credibility opens doors that would otherwise remain closed, because opportunities often flow to businesses that appear prepared.

Document your processes and treat them like assets

A business that runs on memory quickly hits a ceiling. If every step sits in your head, growth depends on how much you can handle, which isn’t sustainable. To scale, you need written processes others can follow. Start with the essentials: onboarding checklists for staff, guidelines for customer complaints, instructions for packaging and shipping, and basic quality checks.

Writing standard operating procedures can feel tedious when you’re busy, but the payoff is real. Instead of starting from scratch, use AI tools like Notion AI, Scribe or Trainual to generate first drafts. Feed in details of how you work, get a structured outline, and refine it into a practical document. Once captured, that process becomes an asset saving time with every hire and preserving consistency so customers get the same experience no matter who handles the work.

Documentation also extends to contracts and paperwork. Tools like ChatGPT or Harvey AI can review agreements to flag unclear clauses and summarize the fine print. When it’s time to sign, free digital signature tools like DocuSign, HelloSign, or SignWell make the process easy. For editing or adjusting PDFs, platforms like PDF24, Smallpdf, or ILovePDF let you merge, split, or update documents without expensive software.

It’s also worth investing in a searchable knowledge base. Options range from Google Drive and Dropbox Paper to more structured platforms like Confluence or NotebookLM. With these, your team always has a single source of truth. When new hires can quickly find answers, they make fewer mistakes, waste less time, and keep operations running smoothly as you grow.

Don’t underestimate presentation polish

The way you package your message matters more than most people admit. Good presentation signals that you take the person on the other end seriously. When you walk into a meeting with a buyer, investor, or partner, they are paying attention to both what you are saying and how it is delivered. A pitch deck does not have to look like it came from a global consulting firm, but it should be easy to read, well structured, and consistent with your brand identity.

Today, there are tools that make it almost effortless to add that polish. Canva, for example, has templates that take care of layout, typography, and branding. Free options like Google Slides, Gamma, and Pitch also help you create slides that feel professional without hiring a designer. It costs very little, but the impact on how you are perceived is significant.

Polish extends beyond slides too. Simple details like using your brand fonts consistently, ensuring charts are readable, and avoiding walls of text go a long way in helping the other person engage with your pitch. When the substance of your pitch is strong and the presentation matches that level, you give yourself the best chance of being remembered and taken seriously.

Featured read: The myth of African market expansion

Why I care, and what I tell every founder I meet

Speaking at FATE Foundation was an honour because organisations like that have been doing the heavy lifting for entrepreneurs long before it became fashionable to talk about startups. For more than two decades, they have been providing the training, mentorship, and community that turn ideas into operational businesses. That work matters deeply to me because it aligns with what I try to do every day at Lendsqr.

At the event, I met founders who were sharp, creative, and determined, but who often lacked the resources that would allow them to fully realise their potential. This is where technology and process make a difference. With the right tools and some structure in place, a small business can start to look and behave like a much larger one. When you combine those practices with even modest capital, the odds of surviving the early years and eventually growing into something meaningful increase significantly.

I care about this because I believe in the possibility of Nigerian and African businesses to not only serve local markets but to expand across borders and compete on a larger stage. And my role, as I see it, is to keep finding ways to make the practical side easier for founders.

Sometimes that is through Lendsqr, by giving lenders the infrastructure to operate and grow. Other times it is through direct mentorship, sharing insights here and on Linkedin, or simply pointing people to tools they can adopt quickly. These small interventions over time add up to stronger businesses and a healthier ecosystem.

The myth of African market expansion

Founders love to talk about planting flags across the continent, yet for every headline success, there are dozens of quiet failures nobody writes about. Regulation, cost, culture, and talent make the road far rougher than most anticipate. From my experience at Lendsqr and in banking, succeeding across borders requires more than ambition.

Africa is a 1.4billion-person market, 20x the size of the UK and 4x the size of the US. You would be a stupid founder to sit in your corner of Africa and not explore.

