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I started sending out a weekly newsletter to immigrants about money in January of this year. I basically send all the money lessons I gather as I go on in my own immigrant journey.

The reason is simple. I love seeing and reading about immigrants who made that very difficult life decision to move and settle in another country. Then being successful while at it.

I started something different in the month of May. I started interviewing other people and sharing the conversation with everyone who subscribed to the newsletter.

Don’t forget to share this with your friends/family and tell them to SUBSCRIBE HERE.

See the first story below.

Profile
Gender: Male
Country of Residence: United Kingdom
Profession: Accountant and Entrepreneur

Why did you choose to leave your own country?
It was for two things; I wanted to progress. I wanted to go for a postgraduate degree and at the same time I wanted to get international work experience.

Okay so it was a career move really?
Yeah mostly

Why did you say mostly?
At the time I had a lot of focus/interest on academics and so I was toying between going into pure academics and also considering advancing my banking career. While I had those two objectives in mind as my why, when coming I came on a work visa……

Wait, you came on a work visa?
Yes! back then the rules were different than now. I came on the highly skilled program general program, kind of like a point-based system where you are assessed on your current work experience, qualifications and if you meet certain number of points.

All right okay so your journey was different….
Moving forward when I came with my work permit, I went to school for a Masters degree in Economics. I had savings from working in Nigeria but it wasn’t a smooth journey.
While working in Nigeria I saved up. I mean in hindsight I made the terrible decision of investing the money in Nigerian stocks. I liquidated part of the stocks before I came which I used to pay for my school fees, but once I arrived here, because I got here in 2008, the financial crisis hit and basically all the stocks went to zero.

I had paid half of the school fees before I traveled and now with literally no money left and with the balance to pay I had to get some kind of work to survive. So I got two jobs. School and 9-5 in the daytime and then nighttime for more work to survive.

But what kind of job were you then able to get?
Back then, local businesses within the community in Leicester would come and advertise jobs, part time jobs that students could take up. There was a marketing firm in Leicester that came to advertise on the job board in the library. This was an analyst role but not business analysis as a project management but it’s kind of management consulting tech role.

So while in Uni I will be in the marketing company doing like 9am – 5pm and then in the night I went to do a warehouse job. Because I didn’t have the limitation of 20 hours I could do as many things as possible. I had to do both jobs because I literally lost all my money and I was down to zero so I had to start from scratch.

Quick question, was that job the same level as your last job before you travelled , a promotion or you had to like start all over again…..
It was like same level because I used to report to the director. I was looking after things like business strategy for the company; in terms of what kind of products do they want to launch, what markets do they want to enter, you know what’s the best strategy for packaging the products or entering the market and things like that.

Those job boards in the university are they still available?
I mean this was 2008 so I have no idea what the environment looks like now anymore. I would want to imagine that there it is still there in one shape or form. I want to believe there will be better options now than it was.

Personally I was always looking for opportunities.

I think one thing to be very mindful of when you come to the UK is how you you set up; I mean opportunities you access depends on where and how you look for it. If you come to the UK as a student or as an immigrant and your focus is “I want to look for the next available care job” that is what you will get for sure. “I want to look for a warehouse job” that is what you will find. So I didn’t focus my attention on care jobs or warehouse jobs. I focused my attention first on professional jobs.

Nothing wrong with warehouse or care job. Just saying you will get those if you focus on those alone.

Running these three things, your school, your 9-5 job and warehouse job sounds like a lot at once.
It was tough. It was really really tough because those days I did the three at the time, I’ll probably catch just a few house sleep. It was tough and this didn’t end until September 2009.

So a whole year you were running that lifestyle?

7-8 months of that. About seven months because I didn’t get the job immediately.

When I finished Uni, I thought to myself what is the next step? I looked at Leicester and thought Leicester was a small city. I don’t think I would achieve what I wanted to achieve career wise, so I left the job and I moved to London. I didn’t have any job offer in London but luckily I had family in London

You didn’t have a job but just resigned?

Yes I went to London with no Job offer.

I will tell you a story.

One of the nights I was going for the warehouse shift, I met a guy; he had done his masters in the University of Leicester the year before me. We were going for the same shift as warehouse operators that night and I had just finished my masters degree that year. We got talking and he was saying “oh you know what? you can live so well here. If I was doing this kind of job in Nigeria I probably won’t be able to take care of myself with this job; but look at me, I can pay my rent, I can buy nice clothes, I can go out for lunch, I can go to the nightclub when I want to, you know life is nice and simple. This is okay!

