Olawale Ayilara of LandWey Investment is our #BellaNaijaMCM this Week!

Nigeria’s biggest resource is not oil, or even arable land, but it’s youth, and we’ve celebrated hundreds of them in our numerous columns/features on BellaNaija.

This week, for our #BellaNaijaMCM feature, we celebrate an entrepreneur passionate about human capital development especially among the youth.

Olawale Ayilara started out as an entrepreneur by running a coaching centre in Abeokuta, Ogun state in Nigeria, but that business soon failed. He got into printing, business consulting, and even sold food at the annual The Experience concert held in Lagos at some point. They all failed after some time.

At some point, Olawale even left the country at some point. It was while he was away in South Africa, researching on what he wanted to do, that he decided to get into the real estate industry.

Three years prior to starting his business, Olawale took time to learn about what it entails. He was providing digital marketing services for real estate firms and he at one time, helped a company increase its sales by N85 in one month, a landmark achievement for that company, considering how much it had made in the entirety of its existence.

Olawale decided to bring all his experience into play to start his business – LandWey Investment Limited.

By 2018, the company, which started with 5 employees, now has 42 full-time staff, 370 realtors and 16,000 consultants.

Olawale has also been passionate about youth development and is the founder and director of Beyond School Initiative which provides training programs for university students.

He’s an alumnus of Lagos Business School with an MBA from the London Metropolitan School of Business. In 2018, he was named in Forbes Africa’s 30 Under 30 (Business) list.