Michael Olafusi shares the inspiring story of how his curiosity to learn on impulse lead him to develop exceptional skill in Microsoft Excel, accidentally caught the entrepreneurship bug, and quit his job to start his own Consulting firm purely based on his Excel skill.
Michael Olafusi is the founder and lead consultant for UrBizEdge, a business data analysis firm. He is the first and only Microsoft (officially awarded and recognized) Excel Most Valuable Professional – MVP in Nigeria and Africa. He is a simple guy who loves reading, thinking, swimming, photography and trying new stuffs.
We share with you excerpts from his interview with AfterSchoolAfrica.
How I Developed Passion for Excel
It all started 2011. My first job after school was in Nokia Siemens as a radio access engineer, which was a very technical job. I was in that job for 6 months. They downsized, I was let go. That was where the Excel story began. My next job was with Airtel, for an MIS – Management Information System – analysis job. It was basically about getting information about the company – sales and everything that matters; and having it analyzed and reported. That was how I got into the business data analysis world.
What were we using? Excel. I was surprised. This company has operation in 10 countries in Africa. A company this big, we use Excel just for everything. Backroll, business analysis, management report. It opened my eyes to the capability of Excel. I put my mind to it because everything I had to do had to be reported in Excel. With that I realized that Excel is that big. Companies can use it as part of their strategic tool. That was how I got interested in Excel.
How I became Africa’s First and only MS Excel MVP
Let me give you the background of how the whole MVP started. I think it came as an idea of Bill Gates. What happened was Microsoft sells their products for profit. No open source. It was very difficult for them to have people spread their word. So they decided to start MVP – Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in 1993. They look around based on nominations, and whatever criteria. Till today no one knows the exact criteria. They pick people that are the best in every category of their product line and give them some internal access, create an email group for you, and benefits like you can get almost all their software for free, and coupons per month.
Also they do a yearly in-house conference where you meet the who is who in Microsoft. There they share what they want to do. And it’s free. You only pay for your airfare. That way they were able to make people become independent evangelists of their products. People were now more willing to share what they know about their specific area of expertise. Microsoft began to see positive results. People answering questions in their forum. Creating forums on their own to share knowledge.
For me, I would go to the Excel part of Microsoft answer forum, and answer questions. That was the idea. I believe this was part of the things you get rewarded for. So they wanted people to be willing to share their knowledge and to also give them in-house feedback, since they deal with the clients and use their product more. So you have direct access to the engineers who actually build the products.
Me becoming an MVP, naturally I always enjoy sharing what I know right from university days. So when I began using Excel, I started blogging about it, answering questions, sharing my knowledge, building templates and giving them for free. I caught the attention of some of the big people in the Excel world. Bill Jelen, we call him Mr. Excel. He is one of the biggest personality in the Excel world.
To get the award you have to be nominated or nominate yourself. I nominated myself by filling the form, with references to what I’ve done with Excel. That was after about 2 intensive years of talking about Excel online. I wasn’t expecting it but after about 6 months I got the award letter. And then a call from the Microsoft team in Nigeria. They told me that I’m the first in Nigeria and African to get the Excel MVP Award. I was given the award again this year.
Businesses that use Excel
I’ll give you some clients I worked for and what I did for them. I’ve talked about the company I joined that I used Excel for the whole operation analysis. After that I joined 21st Century Technology, a telecom company and I was taken purely because of my Excel skill. They didn’t have anyone that was analyzing the phone calls… the records. That’s lots of data in millions of records every month. But nobody was looking at it. So I had to use my Excel skill to analyze this huge data. To show who our biggest clients are, trends, who stopped using out network, who is using our network the most. We were able to classify clients based on how much revenue they generate for us.
Also I got a job on Odesk (online freelance website) to do Excel software for a stock analyst. What this does is that it pulls share prices for the company to specify. So he’s able to see how the investment is doing.
Another client was trying to set up a company. He has partnered with a phone manufacturer in Asia to be their authorized dealer in Nigeria and wants a sales and inventory manager. He want to be able to accurately monitor cash inflow, credits, which stock is running low, is he making profit or loss, who is his biggest sales partners and everything about his sales and inventory. And this was done with purely Excel, nothing more.
I’ve had to work with companies like Total, DeltaAfrik, Vodacom, MTN. It was just my Excel skill they needed. Excel is as powerful as you know how to use it. The good thing about Excel is that everybody has it on their PC. So if you build a solution with Excel, they don’t need to pay for a new platform to use it.
For small companies, it’s very useful to build up your invoice in Excel. That way you can have extra functionality of it keeping a record of all your invoices automatically. Also, you’ll like to have your account and business details, you break down the financial aspect of your business in Excel to see how you are doing; especially if you plan to pitch investors. The best way to do that is to use a solution already built in Excel, we call them financial template. Depending on your industry, you may need Excel beyond invoicing and finances. You can use it to capture and analyze any form of data, and even automate tasks, produce monthly reports. Excel will help you have a very organized way of doing business.
Further reading – AfterSchoolAfrica
“Ogbonnaya Bassey’s entry, SolarKobo, provides solar power systems with zero-upfront financing in Nigeria as a cheaper, more reliable and cleaner electricity source than the private oil generators that are widely used to supplement the insufficient public electricity supply. It will allow small businesses and families to benefit from solar systems for relatively low monthly fees and will use single board devices for remote monitoring and customer payment systems.”
POSITIVE NIGERIA 