The 11-year-old question

What would become FourthCanvas in 2015 began on a casual evening walk two years earlier. At some point in the middle of random reflections on the mundane, a simple, random question popped up. As you are about to find out, there was nothing random about it.

I spent much of my childhood in my dad’s library, travelling wherever the illustrations in the encyclopedias and the endless versions of the Bible would take me. When I wasn’t behind those doors, I was turning the sheets of an annual almanac, amazed at how its photographs and colours changed from month to month. Who made these things? How did they decide what followed what? Why were some pages so pleasing to look at? Questions thought but never asked.

Bolaji grew up with a different view of the same world. In his dad’s basement, he watched his journalist-turned-newspaper-publisher father work with graphic designers on publications. He spoke little at home, mostly observing in silence as the adults did things he was curious to understand. What did they spend hours deliberating on? Why did these things matter? What was the value of these decisions? Questions pondered but never expressed.

At least Bolaji knew the term graphic designer. I would hear it only when I got to university.

By then, I had begun to make things of my own. I had cut pictures from my dad’s newspapers to decorate exercise books. I once made a winner’s shield from a sheet of glass and some paper, then organised a football competition so people could compete for it. Years later, I looked at the cover of my elder brother’s campus magazine and had more questions. Could the name stretch across the cover like those magazines I had seen at home? My brother encouraged me to learn graphic design. “If you have these many ideas, you could as well learn the craft.” From then on, CorelDRAW became the only ‘game’ I played on my laptop.

I began to design for almost anyone who asked. I also promised almost anyone that their work would be ready by 9am the following morning. Bolaji, who had become my roommate, saw what happened after those calls. I would go play tennis, join a football argument, wander around chat rooms on 2go, talk on the phone with undergraduates of the other gender, and then start to fall asleep. He would tap me and ask: “That thing you promised for 9am, what is the plan to deliver it seeing that you are going to sleep?”

I made the promises while Bolaji asked what it would take to honour them. Till date, it still feels that way, but today I’m a little bit more than just promise. And now we also have Tunji Ogunoye, Mary Afolabi and a few others in the leadership who feel like better mixes of us both, while bringing their own full selves to the table.

On one seemingly random evening, Bolaji and I walked, or say wandered down a crowded street right on the edge of the Federal University of Technology Akure campus, in search of food and meaning. As our eyes rolled at the busy, complicated, and unappealing signs and boards by the roadside, one question popped up that went beyond what to eat: “How much more, no matter how little, could these businesses be doing if they just looked a little better?”

It came to be on the back of several questions that came before it, while birthing even more, establishing, one question per time, the core ideology we would nurture for years before we could name it — care.

We certainly had no guide for building an agency. On Facebook and Google, we had found one or two examples we admired from faraway Lagos, and many more from London, whose distance we couldn’t even quantify. There was no academy or template to show us how to get from a student room in Akure to anything like them.

So we started in the form available to us. We leaned mattresses against walls to turn rooms into offices. At one point, we occupied a table in the corner of a photocopy shop. We tried one way of running the business, then another. Every new idea felt, briefly, like the one we had finally been looking for. Till date, we continue to hit “the golden idea!” We must have run the business in 11 different ways in 11 years. Every one builds on the one that came before it and helps to establish the one that follows.

My freelance work had carried the name Victor Gold Creations. When Bolaji became more involved, it became VGC Media. Then, in 2015, a friend of ours in Lagos, Adedeji Alebiosu, ran into one of our earliest employees, Nifemi Akinwamide and he was expressing how much belief he had in what we were up to, and wondered how much more we could achieve if we took things more seriously. Another question.

That week, I led several informal brainstorming sessions involving Bolaji, Nifemi, and Segun Oroyo, who was the other graphic designer on the team apart from me (and future co-founder with us on Fullgap). We decided it was time to run VGC Media like an agency that could go on to do really great things. For a start, we decided it had to die. Although they both moved on to other companies in the months after the restart, their names remain on the first page of the story now titled ‘FourthCanvas’. (Before you ask, there’s no special story to the ‘Fourth’. It just sounded perfect with ‘Canvas’, which meant to us a platform from which we could create just anything).

In those years, we set ourselves a goal of becoming one of the top 10 agencies in the world by 2025. 10 in 10 or nothing! Our ignorance of what it would require was as loud as the boldness with which we set the goal. We wouldn’t achieve the goal, but we would begin to build the frame, starting with Tunji Ogunoye by July 2016.

