For more than a decade, Sanmi Lajuwomi earned a comfortable living as a technology contractor in the United Kingdom. Returning to Nigeria meant giving up that income for a business paying a fraction of it. The calculation only makes sense when salary stops being the only measure of value.
He remembers the numbers because the gap between them was difficult to ignore.
In the UK, he says he was earning as much as £500 a day as an independent technology contractor. After deciding to build in Nigeria, the business he was pursuing here was paying him about ₦120,000 a month.
“I actually gave up my residence permit for this,” Lajuwomi said in a recent interview on the Venture Valley podcast. “Can you imagine waking up and saying you are no longer taking £500 a day, and you return to Nigeria to a business that was giving you ₦120,000 monthly?”
The £500 figure was a contractor’s daily rate, rather than a salaried employee’s take-home pay. Even with that distinction, Lajuwomi was walking away from a well-established professional career.
He had spent years working in business analysis, IT and project management in the UK, including assignments with Sky, Discovery Channel and Daily Mail Group.
Winock Group, which he now leads, says he has more than 15 years of experience across business and technology consulting.
What followed was not an immediate success story. Lajuwomi spent years looking for the right business to build.
That part makes the decision more useful to entrepreneurs than the headline salary sacrifice.
He came back before he knew exactly what to build
Lajuwomi began exploring Nigerian business opportunities around 2013.
Oil and gas attracted him first.
He attended industry events in the UK, studied the sector and built relationships with operators. He says the pursuit took him close to oil-field opportunities and discussions around a potential $40 million gas-to-power transaction. He also experimented with gold trading.
None became the company he eventually built.
By the middle of the decade, Lajuwomi had begun to see distributed solar as a more attractive opportunity. Winock Solar was founded in 2016 and began operations the following year, initially providing solar systems to Nigerian microbusinesses.
He eventually returned to Nigeria permanently in 2019. By then, he had already spent several years testing ideas and developing the solar business.
The sequence is important.
Leaving a high-paying job was one decision. Finding a viable Nigerian business was another.
Entrepreneurship stories often compress the uncomfortable years between both.
There is more to the salary comparison
On paper, choosing ₦120,000 a month over a £500 daily contract makes little financial sense.
But a salary and a business do not create wealth in the same way.
Professional income compensates someone for their labour. The income can be substantial, particularly for specialised contractors. Stop working, however, and that stream of earnings eventually stops too.
A founder accepts considerably more uncertainty in exchange for something different – ownership.
That ownership may ultimately be worthless. Most businesses never become large companies. The founder can lose savings, income and years of professional progression.
But when the company works, its value is no longer limited to what the founder can personally earn in a day.
That was the economic trade Lajuwomi was making, whether or not its eventual outcome could have been known at the time.
It is a calculation familiar to several African founders who accumulated skills abroad before returning to build locally.
BEA has previously profiled Africans who returned home to build businesses and examined the more recent “Japada” movement of Nigerians returning from abroad.
Lajuwomi’s case is useful because the economics were so stark.
He was exchanging predictable cash flow for an asset that did not yet have predictable value.
Winock began with a specific problem
Lajuwomi did not enter solar by deciding that renewable energy sounded fashionable.
He and his team focused initially on microbusinesses that depended heavily on petrol generators but struggled to afford the upfront cost of solar systems.
In an earlier interview, Lajuwomi said Winock surveyed about 500 businesses while developing the model. The company began by leasing solar equipment before moving towards lease-to-own arrangements.
That model later attracted institutional capital.
Acumen invested in Winock Solar in 2020, describing it as a company helping Nigerian microbusinesses gain access to solar systems without paying the full cost upfront. The investor also provided bridge financing during the COVID-19 period.
In 2024, Winock Solar announced another $1.6 million equity investment from Acumen and All On.
The business has since changed again. Winock Solar says it expanded into distribution and retail in 2024 as Nigeria’s energy market changed following fuel-subsidy removal. The wider Winock Group now operates across solar energy, SME lending and agricultural commodity trading.
Winock Group says its lending subsidiary has disbursed more than ₦4 billion to over 5,800 SMEs, though those figures are company-reported and should be read as such.
Interestingly, Lajuwomi’s ₦120,000-income business did not stay at that earning. His bet paid off. But there was no guarantee it would succeed.
Returning home did not remove the cost of the decision
It would be easy to package Lajuwomi’s experience as evidence that Nigerian professionals abroad should simply return and become entrepreneurs.
A successful return required more than conviction.
Lajuwomi brought years of experience managing technology projects, professional networks built in the UK and familiarity with the language institutional investors use.
He spent years researching sectors before settling on his business model. Even then, the company later faced COVID-19, currency depreciation, and the difficulties of servicing foreign-currency obligations with revenues generated in naira.
Nigeria’s current migration debate makes that context especially important.
BEA has documented how the country’s continuing loss of skilled professionals is affecting businesses, particularly in sectors where replacing experienced workers is difficult. Read the analysis of the Japa effect on Nigerian companies.
Returnees face the opposite adjustment.
A foreign salary may disappear immediately while the Nigerian opportunity can take years to mature.
Housing, family obligations, business runway, currency exposure and access to capital all affect whether that transition is financially survivable.
Purpose does not pay payroll.
A founder still needs a business capable of doing so.
What Lajuwomi was really giving up
The most valuable thing Lajuwomi surrendered was not necessarily the £500 daily rate.
It was predictability.
He says he was rarely without a contract in Britain. His skills had an established market, and employers were prepared to pay for them.
Entrepreneurship removed that certainty.
Customers had to be found. Capital had to be raised. The business model changed repeatedly. Oil and gas gave way to solar. Solar leasing evolved into other forms of financing and distribution. The group later entered lending and agriculture.
This is where the usual “follow your passion” interpretation becomes inadequate.
Lajuwomi was making a series of commercial decisions about where his experience and capital might produce greater long-term value. Some worked. Others were abandoned.
He describes that process as looking for the next “train”: an industry where the opportunity is expanding rather than one where a newcomer arrives after the largest gains have already been captured.
Professionals considering the same move
For Nigerians abroad thinking about returning to start companies, the lesson is not that entrepreneurship is inherently superior to employment.
The calculation is more demanding than that.
A prospective founder has to know what is being exchanged.
How much income will disappear? How many years can savings support the transition? What problem is the proposed company solving? Who will pay for the solution? What advantage does the founder bring from the career being abandoned? How much capital will the company need before it supports the founder rather than the other way around?
And perhaps most importantly, what is being built that could eventually justify the sacrifice?
