I’m Adetobi Lawuyi - and I’ve had more than one life.

I started early. Long before any career, I grew up working weekends at my family’s pharmacy and supermarket in Lekki Phase 1 - one of the well-known ones, before it closed. Business wasn’t something I studied first. It was something I lived. During my bachelor’s degree holidays I was already interning with top real estate firms - Diya Fatimilehin & Co, Estate Links - learning how transactions work and how people make decisions about value.

Then came finance. Treasury. I traded bonds, treasury bills, and interbank instruments, and represented my organisation as a market analyst on CNBC Africa. It was the kind of work that sharpens you quickly - you either learn to read a room or you don’t last.

Then I went back to school. An MBA from IE Business School in Madrid - and stayed on the other side of it, joining IE as Associate Director covering the Middle East and Africa region. I held a CFA Level 1 alongside all of this, because the version of me that grew up in a pharmacy doesn’t really know how to stop.

Then I came home to Lagos and built something of my own.

TravelShopNG is a travel retail business. TravelShop Corporate - built on the foundation of The Pamper Trap Company, which I founded in 2017 - is a corporate gifting operation serving financial institutions, multinationals, and organisations that understand the value of getting it right. I have spent nine years building both, quietly and seriously.

Over the past year I’ve been working at a different kind of intersection - between business operations and AI adoption. Not as a theorist. As a business owner who uses these tools daily and teaches others to do the same. I’ve facilitated sessions for financial services organisations, legal firms, and companies across the public and private sector on AI literacy and workforce upskilling. I speak on panels about the future of travel, entrepreneurship, and what it looks like when someone leaves a structured career to build on their own terms. I’ve been written about. I’ve been on podcasts. I’ve been in the room.

My focus in sessions and everywhere else; is the gap between awareness and action. The moment something shifts from intimidating to useful. That’s the moment I’m always working toward.

This blog is not a CV. It is something harder to explain - an attempt to find the pattern underneath everything. The things our parents taught us at the dinner table. The way cities change and we change with them. The tools we adopt and the habits they become before we notice.

I write once a week, at my own pace, for the pleasure of it.

If something here stays with you, that’s enough.