My Entrepreneurship Journey by Austin Avuru: A Delicate Balancing Act
Which business stories do you take to your grave, and which must you include for their pedagogic value in your autobiographical narrative? This must be a fundamental question that gnaws at every successful business executive who ever attempted the arduous task of leaving behind a public account of their life and career in autobiographical form. In the case of the secretive Nigerian business environment, this must be a particularly difficult balancing act to accomplish. Even more so in the famously inscrutable Nigerian oil and gas business sector, where many of the truly tantalizing secret business stories are to be found.
As it turns out, the biggest let-down of Austin Avuru’s entertaining My Entrepreneurship Journey is that this delicate balancing act does not quite find a happy equilibrium. But delicate balancing aside, the great triumph of Mr Avuru’s highly anticipated autobiography is that it does succeed in committing quite a few acts of journalism in the course of his narrative, while leaving the reader more knowledgeable thanks to the authors obvious wealth of experience.
It is not often that a Federal High Court restraining order is obtained preventing the release of a book in Nigeria. This is precisely what happened in August of last year, just a few days before the originally scheduled public presentation of this much awaited new tome. That fact alone heralded the coming of a book that would most certainly contain stories worth reading.
In the event, My Entrepreneurship Journey delivered on expectations.
Even as someone working in the field, and with prior exposure to the man and many of the business stories contained in Mr Avuru’s book, there was still a lot to learn. For everyone else interested in Nigerian corporate finance and the specific oil and gas variety of it, they will be very pleased that the restraining court order was ultimately vacated, and My Entrepreneurship Journey is now available to be enjoyed by the general public.
Mr Avuru is arguably the leading upstream oil man of his generation in Nigeria. From the perspective of indigenous, independent oil and gas executives focused on exploring and operating oil acreage within the country, there are very few that have risen to the heights he attained in his long career. In many ways, he is widely acknowledged as a legend in the industry. In My Entrepreneurship Journey, the reader is provided with the key highlights of the paths he trod to becoming a co-founder, major shareholder and chief executive of one of the most successful indigenous oil and gas businesses in the history of Nigeria, making a personal fortune along the way.
That story alone is worth the cover price of the book. It is told in simple language and with sufficiently detailed timelines allowing a reader to appreciate the author’s step-by-step journey to acquiring the deep industrial expertise that ultimately allowed him to lead the later successes of the now famous Seplat Energy, a business that earned close to US$1bn of revenues in 2022 from the sale of oil and gas produced in Nigeria.
From relatively inauspicious beginnings as the son (born 1958) of a cocoa and palm produce farmer who unfortunately died relatively young in 1965, My Entrepreneurship Journey takes us through the story of Mr Avuru’s early rural education followed by his first big opportunity to study Geology at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. An eventful University life was followed in short order by a big career opportunity to work for the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in Lagos as a trainee Wellsite Geologist starting in late 1980.
I always say that the best books are like a time machine. They take us back to places we could never have been and give us an opportunity to enter rooms we could never otherwise experience. The definitive history of NNPC as an organization is yet to be written, but Mr Avuru’s My Entrepreneurship Journey will be a useful source document whenever that immense task is attempted. The NNPC that Mr Avuru describes in 1980 is almost idyllic in its simplicity and innocence. It was a small but fast-growing organization that offered the ideal launchpad for the career of a young, highly intelligent and capable individual willing to work hard.
Mr Avuru tells an interesting story of booking an appointment and walking into the office of the acting Managing Director of NNPC (it was Aret Adams at the time) when Avuru himself was still a trainee, and then proceeding to “argue back and forth” with the Managing Director about being retained as a full-time employee following his time as a National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) service staff. I am certain that even the most audacious NYSC service staff at NNPC today would shudder at such a concept. In the event, Avuru was in fact retained, and went on to have a truly trail blazing career as one of the leading Nigerian Petroleum Geologists, with multiple local and international developmental opportunities offered to him. By the time he left NNPC to join a start-up indigenous oil exploration company called Allied Energy Resources in July 1992, Mr Avuru would have already been one of the leading young oil and gas executives in Nigeria.
One of the great successes of My Entrepreneurship Journey is that it allows a perceptive reader to witness the evolving historical context of indigenous private-sector participation in the Nigerian oil and gas industry, through the eyes of a leading participant in that evolution. In many ways, Mr Avuru’s entire career culminating in his co-creation and leadership of a public company valued at more than a billion dollars today is a personification of the long historic arch of local ownership and operatorship of oil and gas assets in Nigeria.
Having acquired the necessary industrial expertise and then tasted success as an employee within an entrepreneurial organization, Mr Avuru moved on in July 2002 to establish his own company called Platform Petroleum, with the objective of bidding for, winning, developing and operating an oilfield in Nigeria.
