Profile #24: Bukky Adejobi – co-founder of Awa’Tori and career coach

Hi Bukky. Thanks for joining me today. To start us off, please tell us a little about you.

Bukky: I was born in Nigeria, partially raised there, moved to Canada and have been in Japan for approximately nine years. In my nine years in Japan, I spent one year in Osaka as an exchange student at Kansai Gaidai, two years in Kyoto for my master’s studies at Doshisha University, and in 2017, I made the move to Tokyo with my dog. Somewhere in my time in Tokyo, I met my partner whom I now live with.

Firstly, let’s talk about Canada. What was your experience growing up there after moving from Nigeria?

Quite recently, I realised that I have been in Japan longer than I have lived in Canada.

Moving to Canada was eye-opening. I would say it was the beginning of my self-discovery. In Nigeria, there was just one colour, one “type” of people and one way of speaking. And then we moved to Canada, and it was like the world vomited colour and then you also began to see and recognize your colour and accent. I did not experience racism, but I became very aware of the differences and the way of thinking.

The biggest culture shock for me was the mental maturity of the kids my age – 13 at the time. My observation of 13 years old at the time was the sense of sexual maturity. I had friends make sexual jokes and talk about sexual experiences. On the flip side, as a 13-year-old in Nigeria, I had the mental maturity to have a sense of responsibility – to be responsible for myself and that of my younger sibling. We knew of sex, but our priorities were much different! Aside from that, it was great getting acclimated to Canada.

You gained your bachelor’s degree in business administration from Trent University in Ontario in 2014 and then decided to come to Japan for your MBA at Doshisha University. Why Japan and what kind of career did you have in mind for the future?

Doshisha was my second time in Japan and for a different reason than the first time. 

My first time in Japan was in 2012, as an exchange student at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka. Japan was recommended by my Japanese friend who was completing her bachelor’s degree at my university. At the time, my first choice had been France, as I was studying French, but due to various reasons, it did not work out. At that point, I was open to going WHEREVER, and so when Japan was recommended, I thought “why not?”! The idea of studying in Japan interested me because I would be the only student from my school going to Japan in that academic calendar. I felt that people tend to stick together if they study abroad from the same university and I was intrigued by the idea of being “alone” in a completely foreign place, with an unknown language. So, I took the recommendation with the intent of only staying for one semester, but I enjoyed the experience and stayed for a year.

A big part of that experience that led me to stay was my business class teacher, who is now my mentor. During my year at Gaidai, I was introduced to the business and entrepreneurship world, which opened me up to the possibilities and opportunities of the corporate world.

I was studying Business Administration at the time but was still uncertain of what I wanted to do as a career, so I decided to pursue MBA opportunities to explore my career options with a business degree. After months of research, and cost comparisons, I decided to return to Japan for the second time with a great recommendation and a 50% tuition scholarship.

At this point, I still wasn’t 100% certain what career I wanted to pursue, only a thought that “it’d be nice to run a business”. By the end of my master’s, the only thing that was clear to me was my desire to start what has now become Awa’Tori.

We’ll come back to Awa’Tori in a moment, but before that, you joined a multinational recruiting company as a recruiter after your MBA in 2017. Why recruiting and how did working in the industry affect you and your future career plans?

Agency recruitment was never something I considered, but I toyed with the idea of consulting, specifically something in investment banking, and M&A. 

After completing my master’s and doing some soul-searching for a year in Canada, I decided Japan was where I could make an impact. I reached out to a number of connections I had made while in Japan, one of whom was the CFO of Armani Japan at the time, who referred me to a recruiter from his network. Thinking it was an introduction for an in-house position, I took the leap and made a 1-week trip to Japan to meet with the managers of Allegis Group Japan at the time.

Speaking with them, I saw it as an opportunity to learn about the different types of jobs that exist in the corporate world. As someone uncertain as to the path to take in the in-between of figuring out how to make my goal a reality, the opportunity with Allegis Group seemed like the perfect fit for the in-between.

What did you think you gained from your experience in recruiting?

