Inspiring Women Series: Honoring Dolapo

31 March 2019 5 min read

Spotlight: Dolapo Sanusi-Ola.

In honor of Mothers on Mother’s Day, we reached out to five awesome ladies in different fields to talk about the challenges, joys and meaning of being a mom with a successful career. We caught up with Dolapo, an ambitious goal-getting business woman and a mother. In this interview with the TBCA Talent Team, Dolapo shares with us about her entrepreneurial ventures and how she balances her career, personal goals, motherhood and more.

How do you describe yourself? I love to describe myself as a two sided coin — ambitious, goal-getting, pacesetting, self — confident person but with a heart for people. My passion in life is empowering people around me to be all that they could be and tend to take on people’s problem as my own. I am very empathic and also an introverted extrovert. But most importantly, I love life — I am a fun loving, love to dance, sing, watch movies and hang out with my children and husband.

Looking back, are there any indications from childhood that foreshadowed your becoming successful on your chosen career path? For me, it was more than that because of the type of person that I was or am, I would keep working hard till I succeeded. I always found hard problems easy to solve and academics came easy to me unless I wasn’t interested in a particular subject. I remember in SS1 I was doing geography as a subject and for the life of me, I just didn’t see the relevance so I didn’t do one of my tests and the other one I failed, but I knew somehow an F was not an option so for the exam I pulled out all the stops and ended up with a 63/70 which earned me a B but then dropped geography and picked up literature, I probably had one of the weirdest combinations of subjects as a pure science student. I never believed in failure and I always believed that every problem had a solution. I learnt very early in life not to quit but if I failed, to find another way to solve the problem. I also learnt from a very early age that my greatest limitation was ME. As I grew older, I learnt to fail forward and reading the book FAIL FORWARD by John Maxwell really helped me as well.

Tell us about your first entrepreneurial venture (if any): How did you come up with the idea and how did you start your business? All my current ventures were born out of my passion, education and experience. My first venture was an ecommerce marketplace for ethnic food which we closed down when I started my MBA. However, I am currently involved in a fintech project which was born out of my passion to help women in micro businesses and also by working with NGOs which focused on skills acquisition for women and young people — one of their major obstacles was funding. The fintech start-up was set up to help micro- businesses with investment, savings and credit. I am also co-founder for a financial academy which focuses on educating and equipping people with tools for financial freedom including children. Finsavvy was also born out of the major issues that start-ups and women led businesses that I had the privilege to work with were struggling with. So for me, my start-ups have always started as a solution to a problem that I see every day based on my work with people.

Do you follow a certain morning routine or daily schedule to maximize productivity and well-being? I plan my day the previous day. I have a to-do list in order of importance of value-add. I am also a big advocate of not leaving what you can do today till tomorrow even in the little things. So school lunches packed the night before, uniforms laid out the day before, even my own bag packed the day before. I basically project manage my life and can be very organised. My Husband says I like to put too much pressure on myself but for me I need to plan everything down to the last detail and don’t like to leave things to chance. With my work, I like to do the things that would yield the greatest reward first and leave the non-value add tasks to when my energy is low. I also tend to multi-task a lot.

How do you balance your career & personal goals, marriage and motherhood? This is really a work in progress and If you ask me, it would always be.

The weighting of the scale always changes depending on the phase that I find myself in and what is priority at that time. Motherhood always come first for me and my children are the most important thing in my life, so that means, everything else will have to wait if any of my children needed to be attended to.

However, we have a routine that works for us and my children can be very independent. Everyone having a routine helps, so my children have a bedtime, this way once they are in bed, I can bring out my laptop and work away. My husband insists on us using the one car so that way we also get to family bond. I’ve learnt to allocate my time during the day to things that add value to my career or personal goals. Eat that frog is a good book to read actually. Communication in my marriage has been key and also having a spouse where you both believe in each other’s vision and support each other.

What’s the best advice you have received in your business/career journey that you wish to pass on to our readers? Know yourself, your strengths, your gifting, your talents — work hard on those and use that to make success easier for you but outsource everything else. Never do for yourself what others should be doing for you, learn to delegate and trust people you delegate to. If the people you delegate to fail at the task or don’t do it like you would do it, turn into a learning opportunity for them. As a mentor myself, helping my mentees to discover their strengths and abilities is very important to me and sometimes it means allowing them to fail.