Then the calls started. Friends. Clients. Staff. People I had not spoken to in years. In Nigeria, you know when news has crossed into the bloodstream because it begins reaching you from directions you did not expect. One message came from an old schoolmate. Another from a client's wife. Then my father forwarded the ranking to me, after somebody else had forwarded it to him. That detail stayed with me. Public recognition is one thing. Watching it travel back through the family system that formed you is another. Here was my father, the disciplinarian who used to inspect our school bags at the end of every term, counting books, checking for losses — now receiving word from his contemporaries that the Financial Times had named his son's company a continental success. If you are going to hear that your son is a big deal, hearing it from the FT carries a particular weight.
Even then, I could not fully enjoy it. I went through the entire list painstakingly, studying every company on it because even in the middle of celebration, the calculative Dayo cannot turn off. I never once visited the FT website myself. The screenshots kept arriving through WhatsApp and I kept scrolling, but some part of me was already using the moment as competitive intelligence.
What the ranking gave me, more than pride, was validation.
There had been a time, not many years before, when I used to pray that Zedvance — our lending business — would reach a ₦100 million in monthly originations. I would look at other operators and assume they knew something I did not. Success, from the outside, always seemed to belong more naturally to other people — to founders with connected uncles and well-stocked boards, people who could pick up the phone and call somebody. I had none of that. My father knew nobody. I knew nobody.
It told me that perhaps I was not a fluke after all. Not that I had arrived in any final sense. I knew too much about our imperfections for that. The credit rating agency GCR, a subsidiary of Moody's, still recently included a line in our annual rating that haunted me: "This rating is constrained by Zedcrest's limited contribution to the larger financial services ecosystem." What they meant was that our total balance sheet of less than ₦300 billion was a rounding error beside the ₦40 trillion on the books of a bank like Access Bank. We were celebrating in the margins of an industry whose centre barely knew we existed.
But the ranking cracked something open in my imagination. Until then, a part of me still thought of scale as something that belonged elsewhere. Maybe mainstream was not a club permanently sealed to people like us. Maybe the business we had built in our corner of Lagos, by grit and improvisation and stubbornness, could stand in a continental conversation without looking out of place. That shift in imagination was as important as the ranking itself.
If the FT ranking was the moment the outside world announced something back to me, our tenth-anniversary celebration was the moment I tried, cautiously, to announce something back to the world.
We themed the event "A Future Redefined", and the language was deliberate. For ten years, Zedcrest had been built in the improvisational manner that Nigerian businesses are often forced to build: piece by piece, opportunity by opportunity. We had been pulled into things — a bond trading business here, a consumer lending business here, an asset management license there. It was all opportunistic. The anniversary was my way of announcing that that phase had done its work. We were no longer the lucky young boys who had done well for their age. We intended to become an institution.
I wanted, for once, to let other people breathe. Left to myself, achievement disappears in my head almost the moment it arrives. Win today, and by tomorrow my brain is already obsessing over the next unfinished thing. But an institution cannot be built on permanent internal scarcity alone. People need moments to look up and see what their labour has produced. I have staff who have been with the company for ten years, people whose entire working lives are built around something I created. That is a humbling and precious thing. They deserved their flowers while they could still smell them.
The most emotional moment that evening was not the applause or the speeches. It was seeing the Ogunsesans there.
My parents' presence mattered, of course, but parents own both your victories and your failures. They are implicated in either direction. If I were a drug pusher now, their faces would still be in the papers. The Ogunsesans owed me nothing. Years earlier, when I was a boy in Ilorin with no visible promise, they had taken a bet on me. They fed me, sheltered me, extended trust before there was any evidence of what I might become. To see them seated at the table that evening, photographed as parents in the larger moral sense, was to feel the full weight of grace.
That is one reason I care about building a platform that widens the path for others. The deepest satisfaction in success is not the achievement itself. It is the chance to alter someone else's trajectory — to give a student room to continue school, to give an employee the best years of his working life, to change the course of a lineage. The older I get, the less impressive success seems when it ends with the self.
When I hold those two moments together — the FT ranking and the tenth-anniversary celebration — the connecting thread is clearer to me now than it was then. Both were public confirmations of a much older, much more private journey.
The season between 2021 and 2023 — the ranking, the trials I faced, the celebration — was the season in which I finally lost my impostor syndrome. Two things happened in quick succession: I survived a period of institutional pressure that taught me I was truly on my own, that the self-sacrificial posture I had always carried was not being reciprocated by the world; and then the validation came, from the FT and from the market and from the people who showed up to celebrate what we had built.
So the ranking was not the story. The party was not the story. They were only markers. To understand why a screenshot in a bathroom could make a man stand still with soap on his face, or why a ten-year anniversary could feel heavier than celebration, you have to go much further back: face-me-I-face-you compounds, a father straddling two households, and a boy who learned very early that Nigeria contains more than one country inside it.
That is where this story begins. Not at number five, but in the first Nigeria I knew.