I didn’t say anything. But I said to myself that night I must never remain this complacent. I must never get so comfortable with the warehouse job and think this is where I am getting my result. Because I don’t want to remain in Leicester then get complacent I knew I needed to move out of there. You know this is something I’ve always heard and I’ve always believed; you go as far you see as far or you access information as far as the people around you. I didn’t have a network of people that were aspiring for more, I didn’t have anybody around. The people I knew were mostly students and a lot of them were international students.

So how was life in London?

I stayed with family from November 2009 and I will just sleep, wake up and apply for jobs. That was my full time job; I could apply for a one hundred jobs per day. I literally will just apply non stop and at first nothing happened. I mean no interviews; a lot of sectors – healthcare, banking just name it, I applied for it all.

Even with the seven months of UK experience on your CV?

Yes. Then eventually I got this call in January 2010 of the following year and it was with Scottish Widows which at that time was part of Lloyds banking group. The recruiting agency asked me “would you be willing to travel down to Edinburgh for an interview” I said yes that’s fine no problem. At that time, all I had left for money was £70.

Wow

I went online for whatever cheap train ticket to Edinburgh I could find and I found one for £50. All I had left was £20. Meaning that if I got to Edinburgh and back and I didn’t get the job that was all I would have for money.

I was still on Princess Street in Edinburgh on my way back to London when the recruiting agency called me back asking how it went. I remember telling him I had no idea but we will see what they say. Literally five minutes after he called me says “they really like you to start immediately”. I got myself back to London, borrowed some money to move myself to Edinburgh and book an airbnb because I didn’t have an apartment to stay.

I was with Scottish widows for two years on a rolling contract.

At that time how much was it then per day as a contractor?

Back in 2010 it was £350 per day for the first 12 months and then they increased the rate to about £400 per day.

This is somebody coming from almost zero and suddenly you are earning lots of money………​
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My spending became very very conservative and I am still the same till date.

Going back to my journey, when I finished uni I had no particular intention of doing contracting. However again back to when I said that the kind of people you surround yourself there is a part of the journey story I missed that is very very important.

When leaving Leicester and realised I needed to surround myself with people that are professionals, I had friends some friends who had worked in Nigeria and who had been in the UK before myself. What I used to do was that while I was applying for jobs I would do up my CV and send it to them for feedback; “what do you think about this? what changes should I make? what can I do to this that will make it attractive to an agent or an employer?”

They will help me with my CV and other things. I mean I had quite a bit of banking experience in Nigeria so I wasn’t a green horn in terms of work experience I just didn’t have a lot of UK experience.

I knew my stuff but I think because I haven’t done it in the UK, I was missing something. My experience in Leicester was not financial services. It was marketing and definitely not related to what I actually wanted to do.

So what I will do then was that, when these my friends go to work in the morning & come back in the evening, I will go to their place and ask them to tell me “what is your day like? Run me through your day? What did you do what project did you work on? What tasks did you do? can you bring me some of the outputs let me see what kind of documentation you guys produce? and as they were walking me through that, I was picking up the Lingo because it was different from what I was used to. I’ll review the documentation and I would digest them. From all those conversations I could actually then begin to build work scenarios in my head so when I step into an interview and they ask me to tell them about my experience I’m telling them about my experience in the language of my friends experiences. The interviewers will feel like okay this person appears to have UK banking experience because I understood and spoke the lingo.

That was the method I used to break into into the UK marketplace because I wanted to build my career in financial services.

How many years in total did you do contracting for?

So I joined RBS 2013 and I was there up until 2017 , after RBS I went to Aberdeen standard investment. So six years totally for contracting or so . But while I was in Aberdeen Standard Investment I started my accounting practice on the side.

I have a question, I mean contracting; by that time you would been doing upward like £500 to £600 a day. Why did you leave? Why did you decide to set up your own practice?

While I was at RBS, there was a guy, Nathan, we were contracting together then. He is from Jamaican origin and he used to tell me a lot about how he was into properties. He would buy properties do them up and rent them out.

We became good friends and I used to share my new experience in buying stocks. He would say “we’re contracting and we’re getting good cash flow, that is great but what exactly is the next level? You know we can’t just sit here and just get comfortable? What if contracts don’t get renewed or if the business landscape changes, what next?”

I was like you know we need to kind of explore opportunities for financial freedom. I remember saying why don’t we do properties and why don’t we do stocks. Before now I mostly followed the crowd and we discussed about getting things done properly. We started buying books about stocks and that’s when I came across a book called Buffettology; detailed analysis on how Warren Buffet used to go about his investments and one thing struck me.

He said the key to wealth was owning businesses and that was when my mindset shifted away from contracting. I decided it was time to build my own business.

So I tried with one client to test the hypothesis. One client became two, two became four, became 10 and then became 15 and just grew gradually like that without any any form of marketing or advertisement.

