Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford

Starting a business in your early 20s can feel like a bold adventure full of promise. For me, that adventure was Dial-A-Plumber Ltd. It was my first official foray into entrepreneurship—one that ended in spectacular failure, but also laid the foundation for everything I would later achieve.

🚀 The Big Idea: Plumbing Meets Professionalism

The concept behind Dial-A-Plumber was simple yet revolutionary for 1980s Nigeria. At that time, plumbing services were mostly handled by part-time tradesmen with little recognition or professionalism. My best friend, Kayode Ayeni, and I thought:

• What if we modernized plumbing services?
• What if plumbers wore uniforms, had proper offices, and were trained in customer service?
• What if, with the rise of mobile phones, you could just dial a number and get a professional plumber dispatched?

It sounded brilliant. At only 24 years old (Kayode was even younger), we were determined to make it work. We secured an office, purchased equipment, trained 10 plumbers, and even created a customer service manual to standardize operations.

We believed this was the idea that would make us millionaires.

📉 The Reality Check

Despite our passion and investment, Dial-A-Plumber crashed hard.

Why? One word: customers.

At the time (1986/87), mobile phones were just arriving in Nigeria, and very few people owned one. We had built a brilliant concept—but for a market that simply didn’t exist yet. Our beautifully uniformed plumbers, shiny toolkits, and printed business cards couldn’t overcome the reality:

👉 If no one can reach you, no one can hire you.

It was our first brutal lesson in timing and customer acquisition.

😔 The Embarrassment of Failure

In Nigeria, starting a business only to have it fail was no small shame. It felt like a public funeral. Friends, family, and peers expected us to succeed; instead, we were left with debt, disappointment, and embarrassment.

But here’s the thing: failure didn’t bury us—it baptized us.

Rather than quit business and look for “safe” jobs, Kayode and I embraced what I now call the Entrepreneurial Lazarus Effect: rising from the ashes of one business death to start anew.

🌱 Rising Again: The Lazarus Effect

The failure of Dial-A-Plumber was painful, but it became the soil for future success. Shortly after, I launched First Aid Finance, which blossomed into one of my first real wins. Over time, I would experience this cycle of birth → death → resurrection in business more than once.

Each failure carved out lessons that no textbook or MBA could ever teach me.

💡 Lessons Learned from Dial-A-Plumber

Looking back, here are the key takeaways from my first business “death”:

✔️ Customer acquisition matters more than the idea. No customers = no business.
✔️ Timing is everything. A great idea in the wrong era is just a dream.
✔️ Failure is a teacher, not a tombstone. Every crash carries seeds for your comeback.
✔️ Resilience is the real entrepreneurial skill. The ones who win are those who rise again.

✨ Final Thoughts

Dial-A-Plumber was my first crash course in entrepreneurship. It never scaled, it never made us millionaires, and it ended in debt. But without that failure, I wouldn’t have had the grit, creativity, and resilience that shaped my later ventures.

So, if your first (or fifth) business dies, remember: it’s not the end—it’s the setup for your resurrection.