By September, before we had even clocked a year, I almost met my own end in a violent knife attack by armed robbers. I was standing by the roadside, typing an email on my phone to one of our design interns with feedback on their work. I survived by what I now know to be God’s grace.

Building the frame

Fresh from Obafemi Awolowo University, Tunji brought a level of execution speed we didn’t know existed in graphic design. I was not the example, and he didn’t need one. He then introduced us to other designers he had met on campus. First was Mary Afolabi, whose imagination stretched our range and whose care for younger designers gave their learning more shape. Then Ajayi Ayomide (AJ) came bearing questions about the business and its clients in what would eventually lead us into brand strategy. He and Opeyemi Olugbemiro, whom we had invited on board to give words to our journey, were the first brand strategists in FourthCanvas. Aluko drew us toward digital product work, and when he wasn’t drawing buttons, he was photographing our lives and work around the long wooden table we all huddled around in Oba-Ile, on the edge of Akure.

People came and went, as people do. But these five stayed long enough to help build a foundation beyond Bolaji and me. We began to find a rhythm, to give one another room to lead, and to say more clearly what we believed we were there to do. Around 2017, we put it into a mission: “to partner with good businesses to build great brands.” We understood more of that sentence than we had understood our top 10 goal. Still, we did not fully know it, but we were growing in understanding.

The years that followed tested that word partner.

A long agency relationship with Red Media Africa steadied our ship with consistent work and revenue, helping us make the move to Lagos. But it was not the kind of work that excited us at the time. Much of it was urgent, repetitive, and far from the adrenaline we felt helping new clients craft new brands. It was our first real introduction to accounts. To this day, I still don’t like the word, but I understand it and embrace the thinking behind it. It was, in fact, at the heart of what we were trying to build as partners.

Eventually, we left the engagement. We took a premature flight, off a limited runway. We were up for hard lessons.

What followed was a long struggle to keep the company moving. We tried new ways to run the business and took on work we were proud of, but the pressure made it difficult to keep people. Team members left, sometimes because we could not offer enough stability and sometimes because the uncertainty had become too heavy. Leadership began to feel low. We were asking people to believe in a future that we could not always see clearly ourselves.

I was also drawn further into a digital product we had started to build, called Fullgap. We had an idea to build a tool to manage our operations, from invoicing to contracts and project management. It quickly became a thing on its own and we invited Segun Oroyo as a co-founder. I struggled in those earlier days to efficiently share my attention and energy between both companies. At some point too, maybe due to creative restlessness or overconfidence, I also accepted the invite to become CMO of a startup as well. Good experience all around but crazy times! Each commitment made sense on its own, but together they left less time for FourthCanvas than the business needed. Bolaji and the team kept carrying the work, finding ways forward even when the company’s direction felt unclear and its resources were thin.

There were several junctures when FourthCanvas came to the brink of death. On the personal front, I also had to survive a personal adversity. I was definitely not going to be the person who would save the company. But each time, something held it together for a little longer: a project, a client, a person willing to stay, or the stubborn belief that the company still had a reason to exist. One thing was never guaranteed: survival.

Approaching our 10th year, we had yet another restart left in us.

The reset

By late 2024, the question from that walk was still with us. We had seen far more of what design could do for a business. We now had to ask whether FourthCanvas, as we had built it, could give that possibility the attention it deserved.

Off the back of a tumultuous year that had diminished my capacity to lead FourthCanvas, the business kept going because other people continued to believe in what we were building.

Mary was an important source of energy. So was Wilfred Alfred, who had joined us as a fellow and was becoming one of the clearest leadership voices on the team. He came on sales calls with me, listened closely, and returned with questions that showed how deeply he was thinking about the business. After two calls, I left the sales ‘department’ to him.

Towards the end of that year, I began to find my energy back. Bolaji was asking questions. Fortune was asking questions. We were trying to understand how we had arrived here and what we needed to change if FourthCanvas was going to become something more enduring.

One of the most consequential developments came from a retreat that almost never happened.

Bolaji is notorious for never taking leave. He works at almost any hour and has little separation between work and the rest of his life. Around his birthday, Oluremi and I decided to gang up against him. We booked him a few days away, removed him from meetings, and told him he was going to rest. He agreed reluctantly, then tried to join conversations from wherever he was. Each time, we removed him again.