So, everybody wants to go pan-African until reality smacks them. Market expansion often sounds sexy on paper. It is the kind of announcement that founders like to make with chest-thumping pride, almost the same way politicians love to declare “we are diversifying the economy.” It feels good to say, signals growth and it gets investors nodding and clapping. You can bet the press picks it up, and suddenly you are in the headlines as the next big continental play.

The moment a startup in Lagos, Nairobi, or Cape Town grows to a certain size, the itch begins. There’s this unspoken belief that to be truly successful, you must spread your wings beyond your home country. Suddenly, we all want to plant flags across the continent, to prove we are bigger than just one market.

And to be fair, some companies have actually managed to make it work. Flutterwave is everywhere and has built a name that is recognized across multiple African countries. Paystack has pulled it off as well and has done it with enough discipline that people now point to them as a benchmark. My own company, Lendsqr, has spread beyond Nigeria, working with customers in several countries. Even Chowdeck, which is much newer in the scene, just marched into Ghana and is already crushing numbers like they have been there for years. These stories are inspiring and keep the dream alive for a lot of founders who are planning their own moves.

The truth, however, is that these few success stories sit on top of a mountain of attempts that didn’t end the same way. The continent is littered with stories that don’t sound as rosy. I’ve personally watched Nigerian startups head into other countries with all the confidence in the world, only to retreat quietly when reality hit them. Some leave with public statements about “restructuring strategy” or “shifting focus,” but many just fade out and go silent, nursing their wounds in private. I’ve also seen the reverse. Companies from other African countries have tried to break into Nigeria, hoping to tap into the massive market, and they’ve ended up crashing just as badly.

One example that comes to mind is the Sendy, the Kenyan logistics company that tried their luck in Nigeria. They came in with energy and ambition, but it didn’t last. It was over before most people even noticed they had arrived. Wave, which is doing incredibly well in francophone Africa, hasn’t dared enter Nigeria, and maybe that decision is more out of wisdom than fear. Nigeria is not for children. It eats up outsiders who underestimate it, just as easily as other countries chew up Nigerian startups that come in thinking size and ambition are enough.

So when I talk about the myth of African expansion, this is what I mean. On the surface, it looks like the natural next step in a startup’s growth story. It feels like something you are supposed to do once you are stable at home. But when you look at the outcomes of many who have gone before you, what you find is that expanding across Africa is less of a walk in the park than they let on.

And before anyone runs off with the wrong idea. This is not a dig at any individual founder or business. It is my own reflection from years of watching, living, and sometimes participating in these moves. It is based on the scars I have seen others carry and the ones I have earned myself.

Why do we even want to expand in the first place?

The motivation is never the same for every company, and each founder has their own story to tell about why they chose to leave the comfort of their home market. For me, speaking from my Lendsqr journey, the decision was almost hardwired from the beginning. We never set out to build something that was only relevant to Nigeria. The company’s DNA was global from the very start.

Lending has never been a uniquely Nigerian issue, it’s always been a challenge faced in every economy where people need access to credit to move forward. Whether it’s a street vendor in Lagos, an Uber driver in Dubai, or a small migrant-owned business in Toronto, the need for fair, reliable, and efficient access to credit is the same. That understanding shaped how we built Lendsqr and made expansion feel like a natural progression rather than an afterthought.

As things stand today, we already serve customers in countries far beyond Nigeria. We have businesses using Lendsqr in Canada, the United States, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, and we are in meaningful conversations with potential clients in several other places as well. That was always the plan. It was never about simply conquering Lagos or focusing on a handful of Nigerian states. The mission was always to solve lending problems wherever they existed, and the more we engaged with different markets, the clearer it became that our solution could travel.

Another major driver is the need to spread risk. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a smart move, and in a market like Nigeria, it is downright dangerous. If your entire livelihood as a business is tied to the whims of one regulator or one government agency, you are gambling with your future. I have seen this play out in real time. The FCCPC made one sweeping decision recently that threw the entire lending ecosystem in Nigeria into confusion. If Nigeria was our only market, that single move could have ended us. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of building in volatile environments. By expanding to multiple countries, we reduced that risk. It meant that if one market decided to play rough, the entire company would not go under.