When I speak with project sponsors and entrepreneurs today, I always say that three of the most important things that financiers are seeking in projects they will back are: deep industrial expertise in the hands of the promoters, strong and sustainable commercial logic in the opportunity itself, and the clear financing capacity of the shareholders. Of these three, the most important and often the hardest to come by is the first: deep industrial expertise in the hands of the promoters.
Mr Avuru’s career as chronicled in My Entrepreneurship Journey illustrates this point very clearly, particularly in his Chapter 3 titled, The Making of Platform Petroleum. This very important chapter lays out in clear detail the process, timelines and roles that needed to the filled in making a success of the Platform Petroleum entrepreneurial venture. In sum, the deep industrial expertise acquired at NNPC and Allied Energy, allowed Mr Avuru as the promoter to assemble a strong shareholder group with the financial capacity to undertake the development of a greenfield project, and provided the technical and market knowledge to select the marginal field opportunity with the most compelling and sustainable commercial logic. In the event, it was also that deep domain knowledge and industrial expertise in the hands of the promoter that ensured the successful implementation of the project which by 2008 was a debt free, cash generating oil producer paying regular dividends to all shareholders.
My friend and co-author Feyi Fawehinmi often tells me the story of how he once went to interview a leading Nigerian oil man with several decades of experience in the business. Feyi attempted to record the conversation, at which point the old man almost fell off his chair in surprise. You do not bring out a recording device if you want to have a frank conversation with a Nigerian big man, and certainly not one who has risen in the highly secretive oil and gas business where all manner of deals must remain publicly undisclosed in the interest of everyone concerned.
My Entrepreneurship Journey breaks the mold in this regard, and for this I doff my hat to Mr Avuru. On the one hand, it says a lot about his approach to doing business transparently that many of the key details of such a long and successful career can be laid out plainly for the public record. On the other hand, it is instructive that even he clearly cannot tell all the business stories in his possession. One glaring example of this is his list of founding shareholders of Platform Petroleum, which names 13 individuals but leaves out three names with a total ownership of nearly 15% simply listed as “Other A, B and C”.
In other respects, however, My Entrepreneurship Journey brings into the public domain new information that cannot have been common knowledge prior to now, particularly when the story arrives at its epic denouement with the creation and spectacular successes of Seplat Energy from around 2009. This part of the book occupies the most space and is clearly the most important segment of the author’s career. It is also the part of the book where acts of journalism have been committed whether unwittingly or not. Without causing any spoilers for the reader, I will point to three interesting revelations from my perspective.
Firstly, the blow-by-blow details of the commercial negotiations, financing arrangements, and M&A (mergers and acquisitions) discussions leading to the creation of Seplat Energy are a very important contribution to the historical record. As someone who works in corporate finance, I can confirm that this is the kind of granular information that is typically only available to deal insiders, and generally never revealed to the broader public. As a lead participant in the discussions, Mr Avuru has done a great service to the history of corporate finance in Nigeria by documenting this fascinating story in My Entrepreneurship Journey.
Secondly, I am not certain to what extent the Nigerian general public was previously aware of the inside regulatory and political negotiations within NNPC, the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), and the Ministry of Petroleum to secure the approvals for the landmark acquisitions from Shell that led to the creation of Seplat. In a similar vein, I am not certain that such a direct linkage had previously been publicly established between the M&A transactions leading to the creation of Seplat Energy and the provenance of the ingenious, but ultimately scandalous “Strategic Alliance Agreements” that were established between NNPC and Atlantic Energy, among others. Mr Avuru makes this direct link for I believe the first time in the public domain on Page 121 of My Entrepreneurship Journey, thereby committing a notable act of journalism.
Thirdly, any follower of Seplat and the latest news about the company will be familiar with the ongoing unfortunate rift between key shareholders which has spilled out into the public domain via multiple cases in litigation and official public statements. My Entrepreneurship Journey lays out Mr Avuru’s side of the story in riveting detail, making one convincing case for the sources of the disagreements, including several subtle digs and one or two bombshell allegations in relation to inappropriate boardroom dealings.
All told, Mr Avuru leaves the reader in no doubt about his own version of the story, which is inevitably the point of every autobiography. It remains for the other participants in the narrative to either add additional light or allow the narrative that has been committed to the public knowledge become the only historical record.
In the end, My Entrepreneurship Journey weighs in at nearly 240 pages as an extremely important contribution to the business history of Nigeria, with a focus on the oil and gas industry. As with most autobiographies, there is probably a lot more that could have been included, particularly around the authors early life and the global trends and local context that were driving key actions in the industry. But as a straightforward story about the authors entrepreneurial journey (the stated intent of the book), Mr Avuru’s contribution is extremely vital and will hopefully form an important source document for future corporate and business histories yet to be written.
It is not often that successful Nigerian businessmen and women commit to putting detailed information about their career trajectory, victories and defeats into the public domain. Every such effort must be highly commended, especially when the ensuing narrative provides the clarity, insight and wealth of experience that Mr Avuru leaves us with in My Entrepreneurship Journey.
