Ruka Sanusi - Creating a lane for the extraordinary female entrepreneur
It was the leafy green and pleasant pastures of England thousands of miles from Accra - and the memory of her late father - that gave Ruka Sanusi the inspiration for her successful company.
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The business consultancy firm, Alldens Lane, is named after the road in Godalming in Surrey where the family had a home years ago.
“He was born to very underprivileged parents but with a vision, hard work and a lot of perseverance built industries across the country of his birth, employing thousands in the process. One of the homes that he had in the UK was on a private lane in a lovely village in Surrey called Alldens Lane. So Alldens Lane to me speaks to the power of vision, the power of aspiration, and the art of the possible in entrepreneurship. As Walt Disney said, if you can dream it, you can do it” says Ruka.
Ruka always planned a fabulous international corporate career in management consulting, travelling the world and leading a glamorous lifestyle. And it is indeed the life she went on to live.
At age ten she left her birthplace of Lagos, Nigeria, to grow up in the UK. After bagging degrees in Politics & Economics and Development Studies from the SOAS, University of London, and University of Bath, she worked at the Crown Agents in London, settling in a role where she did development consulting for many African governments. From Crown Agents, she went on to the Commonwealth Secretariat and then PwC.
But at weekends as she went about her business – at the gym, the salon or the dry cleaners - a burning desire started inside her that would ultimately lead her to scrap her original career plan.
Where that fire came from? “I thought they provided a good service, I could see how those businesses could be managed a bit more efficiently, so that they could actually really scale” she replies, referring to the seeds for Alldens Lane, the business advisory firm she founded in 2012.
“I’m a management consultant by training and in the course of my work, a lot of my friends who had their own businesses would come to me and ask for advice.”
She would organise mini workshops – sometimes at home, sometimes at swanky hotels – for these friends, mostly women, providing crucial advice on what they were doing wrong or right, or missing in their young businesses.
All at her own cost, free for the beneficiaries. It slowly became a hit with her friends, some of them flying from as far as Nigeria and South Africa to be part of those sessions.
“Typically, women are not in business because of a transactional opportunity or to make a quick buck,” she explains. It is their passion for nurture that fuels her own desire to support women entrepreneurs and women CEOs to come into their full economic potential.
Alldens Lane now provides one-on-one business coaching and advisory to women, helping to smoothen out the edges that their passionate natures may have neglected.
She takes her clients, mainly small and enterprises with growth potential, through coaching sessions over several months, teaching them about business management, operation and strategy.
A menu of services has been developed for every category of business owner. They are aptly named: ‘Inside Out’, ‘Here and Now’, ‘Leapfrog’ and ‘Future Ready’, and cater for every aspect of business development.
It is a journey that in many cases, doesn’t end, as Ruka’s students often go on to join the WCEO (Women CEO) Academy, a network of Alldens Lane alumni and friends via which life-long nurturing continues.
It is easier to describe it as a family. One evening, they’re at a dinner together, hosting a successful business leader and soaking nuggets of wisdom; another time you may catch them together in a different African city, spending time with formidable business leaders in those countries, and observing and learning from them.
Some of the ladies may run very tiny businesses, but those trips open their eyes to what is possible, and what the bigger picture is like. Ruka herself is aware of the bigger picture, and so has set up Alldens Lane to provide her services continent-wide. She coaches women in Ghana and Nigeria, and is now gearing up for Uganda and Tanzania.
From the dreaminess of summers in England to the boardrooms of Accra and Abuja, the dream to raise generations of extraordinary female business leaders continues.