There is also the financial angle, which cannot be ignored. Revenue from multiple streams is healthier than relying on a single source, and international expansion makes that possible. If there are markets willing to pay for a product you have already built and tested, it only makes sense to step into them. For us, it was about increasing top-line numbers and also about strengthening the platform itself. Working with a wide variety of customers across different geographies exposes you to different lending cultures, regulatory requirements, and customer expectations. Every time we enter a new market, the product gets better. The feedback loop becomes richer, the technology more resilient, and the overall offering sharper because it has to meet higher levels of diversity.

So when I think about why we wanted to expand, it was never a vanity project or a way to entice investors. Rather, it was rooted in the nature of the problem we were solving, the need to protect the business from unnecessary risks, the opportunity to make more money, and the understanding that the more we stretched ourselves across borders, the stronger Lendsqr would become.

Market expansion is hellishly hard

The biggest reality check for any expansion dream is often regulation. For Lendsqr, we’ve been lucky because we operate strictly as software. We don’t move money ourselves, which means we are not directly under the kind of licensing and compliance requirements that payments companies face. That has spared us many sleepless nights.

But for any company whose business model involves actually handling money, the reality is brutal. You will find yourself sitting in front of regulators who can stall you for months, sometimes even years, before you get the green light. The rules are not always clear, and just when you think you’ve ticked every box, another requirement appears. It is never a one-time battle either, be prepared for a constant tug-of-war that drains time, energy, and cash.

From my days in banking with UBA, Access, and Atlas Mara, I saw how different the game is when you are a large institution with the muscle to play. These banks had entire departments dedicated to market entry. The teams were filled with people who spent their entire careers learning how to navigate regulators across different countries. They knew the contacts to call, the processes to follow, and even the cultural nuances that mattered when walking into a government office. That kind of machinery is what gave them an edge. Startups, on the other hand, rarely have that. They move into new markets armed with gist, hearsay and a lot of optimism. And optimism is not a strategy when regulators are standing in your way.

The second wall you crash into is the cost. Expanding into another country is not just expensive; it can bleed you dry if you don’t have the right financial foundation. Banks, again, can afford to raise capital specifically for expansion. They walk into new markets with war chests and stay long enough to weather the storm until their operations stabilize. Startups don’t have that luxury. Many of them try to squeeze international expansion out of funds that were barely enough for their home market. What happens is that the burn rate goes up, revenue lags behind, and very quickly the whole project becomes unsustainable. I have seen promising companies sink this way because they underestimated how much money it would take to break into another market.

And then comes the most unpredictable challenge of all: people. Regulations and money can be calculated, at least to some degree, but people are the wildcards that make or break everything. The hires you make in a new country determine whether your business will take root or wither. Too often, founders underestimate this. They go into a new market, bring in locals, and then realize the work culture and sense of urgency are completely different. Nigerians, for instance, are known for a kind of productive madness (a fancy way of saying we dey craze). We thrive under pressure, we improvise when the ground shifts, and we move with speed even when the environment is chaotic. That edge is what helps us survive. But when you enter a market where the pace is slower, or people prefer caution and safety, and you build your team around that, the disconnect becomes dangerous. You may find that no matter how hard you push, things move at a crawl, and eventually, you drown in that sluggishness.

I witnessed this dynamic back in my UBA days. We were fortunate in countries like Ghana, Cameroon, and Uganda, where we found incredible people to build with. These were competent hires that were relentless, sharp, and willing to fight for results. They would have excelled anywhere in the world, and UBA was lucky to have them. That kind of talent is rare, though. Most startups expanding across borders do not always strike gold when hiring, and without that quality of people on the ground, even the best product and the best intentions collapse under the weight of local realities.

Why banks sometimes win where startups fail

Banks, despite all their layers of bureaucracy and the sluggish pace they’re often accused of, have one advantage that tilts the game in their favor. They don’t always walk into a new country blind or start laying bricks from the ground up. More often than not, they take the shortcut of buying into an existing business that’s already running in that market. It could be a small local bank or a mid-tier institution, but the point is that they inherit something that is already moving.