We wanted him to have the rest he deserved. We got more than we had planned for.

Bolaji came back with a clearer way to think about the business. He wanted us to identify the few things its growth depended on and arrange them so that progress in one helped the others. Through several conversations, we arrived at what we called the 4PACS: Great People, Great Appearance, Great Customer Experience and Great Sales.

That gave us somewhere to put our attention. We began to review how we worked with and evaluated people. We looked again at what we had put into the world and whether it still represented us. We gave more shape to sales. And we asked what our clients actually experienced when they trusted us with their work.

At the same time, I had returned to another set of questions. What had remained true about FourthCanvas through all its different seasons? What did we want to reinforce now? The directors and I revisited our values and arrived at three: Lead, Care and Stretch, with Care at the centre.

Care had been with us from the beginning, even before we had a name for it. But we were now trying to give it a more deliberate place in how we worked and related with one another. It became a rallying point for our internal communications and began to find expression externally too, including in the way we closed our emails: With Care.

We needed to bring the rest of the team into this new thinking, so we organised a three-day retreat on an island. There was a lot of fun, from yoga and a French class to football, parties and an awards night where we recognised some of the people who had contributed remarkably to the team. In between these activities, we introduced the 4PACS, discussed our values and began to establish a shared understanding of what we were trying to build.

I remember the energy that followed. We had always had incredible people at FourthCanvas, but something about the clarity of what we were now asking of ourselves, and the deliberate effort to keep communicating and modeling it, seemed to stir a new level of ownership across the team.

Wilfred won Citizen of the Year, in recognition of the proactiveness and entrepreneurial spirit he had demonstrated. His growing voice was being actively celebrated and encouraged, and we began to see more people find the confidence to express theirs. People were asking questions, making suggestions, and taking initiative in ways we had not seen at that scale before.

Great Sales was chasing half a million dollar in revenue target for the year. Great Appearance was auditing our public-facing materials, archiving old content and questioning whether much of what we had put out in the past still represented the company we wanted people to encounter. Great People was reviewing our evaluation systems, developing new ones and reconsidering how we structured our relationships with talent. And across the business, we were asking more questions about how we could improve the experience of our clients.

We were making progress on several fronts, but Great Customer Experience was proving particularly difficult.

Our initial thinking had focused largely on gestures, the thoughtful things we could do to make clients feel appreciated and cared for. There was value in all of that, but as we examined the work more closely, we had to confront a more fundamental problem. The quality of the work itself still had a long way to go, and we had to be more deliberate about where we put our limited attention.

During an earlier difficult period, we had moved much of our creative team to a contractor model because the business could no longer afford their full attention. That decision helped us survive. But it also made it harder to build the depth of work we wanted to be known for. We had a rethink.

We began to bring people back into more committed engagements and to ask more of ourselves. Clients came to us for the work; whatever else we did to make clients feel cared for, the work remained at the centre. It was what they came to us for, and we had to justify that trust. Everything changed in the pursuit of that.

The changes began to attract projects that demanded that level of commitment.

After 10 years of using technology to transform payments and becoming a shining example for the ecosystem while at it, Paystack was trusting us to build the brand for the parent group that would help make room for a bigger decade.

Established in 1999, TLCOM had invested in some of Africa’s most ambitious technology companies and had more than $300 million in assets under management. They were trusting us to help bridge the distance that their veteran status had inadvertently created.

Long before this time, we had been trusted by the likes of Piggyvest (2019), Nomba (2021) and many more highly consequential projects but now the stakes were getting only higher, and we were better prepared than ever.

Still, we mostly thought about projects, and the joy that came with every new opportunity to make chart new parts. At one point, I argued against Bolaji’s proposition that we sought more retainers. All I could think about was the urgency and repetitiveness of it. On the other hand, new work gave us case studies and the kind of attention that might lead to more opportunities. I made my case with a lot of confidence.

Then Bolaji and other team members on his side (I remember Wilfred and Oluremi Akinfaderin at least) brought us back to the sentence we had written years earlier: to partner with good businesses to build great brands. Was it really partnership if it ended when the new identity was delivered? Isn’t the continuing, sometimes less exciting work of helping a business use what we had built together part of building great brands? I had no answers that supported what had quickly become my old stance. He had my attention. Partnership over time is where brands become, and the one-time work of identity design was only the beginning. I always knew this in theory but now I had to face the reality of it.

