the long version.
I got obsessed with solving them properly.
Most people's stories start the same way. Zero to hero. Impossible odds. Built it from nothing with twenty dollars and a dream. If that's what you're expecting, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I wasn't broke. I wasn't struggling. I wasn't fighting my way out of anything.
I was just obsessed.
The obsession started before I even had words for it. As a kid, I was the one adults called troublesome. I broke everything. Toys, appliances, gadgets, electronics. If I could get my hands on it, I was taking it apart. Adults saw a destructive child. I needed to see inside the thing.
My grandfather was the only person who understood that. He would travel abroad, bring things home, and within a few days I would have them in pieces on the floor. He never stopped me. He never even flinched. I think he saw something everyone else missed, that the kid who keeps taking things apart is the kid who eventually learns how to put things together properly.
To be honest, most of the stuff I took apart never got put back together. It usually ended up wasted. But the understanding stuck, even if the gadget didn't survive.
School was more of the same. My science teachers said I asked too many questions, and they meant it as a compliment. I was named the best library user in my school. A very specific award to win. It tells you everything about where I was spending my time while everyone else was on the football pitch getting good at FIFA.
To this day, when I play my friends at FIFA, the scoreline usually looks something like 8 to 1. And not in my favour. I made my trade-offs early. I can't beat anyone at FIFA, but I can tell you exactly why a business is bleeding money in under an hour. I'm at peace with that.
The curiosity never stopped. It just got bigger. Books. Documentaries. Space. Physics. Business. The stock market. Anything with a system underneath it that I could take apart. Same impulse I had as a five-year-old with a screwdriver. The only thing that changed was the size of the things I was opening up.
At some point the question sharpened into something specific. Why do some people win while others, doing the exact same thing, stay stuck? Not theoretically. Specifically. What is structurally different about the ones who make it?
I didn't just read about it. I tested everything.
Over the years I've owned and operated multiple businesses. I built a media company. I ran videography and photography businesses. I owned a textile and fashion accessories business. I spent two years trading forex. A very specific kind of education. Forex doesn't teach you strategy. It teaches you what happens when you make decisions under real pressure with real money and real consequences. You learn fast or you lose fast. I did both.
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Start with the free Self-Diagnostic →I also spent a year as a brand strategist for a fashion business. Came in, helped them build a real foundation. Strategy, positioning, structure. That foundation held. Today they're one of the most successful fashion businesses in our city. That's the engagement I'm most proud of, because the work outlasted me. That's always the test.
But here's what I want to be honest about. I have failed a lot more than I have succeeded. And I mean a lot more. Not a close ratio. Most of what I tried didn't work. Businesses burned out. Ideas collapsed. Some things just quietly stopped being viable and I had to walk away.
The difference is I never let a failure stay a failure. They say the only failure that remains a failure is the one you don't learn from. I took that literally. Every single time something went wrong, I sat with it until I understood exactly why. I skipped the excuses and dug for the structural reason. What was missing. What was misaligned. What I should have built before I started scaling.
People who win never truly know why they win. People who lose always learn why they lost.
That quote rewired how I think. I chased failure on purpose. Most people avoid mistakes. I ran straight into them. Every loss showed me what not to do and compressed years of learning into weeks. A failed business that costs you six months teaches you more than an MBA that costs you two years. I've had enough of those to have the equivalent of several MBAs. I just also have the scars to show for it.
And the pattern kept repeating. Every business I looked at, mine or anyone else's, broke in the same places. Not approximately. Exactly. The same six places, failing in predictable ways. Marketing was invisible. Sales had no pipeline. The offer was underpriced or poorly packaged. Operations lived entirely in the founder's head. Finance was a black box everyone was afraid to open. And the founder was the bottleneck. The one part nobody wanted to look at, because looking means the mirror.
People around me have said for years that Omar always finds a way. Not because I'm the smartest person in the room. Because my approach has always been unconventional. I don't look at the obvious answer. I look underneath it and ask whether the structure holding it up is actually sound. Most of the time, it isn't. Most of the time, the thing people think is broken is a symptom of something deeper nobody examined, because everyone was too busy reacting to the surface.
I read hundreds of business books along the way. Genuinely, hundreds. Most were useless. Not because the ideas were bad, but because they were written by people who'd never tested them inside a business that could actually fail. Theory is comfortable. Theory doesn't survive contact with a real business with real employees, real bills, and a founder who hasn't slept properly in three months.
So I stopped reading and started building. Company after company. Failure after failure, each one faster than the last because the failures were compressing years of learning into weeks.
Then something shifted. People started asking for help. Friends at first. Then business owners I barely knew. Then, strangely, people further ahead than me. Not because I called myself an expert. I never did. But the advice worked. I tested that too, because I test everything. I worked with a few people for free, just to see if I could take what I'd learned from my own failures and get consistent results in someone else's business. I could. One of those clients brought in two more without me asking. And those two brought in more.
That's when it clicked. This wasn't just obsession anymore. It was a skill. Real, transferable, repeatable. I could look at any business, see where the structure was broken, and tell the founder exactly what to fix and in what order. Not once. Over and over.
The part where it worked.
The failures taught me. These proved it.
- H Flavs, Orlando. Losing money every month and ready to close. Break-even in 90 days, in a slow month.
- DiveIN Media, Bangalore. Founder buried in daily fires. Operations now run without him, and the clients pay properly.
- Cinnamona, Abuja. Made money and watched it vanish. Now makes more and keeps more.
- A fashion brand, in our city. Came in for strategy and structure. The foundation held. Today it's one of the most successful in the city.
Today I run Sargasso.
I work with founders running businesses that feel harder than they should. Where the effort is high and the clarity is low. Where the founder is working twelve-hour days and the business still isn't moving. Where the team is growing but the chaos is growing faster. Where revenue is coming in but the money is leaking out just as fast.
Wins are easy to talk about. Work with me because I've failed more times than most people will admit publicly, and I kept the receipts. I've watched businesses collapse, stall, leak money, and burn out. Not other people's — mine. I've made the wrong moves, in the wrong order, for the wrong reasons, and paid for every one of them.
That gave me something more valuable than confidence. It gave me judgment. The kind you can only get from being wrong enough times that the right answer becomes obvious. A deep understanding of what not to do, what actually matters, and which mistakes cost the most.
If you're tired of learning everything the hard way, that's what the Diagnostic is for.
Omar Faruc, Founder · Sargasso