Even if the integration process is messy, full of cultural clashes, and expensive in ways that only bankers can stomach, there is already money flowing in. That immediate revenue, no matter how modest, acts like a shock absorber. It cushions the blows that come with learning a new market and keeps the business afloat long enough for them to figure out their rhythm.

Startups almost never have this kind of luxury. The reality is that we are too strapped for cash to go around acquiring companies, so the default mode is to build from zero and hope it sticks. A handful of acquisitions do happen in the startup world, but those are exceptions and not the rule. Without that initial cushion of ready-made revenue, every mistake cuts deeper and every delay is costlier. Bloodbath is exactly what happens when the burn rate collides with the slow grind of market entry. For startups, survival often comes down to how long you can keep going without oxygen, and in new markets, that is rarely long enough.

What it really takes to succeed across Africa

If anyone is serious about expanding across the continent, here’s what I’ve learned over the years, both from my banking days and now at Lendsqr.

The first thing is to know the market inside out. And I don’t mean a few reports or the stories you hear at conferences. I’m talking about the messy, often uncomfortable details that don’t make it into slide decks. You need to understand how politics shapes business in that country, what regulators actually like to deal with, the unwritten rules that determine who gets ahead, and the local players who quietly control the ecosystem. These are things you only uncover if you’re willing to dig, listen, and sometimes learn the hard way. Expansion is not a place for too much guesswork or improvisation.

Second, you need to bring in people who live and breathe regulation. If your business touches money in any way, you cannot afford to wing it. Regulators have no sympathy for startup ambition, and they will not bend the rules because you have a great pitch deck or you’re coming to solve a “problem”. This means hiring the right experts, even when they don’t come cheap. The truth is that these are the people who can keep your business alive when a new law drops or when the regulator decides to make an example of someone. Paying for that knowledge upfront is a lot better than paying in lost revenue and endless delays later.

Third, you have to be ruthless about the people you hire. Expansion is not the time to surround yourself with people who just like the idea of working with the next “big startup”. You need people who are hungry, who can operate in chaos, and who have the stamina to build something from scratch without constant handholding. These are the kinds of hires who will stay focused when things get ugly and who won’t buckle under the pressure of setbacks. Without them, the whole thing collapses before it even takes root.

Finally, you need to send in people who already understand your culture at the core. Back in banking, the playbook was clear: the first person deployed into a new country was almost always Nigerian. The reason was simple. They carried the DNA of the parent company. They understood how decisions were made at headquarters, they could replicate that culture in a new environment, and they acted as a bridge between home and the new market. If you parachute in someone who has no sense of your company’s way of working, no matter how competent they look on paper, you’ll struggle to translate your mission into reality. Culture is fragile, and expansion has a way of breaking it if you don’t guard it carefully.

Featured read: Consumer protection should not be weaponized

So, is African expansion really a myth?

Looking at the stories around us, the evidence leans heavily in that direction. For every Flutterwave, Paystack, or Cellulant that manages to pull off multi-country expansion and make it look effortless, there are dozens of startups that attempted the same thing and quietly disappeared after burning money and energy. The failures don’t get panel discussions or press releases, but if you’ve been in the ecosystem long enough, you’ve seen them. Some shut down entire operations, others limp back to their home markets, and a few keep hanging on in silence, never quite breaking through.

The dream of spreading across Africa carries a certain romantic appeal. It feels like destiny to be the company that unites fragmented markets under one product, to prove that borders don’t matter, and to boast about operations in half a dozen countries. But the ground you’re walking on is unpredictable and often hostile. It takes deep capital, endless resilience, and a team that can withstand constant turmoil. Without those, expansion is less of a growth story and more of a slow-motion collapse.

It can be done, but the bar is much higher than founders like to admit. The continent doesn’t reward undercapitalized businesses that expand just because. If you’re not ready to spend heavily on regulation, local talent, infrastructure, and the inevitable mistakes that come with learning new markets, you’ll be finished before you even make it to stability. The idea that “Africa is one big market” sounds nice in pitch decks, but in practice it’s an illusion. Every border comes with its own politics, rules, and players, and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to ruin.