admin
Passion, determination and hard work always give birth to success. This was the case with Tobias and Titus Igwe, twins CEOs of Speedmeals Catering Ltd. The 31-year-old twins from Ebonyi state started our as office cleaners before losing their father In 2009 to an accident. Upon the death of their father, they were saddled with the responsibility to fund their studies in UNILAG, and also to take care of their mum and seven younger siblings.
Looking at the harsh situation, Titus dropped out of school while Tobias deferred his admission for one academic year. They both set out and acquired skills in cake baking and also did a brief entrepreneurship programme at the Fate Foundation.
When sales was difficult, they decided to give children free cakes on Sundays to share with their parents with the message “twins make cakes”. This triggered orders and opened doors to bigger opportunities as they ventured into wedding cakes and offering outdoor catering services.
After taking short trainings in catering, they established Speedmeals Catering Ltd, a food company with N50,000 they saved after the burial of their dad.
The company has grown steadily,and the twins have won many awards along the way including being selected as Africa’s brightest young minds by the Bridge Leadership Foundation in 2012 and nominated by African Awards for entrepreneurship as “Outstanding Small and Growing Business in Africa 2012, They were selected as 2015 KMA award winners and also selected among 1000 Best Growing Business Africa By Tony Elumelu Foundation with a grant of $5000.
The Igwe twins have trained over 365 unemployed youths through their opportunity of a lifetime project. They also launched the Yeast Project, a job creation strategy with a vision to create 20 million jobs and have organized job fairs to connect entrepreneurs, buyer, employers and employees.
According to Tobias, one of the twins: “One of the things we have learnt on the journey of entrepreneurship is that one of the main attributes of a successful entrepreneur is to have passion because as we have found, it is only our passion that keeps us going when the chips are down. Failure has been part of the journey. We have failed in recruiting people and in other areas of administration. But our passion has kept us going. We had people who never believed in us and they did not take us serious. We didn’t have market access to sell our products and we didn’t have funds too”.
