Inspirational Alumnus - MyAIESECStory

Welcome...

Hello guys, you are welcome to the maiden edition of MyAIESECStory of Inspirational Alumnus of AIESEC in Nigeria. His name is Jubril Juma of AIESEC Calabar and he was one of wonderful individuals who changed the face of AIESEC Calabar in between 2009-2011. His story is indented below. I hope he inspires you. 

HisAIESECStory 

Hi, 

My name is Jubril Juma. My AIESEC story? The problem is where to start... 

I joined AIESEC in 2008 because all my friends at the time were joining it, and they sold it to me as an interesting global organization. I did not belive them and I thought it was a scam but still joined though. I was and have always been entrepreneurial, but I was terrible at managing people and I knew that to build a great company I would need to learn how to do this. So that was also another reason for joing- AIESEC being a place you could experiment and fail without the world killing you. If you know anything about AIESEC Calabar back in the days, you would know that was one of the worst performing LCs (we had just been reopened by the MC). I was a sales team member for Project ASK. And we tried to do stuff but not much really happened. Then came a conference. Had never been to any of the famous "conferences" before and I was broke at the time so I borrowed just to go for the conference. Still my best conference! Had a fantastic time, was blown away and came back really super charged after seeing other LCs activities and seeing regular guys doing super smart things. And that is where my AIESEC story really started. 

Immediately after the conference were our LC’s elections, and so I decided to run for LCVP ER. I won, and within the first 2 months I was able to seal a couple of partnerships (the first AIESEC Calabar had ever had). I also won the best EB member for that year. But I still was not great at managing people (all my team members quit), so I decided to run for LCP. It was a tight election, but at the end of the day I won and so set about the task of building AIESEC Calabar. Not much had changed since I had joined (we owed the MC 2 years dues, membership was less than 15 members, and pretty not much else), so I decided it was time to re-strategize and do things differently. I built a different EB team, and then we decided that we were going to treat AIESEC Calabar like a company. Yes, we were still nonprofit but we were going to be entrepreneurial in our approach. Any decision to be taken had to pass through the "what is the return on investment" checklist. And so began our journey. I remember back then my fellow LCPs laughing at my team and the way we were doing things, the MC seriously fighting with us for not following the plan they had outlined for us, and even the infighting within my own team (I had to fire one of EB members who also happened to be a very close friend). I honestly thought I was going to fail. Luckily though, I had enough team and organizational building materials from the conferences I had attended to guide me. So I held on and after a couple of months, things normalized and little success started trickling in. Our team started to movein unison, we weresigning partnerships everywhere, our talent pipeline numbers wererising and money was coming in. And then we started breaking records- we hosted a Global Village, membership grew to 50 active members (and later to 73), we paid off our debts to the MC, became well known in Cross River State, won 2 national awards from AIESEC Nigeria, had over 300% growth in exchanges amongst other things! And all this was achieved in 7months! Looking back I can say that the one thing that made all this possible was our decision to take AIESEC as a business, give equals take- if I give this amount of time to AIESEC I am getting this amount of development from AIESEC. 

 I later went on to being a member of the 12/13 AIESEC Nigeria MC. It was a different experience, had a couple of success there also (restructured sales on the MC, had a 68% increase in corporate partnerships, and started off the first member to member learning program around business development and sales). 

So that is my AIESEC XP. It has been about 3 years now since AIESEC, and I am still using knowledge I gained in my investing activities. I still look for returns on investments, still look for companies with great teams, and I still look for impossible odds and brave fools who decide to change the status quo.

Thank you very much for reading. I hope you were inspired.

Still your guy,
Mojolaoluwa Keshiro,
TM Intel. & Alumni managment,
AIESEC Lagos 17/18