From my experience in recruiting, I gained several key skills and insights. Among these, the most significant are my abilities to listen attentively, interpret underlying messages, and communicate effectively. As a recruiter, engaging with both clients and candidates, it’s crucial to understand the unsaid. Very often, clients struggle to articulate their exact needs in a candidate in alignment with their organisational goals. It’s more about a certain ‘feel’ they seek but can’t quite express. In instances like this, my role as a recruitment consultant was to read between the lines and ask pointed questions to uncover these latent requirements. Without this skill, matching the right candidate to the client’s needs becomes a formidable challenge. This skill is equally important when dealing with candidates. For instance, a candidate with a background in HR management might not consider an HR Business Partner opportunity, viewing it as a step down due to the job title. However, depending on the scope within a particular company, this role could lead to more significant positions, like a country manager, or offer experiences such as managing larger teams and making a broader impact. Conversely, some candidates seek lower-grade roles, desiring less responsibility. Understanding these nuances is critical. Moreover, companies often overlook candidates like a Talent Acquisition Specialist for an HR Business Partner role, not seeing the potential fit. Here, a consultant’s role is to bridge this gap by understanding both the client’s needs and the candidate’s capabilities, and recognizing when they align.

A key realization from my recruiting career is that neither companies nor candidates fully comprehend each other’s present and future potential. This lack of complete understanding underpins the importance of a consultant’s role in the recruitment process. These experiences and skills acquired in recruiting have significantly influenced my career path, leading me towards coaching, where these skills are invaluable.

After leaving recruiting in 2018, you co-founded Awa’Tori, with the mission of bridging the gap between African and Japanese creative industries. Tell us a little about Awa’Tori – what do you do, how do you do it, and what would you like to achieve?

The name Awa’Tori was coined by my co-founder Seiko Mbako and is a play on words in Japanese and Pidgin English, one of the most commonly spoken languages in Africa. In Japanese, it translates into 合わせる and 通り, and in Pidgin English means Our Story.

Awa’Tori is a B2B and B2C creative consulting company that plays in the middle between the African and Japanese creative industries. From fashion, art, music and film, to culture.

Since we started in 2019, we have mainly been focused on the fashion space as that was where a majority of our connections were at the time. We have successfully held five fashion week events under our FACE A-J project, four at Rakuten Tokyo Fashion Week and one at Lagos Fashion Week, introducing African brands to the Japanese market and Japanese brands to the Nigerian market.

During my MBA thesis – Market Entry for Niche Designers into the Japan Fashion Industry, I postulated that simply participating in fashion weeks was not the best or cost-effective way to enter the market. So we had always planned to take things beyond the fashion shows. 

Two months ago, we launched our e-commerce website that predominantly carries African fashion brands and is focused on the sustainability of the value and supply chain, exclusivity, and interactive storytelling of the ethos of each brand. We work outside the fashion industry calendar of Spring Summer & Autumn Winter collections, on a Trunk show/made-to-order model where we carry a select number of designers for a set period during which customers can order. Only after the order period is over that we have the designers make the pieces. We have no inventory.

Our goal is to go back to doing the shows but in conjunction with the e-commerce platform. Beyond this, we aim to become the go-to agency in Japan and Asia for organising and facilitating impactful, informative and entertaining creative industries collaborations between the African and Japanese markets, and expand to other aspects of the creative space like art, cuisine, music and film.

Aside from Awa’Tori, earlier this year, I also co-founded an AI consulting business, innovAItions, with my partner Dennis Ilic, to help bring innovative AI solutions to Japan, and the reverse, from Japan to the world, with a focus on SMEs. 

Having been in the tech industry for the last 2.5 years through Code Chrysalis, I have learnt a bit about the industry and software development. And with Dennis coming from an aerospace engineering background and successfully bringing 500 EVs into Japan with B-ON and also having freshly launched a business helping fleet operators electrify, eMotion Fleet, in Japan, he basically lives and breathes tech. Right now, there is so much going on in the world of AI outside and inside Japan, which is why we decided to leverage our internationality to help bring existing products to Japan and help Japanese SMEs in the AI space expand overseas.

Our first project is to bring a German-made meeting summary and note-taking software, jamie to Japan. In a society that has shifted more and more towards working remotely and having meetings on a daily basis, it can be challenging to remember everything that was said during the meeting and difficult to take note of every important detail. Jamie uses the audio in- and output of your device to summarise the key points of the meeting in your preferred language (Japanese, English, Chinese, French, German and a few more), generate action items and provide transcripts taking note of each speaker’s language. Furthermore, jamie does not store any audio recordings, the audio is immediately deleted after it’s transferred to text. Since it works purely based on audio, it works with any meeting tool, and even offline meetings.

innovAItions in a completely different world from Awa’Tori, but they overlap in some ways, and I am very excited to see how they both evolve.