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My journey into entrepreneurship – Sherifat Mohammed

 

Sherifat Mohammed does nothing but sell everything from solid gold to diamond jewelry. For this, she has become popular and has dined with the high and mighty of the society. But being at the apex of her business didn’t come with taking an elevator of sorts, rather she took the stairs, perhaps with some help from her husband and a little few friends.

Like most people waiting for the monthly cheques and credit alerts, Sherifat Mohammed was doing the 9 to 5 jobs. She had just graduated and in 2010 to get a job was all that was in the offing for her. So, she was employed by an engineering company called Global Ocean in 2010 and by 2013 she was done with them. She moved to British Council in 2013 and worked there till September 2015. To her, something was missing. She wasn’t her true self.

“I never felt fulfilled with 9 to 5 jobs. I guess the corporate world wasn’t just for me . I always felt like something was lacking and getting up to go to work was a struggle. I had little or no enthusiasm. I had done some business on the side while in school and working and I can say the feeling was different and I enjoyed it. Luckily for me, I got dismissed from my last corporate job and that was it for me, I was done feeling unfulfilled. You see, that dismissal was the motivation and the push I needed to go into business fully and it’s been wonderful,” she revealed in a recent interview.

In fact her employment with British Council ended like a bad marriage. She got dismissed. She had just had a child and the timing couldn’t have been much worse. But like everything good in life, oftentimes it must be really worse to be better. Another vista of life was just waiting for her to explore.

“I was home with a newborn after my dismissal and I started selling fabrics which were introduced to me by my husband’s cousin. We were 3 partners and profit was shared into 3. The fabrics business introduced me to Facebook for business and marketing which I never knew existed. This knowledge gained was one thing that really helped me when I eventually ventured into jewelry. Like I mentioned, the profit was shared into 3 so at the end of the day I really wasn’t getting much. It happened that my wedding rings had become too small for my fingers after childbirth, so I surfed the web to see if I could get something low priced to manage with the hopes that my finger size would return to normal later. I did find some low priced silver rings and on arrival they were more beautiful than imagined and looked more expensive than the price I got them. I decided to put them up for sale on Facebook and to my greatest surprise I got a buyer the next day. I was so happy after my first sale and bought a few more rings. I used the same platform to market and sell and within a few days the little stock I had was also sold out.”

According to her, it was the beginning of a new life. She started her business journey in 2016. It was pretty much an unofficial venture, but one that was laying the golden egg. Then in 2017 the unimaginable happened. She lost her son, her first son. She was devastated, crushed and sad but she found new passion in immortalizing the spirit of the child. Then, the idea for her company germinated. It must be in the name of the lost jewel, her son named Benjamin Oshoneh Zekeri (BOZ). She has applied to have her business named after her late son.

Sherifat Mohammed, has a BSc in Accounting from Bowen University, Iwo and a Masters degree in Human Resources Management from the University of Bradford in the UK.

She is happily married with kids and from Okene in Kogi State. She was born on September 26, 1985 in Lagos, Nigeria.

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