Who runs this practice, and why it exists.

My name is Adenrewaju Okupe. I am a Lagos-based business operator. For the last eight years I have been running, building and helping other people grow businesses on this continent. This practice is the place where everything I have learned doing that finally gets to sit in one room.

Why I see business this way

As a child, I used to open things up to see how they worked. Sometimes I put them back together. Often I didn't. My first website was built on Tripod before I was 14. I learned Q Basic around the same time. The same brain that wanted to know how a radio worked then wanted to know how a business worked later.

BAAP is what happens when you spend three decades looking at things that way. It is the framework I built to see businesses the way they actually behave, layer by layer, like the living things they are.

Why this practice exists

Eight years ago, my father's four businesses collapsed. He had built half of Lagos with his hands. Aluminium fabrication, woodwork, block making, construction. None of it survived. The reason was not lack of skill, lack of customers, or lack of capital. The reason was that the artisan ecosystem he depended on had quietly broken under him while he was still working in it.

That collapse is the reason SmartFix exists. It's also the reason I think the way I do about business. Most businesses don't fail loudly. They fail in their stem, quietly, while the leaves still look green. By the time anyone notices, it's structural, and structural problems can't be fixed with new leaves.

BAAP is the framework I built to see those structural problems before they become collapses. PilotAde Consults is the practice where I apply it on behalf of other founders.

The pivots

Before SmartFix, I was a motion graphics and video editor. I had just won a real estate gig that was going to pay me with a land allocation. Then my laptop crashed. I couldn't afford to replace it. The gig went elsewhere.

That kind of loss teaches you something the business books skip: businesses don't break because of one disaster, they break because the disaster meets a fragile structure. I'd built no roots in that practice. One laptop crash and I was done.

SmartFix was the pivot. The roots got deeper this time.

How I learned to lead

I led the Man O' War paramilitary cadet society at the University of Lagos, finishing as Delta Charlie Charlie — second-in-command of the entire campus chapter. Body guards, formation drills, the full structure. It taught me what most leadership books skip: real leadership is about formation under pressure, not slogans.

Years of studying how businesses work

I have spent years studying how businesses actually work, often by accompanying others through their own learning. The reading list of an MBA, applied to the streets of Lagos, taught me one thing clearly: most of it doesn't translate. BAAP is partly what I built once I stopped trying to make it translate.

About the name

I once wanted to be a pilot. I still am, in a way. The vehicle changed. Now I pilot ideas and solutions, refine them, and try to lead people through good or harsh weather. Mostly using analogies from nature, which never lie to you the way business jargon does.