Yeah I was still contracting but the more the business grew the more frustrated I got with contracting because the managers just started to irritate me. You know it gets to a point where it is not they are bad people or they’re annoying people but because your mindset is now changing, you are moving from an employee mindset into a business owner mindset so you begin to become uncomfortable in an employment state. You begin to feel that discomfort in your being, like you’re being caged. I wanted and could do more.

I think the tipping point for me was when I was at Aberdeen Life and it became a really toxic work environment and literally people were resigning every other week. The managers were horrible, I have never had that kind of experience before.

You went on to build your business, I want to assume that in that journey of you changing jobs and building your business you made your first purchase of your property?

Yes that is correct. 1 year and 11 months after. I bought a two bedroom semi detached house. In the time leading up to buying the house I was saving enough deposit such that by the time I put that deposit into house purchase my monthly mortgage payment would not exceed what I was paying in rent.

I saved up so much that what I was paying in mortgage was about £500 pounds monthly. I didn’t want my outgoing to change after the mortgage for the house.

That’s a very smart move. You had your deposit for the house, you bought a house. Which other money moves did you make? I want to assume that you also started doing a lot of investment as well?

No heavy investments at the time when I bought the house. It started after the house because I was studying and doing some more research.

After I got the house and I started to dabble into investing gradually. It was at that point I also got myself a brand new car . Something I was quite reluctant about.

You were reluctant ?

I think I was so affected by using all my money that I became extremely prudent because in my head I was like I never want to find myself in that situation I had zero.

But this brand new car, was it in cash or it was on higher purchase?

If I remember correctly I was paying about three hundred and fifty pounds a month on a higher purchase financing.

Oh wow I mean considering that your income was significant that’s that’s another good stuff as well.

Looking back at your journey it sounds like you are making a lot of really good money decisions. You are not outrageous in your spending, you are making all the right choices. So aside from not investing in just Nigerian stocks what are the other mistakes that you think you did in your entire journey?

I think the Nigerian investment was the single most devastating money mistake I made and since then whenever I’m doing something I have to make sure I get it right. I am very slow to act, before making any decisions.

That sounds reasonable. I have two questions: Do you think that you are finally settled in as an immigrant and what is your next financial goal?

Settling, yes. I would say most definitely yes I am very settled.

In terms of next financial goal, it is just to continue building businesses; multiple business not just one. Because what I’ve found and learned is, this is from Warren Buffett again, his preferences to own businesses. Stocks give you portion of a business but owning the whole business is better. What I do actively now is look for businesses to either start or acquire. I have managed to diligently build the accounting practice from scratch and it is doing quite well. Now I understand how to build a business from scratch. I have also now built a logistics business from scratch and this is also in the UK.

So far this is what I have learnt: build a business to sustain you and the family, add the second business and this second one is just pure cash flow that you can then use to either start new businesses or acquire new businesses or invest or do whatever you need.

What you are describing to me is actually quite interesting, so your first business is the one that takes care of your everyday needs; your rent, your feeding the family, but the second businesses is for cash flow and acquisition of more businesses…..

That is correct. I built the Accounting Practice that allowed me to start a Logistics Business which started in 2021. The logistics business broke even in two to three months. I pulled out all the capital invested in it so now it’s running on its own. That capital that was used and pulled out is now being used to acquire properties. Now it’s the second business that is providing the cash flow for other businesses.

I am trying to mirror Warren Buffet’s approach to building wealth but at a much much smaller scale of course.

In all of this journey from 2008 and this is 2023 you’ve gotten married, you have two kids now. Are you as conservative as before or your spending habit has changed?

In my perspective, it is still conservative. My wife would tell you it remains extremely conservative and the reason is this; I been on the side where I’ve gone from 100 to 0 that was manageable because it was just me. Now I have two kids I can’t afford to go from 100 to 0. It’s just the way my brain works for safety and precaution.

This is for immigrants that will read this, one advice or two pieces of advice you would you say to them?

I would say make sure you have a goal and a vision. Don’t let anything deter you from it, no matter how challenging it is. At the start see whatever you can latch on to as the stepping stone to that ultimate vision. However with your vision, allow yourself flexibility because visions change. The more you learn and the more your vision is likely to change in a finer direction. When I got to the UK my focus was academics and being a banking professional at the top of the chain of my career.

That was my vision but I as I began the banking career, I started to learn, read, and research my vision changed from being an employee to someone running businesses and being an employer. If I don’t allow myself some flexibility; I mean being at the top of the chain in banking is not a bad thing itself but I think I found myself in a much better space than being the MD of a bank.

Thanks OOM. This was great conversation and hearing about your journey is inspiring.

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Thats our first story done! Please let me know what you thought about this immigrant story: Too Long? Too Short? Didn’t add Value? Simply reply this email.

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