Immigrating to Nova Scotia was exactly the opportunity Jide Adesalu and his family needed for him to provide his children with desired quality education and pursue his entrepreneurial dream
Jide Adesalu and his family were sure they wanted to move to Canada, they just didn’t know what province. Adesalu says his kids’ university choices put Canada high on their list. It also lined up with a personal goal Adesalu was considering.
“Just as I got to the height of my career, I was getting a little bored with the oil industry after 25 years,” Adesalu says of his time with Shell in his home country of Nigeria. “Coincidentally, our kids were looking at going to university in Canada. I was thinking about starting a business myself and we wanted to stay close to our children.”
Adesalu and his wife decided to book a vacation to Canada, during which they planned to scout for a university for their son while visiting Toronto, Manitoba, and Calgary. However, after their first stop in Toronto, they decided to follow up on a friend’s recommendation to visit Nova Scotia. They never did make it to Manitoba or Calgary on that trip.
“I never thought Halifax was a place I would visit, but my spouse immediately fell in love with it as we secured admission at Dal University for our son,” Adesalu says. “It has a rich Black history, is a good place to bring up a family, has a good crime rate, and isn’t as cold as some of the other Canadian cities we were thinking about. So, we skipped Manitoba and Calgary and spent the rest of our vacation here. Then we went home and started processing documents.”
Adesalu’s career began after completing his university degree when he accepted a position with Shell’s upstream operations in Nigeria. He later completed further education at Cornell University in New York and the Warwick Business School in the U.K. Adesalu says he started out as a computer systems developer helping Shell computerize its operations, which progressed into building enterprise systems, developing apps, building server infrastructures, moving over to SAP Basis engineering, competence management, and service management. He then went into information technology (IT) project management, before ending his Shell career in business development.
However, the idea of his own venture was never far from his thoughts during those years thanks to the consulting he was doing on the side for his father and brother.
“My father and brother have a family business in communications in Nigeria, and I supported them with consultation while I was still with Shell. So, I already knew this was what I wanted to do. IT is my bread and butter,” Adesalu says.
With the combination of his senior management experience and his work with his family business, Adesalu was able to apply as an entrepreneur through the Nova Scotia Nominee Program Entrepreneur Stream. It is a stream designed for immigrants looking to start a new business or buy an existing business. After working for someone else his entire career, he saw the move as a chance to start something of his own.
Adesalu describes the immigration process as “smooth” but says it isn’t without its challenges. “One of the biggest hurdles is all the money it costs to come in as an entrepreneur and the endless documentation.
Hurdles aside, the family eventually relocated, and the children quickly settled down in their various academic institutions close to their new home in Halifax. Adesalu was able to start his own company, Microhills Inc, an IT consultancy focused on partnering with small businesses to improve business performance and customer experience through the digital transformation of their products, sales, and supplies. He was determined to succeed, having completed a feasibility study, researched the market, and studied the population of Nova Scotia.
“It was the first time doing it for myself, but I had the confidence that I had what it takes,” Adesalu says. “Nova Scotia is a good place to start a business. It’s easy to integrate into the community and make a significant impact. IT is hot right now, so I know I’m headed in the right direction to make the kind of impact I want.”
The impact wasn’t immediate, though. “For the first six months, I didn’t make any revenue. I had to step back to re-evaluate my business strategy and prioritized understanding of the local business culture,” Adesalu says.
The business culture wasn’t something he initially planned for, believing his experience with other operations around the world had prepared him. He was wrong. “I did experience some business culture shock. I’ve worked internationally but wasn’t expecting the culture I found here in Canada. Clients aren’t going to jump at your business just because you have super-duper technology. They want to connect with you personally.”
He quickly realized the need to connect more broadly with the community. He joined Black Boys Code, an organization that teaches and stimulates (science, technology, engineering, and math) in young children. He signed up with many other local and national organizations, including the Halifax Chamber of Commerce, the Black Business Initiative, CAMSC (Canadian, Aboriginal, and Minority Supplier Council), Digital Nova Scotia, Volta, and the Association of Nigerians in Nova Scotia.
“All these organizations helped me immediately connect with local businesspeople,” Adesalu says. What he found out was that technical knowledge alone wasn’t enough to make Microhills a success. “IT doesn’t bring revenue,” he says, “it’s what you do for other businesses.”
The company has performed well since then and his family has settled into their Nova Scotia lives successfully. His youngest son graduated from Citadel High School and would join Dalhousie in September to study applied computer science. His older daughter is already at Dalhousie studying neuroscience, and his eldest son is studying engineering and working part-time with him at Microhills.
“Nova Scotia is an aquatic paradise when you look at it. With the surrounding ocean, beautiful landscape, captivating countryside, numerous lakes, and harbors, Nova Scotia has it all. We’ve traveled around the world and been to bigger cities, but we all fell in love with Halifax at first sight.”
Adesalu says the future is bright for Microhills. The company just released its latest product, called Handyconnect, after more than two years of design and development.
It is the go-to web app for seamless sourcing of multiple service providers in real-time based on geo-location to get handyman jobs done with a community of diligent and verified service providers. The objective is to help in alleviating the pain of getting help with chores so that busy 9 to 5 workers and seniors can spend more time doing what they love doing best, saving cost from cost comparison.
Adesalu says he not only sees a bright future for his own company but for Nova Scotia as a whole. “There’s a very bright future for business in Nova Scotia because it’s getting recognized around the world. More immigrants and businesses are moving here.”
