Focus is key to successful entrepreneurship -FCMB chair

The Group Chairman, First City Group (a financial conglomerate comprising First City Monument Bank among others), Otunba Subomi Balogun, has advised young entrepreneurs on the need to be business-focused if they are to break even on their chosen path.

Balogun who spoke with journalists during the commemoration of his 85th birthday, went down memory lane on how he ventured into the financial sector from being a lawyer.

He counseled young people saying, “they should have faith and pray assiduously and put everything before God. But aside that, they should be business-focused, they should focus and not meander.”

On the virtue of persistence, the FCMB chairman said, “As at the time we created FCMB, you couldn’t set up a bank in this country without a foreigner as your technical partner? But something was pushing me that I should do it.

“The reason was that I helped to set up another bank, which is now dead. I thought I deserved being made the head. They didn’t want me. They said I was only a lawyer.

“I prayed to my God. My nine-year-old boy, who is now almost 50 went to his mother and said, ‘why is daddy praying to be head of another person’s bank? Why doesn’t he start his own?’ I went to the chapel and prayed, singing songs of praise. From my chapel, I walked into my study. I prepared all the papers. A few weeks later, I set up City Securities. Luckily for me, something called the Indigenisation Programme came up during the military.