We had this rethink around our 10-year mark. Today, retainers form about 65% of our revenue, just about a year in. That is the story of FourthCanvas, of one 11-year-old question leading to many others.

At the 2025 timeline to become one of the top 10 agencies in the world, we are nowhere near it. It’s 2026, we still aren’t. We’ve also stopped looking. Now we are answering a different set of questions: What type of value do the top agencies in the world create for their clients? Are we doing our absolute best work for our clients? What would a world-class agency look like from Lagos, Nigeria? What would happen if we did our work with the utmost care and rejected good on the way to care?

It all comes together

11 years in, these scattered past experiences are coming together as wisdom for the future. Kids are becoming parents. Pleasure is becoming joy. Excitement is maturing into care. Like my mentor, Mr Kola Oyeneyin told Bolaji and I when he prayed for us on the phone in commemoration of our 11th anniversary, we are now past the decade of survival and one step into the decade of scale.

Indeed, we have taken our first step towards global scale, with Tunji Ogunoye now setting up and leading our operations in the UK, and eventually across Europe. We were all just kids when he first came on board one Saturday evening to help us deliver urgent flyers for a Presidential campaign in Senegal. The project had come through Red Media Africa on a phone call that morning, when we were still reporting at the police station that armed robbers had stolen our laptops from our makeshift office. That’s a whole story on its own but then I can still watch us sitting at a restaurant called BKFC in Akure just a while ago and now Tunji is coordinating our expansion as Director in the UK. It all comes together.

We are also finding the scale in the places we eventually want it for the most — here in Africa. We now have clients in Kenya and South Africa, with the latter reminding me of one of my favourite full-circle moments. In 2016 I had asked one of the most prominent tech founders in Lagos why they did their rebrand with a South African agency and did not consider doing it locally. He went on and on about the quality and depth of the process. He was right. Indeed there were hardly any local agencies focused on brand design. I told him we would do something about it. Imagine my joy when about a decade later, we won a deal that several South African agencies were actively considered for, even though we charged the highest. Scale.

For a long time, we tried to create momentum. Now, the business is moving faster than the people leading it. It was Wilfred Alfred who first put it in these words, disqualifying his own abilities in a certain capacity he leads for us but committing to catching up with what our trajectory now requires, getting ready for what FourthCanvas is becoming. He was speaking for all of us, starting with me.

That asks more of us than enthusiasm. We are learning faster, putting our thinking and processes into words, and making firmer decisions about talent and leadership. Recently Oluremi developed a decision log to track how and why we make our major decisions. Tunji is creating new internal structures and challenging models that had looked right for years. Mary is pushing work that only appears great to actually becoming so. Bolaji is steadying us up financially like we’re running a fund, working with the ever trust-inspiring Timilehin Omotoyinbo who was there with us in the hostel when we met back in 2012.

We are committed to making the company capable of delivering on the trust people now place in it. Some days, that means making an exciting new choice. On other days, it means doing a familiar thing with more care and attention than we gave it before.

Once in a while I wonder what had been the most critical factor to the progress we have made in 11 years. I have not been the most exceptional leader and most of our most important decisions have come from other people outside of Bolaji and I. I think the only thing we can take credit for is creating the right culture that enables others. And we can only take some credit, because it is the people who have also strengthened the culture itself.

People have always been able to trust us, question us, disagree with us, push for new things and get recognized and encouraged for sticking their necks out. It’s why these days I’ve been thinking more about culture because it seems like everything else sits on it. I do not think we have finished building that culture or we are in a perfect place. But it’s one of the my personal top priorities as other leaders take the wheel of the actual scale and growth.

For years, we wanted to be one of the top ten agencies in the world, and while the scale of that ambition remains relevant, it was a distraction from the question that mattered about how much was possible when we partnered with our clients to help them become more.

Now we know better. We know it would begin with care across the board, from how we treated ourselves to how we treated the work. We know it would take more attention to understanding how best to serve our clients as we help them become more decisive in the moments that define their journeys the most. From when Raenest needed to merge without breaking, to when Ventures Platform needed to reinvent itself on the back of so much valuable equity already gained organically, ambitious teams are increasingly trusting us with these moments.

The one question continues to evolve. This is the where it is at the moment:

“What is possible if we continue to insist that good is not enough?”