During his second year at Lagos Business School, Pan-Atlantic University, Oluwadare Ibitoye found himself becoming increasingly fascinated by how businesses work.
Inside the classroom, the answers appeared straightforward. But why did so many promising ones struggle to scale? Courses in Operations Strategy and Management Accounting explained how companies optimise costs, improve productivity and create competitive advantages. Case studies that showed what efficient organisations looked like.
Outside the classroom, reality looked different. Businesses around him weren’t failing because they lacked customers or ambition. They were struggling because they were running systems in siloes.
Inventory sat in one application. Attendance records were kept separately from payroll. Sales in another. Customer relationships lived inside WhatsApp chats. Accounting was often done at month-end, sometimes inaccurately, and managers spent more time reconciling numbers than making decisions.
“The further I looked, the more I realised people were managing businesses with fragments,” Ibitoye says. “Everyone had software. Businesses struggled with interoperability.”
That contradiction stayed with him. Because Nigeria doesn’t have a shortage of software. It has a shortage of connected systems.
“You cannot optimise operations when information is fragmented,” Ibitoye says. “Strategy becomes difficult when there is no single source of truth.”
He quickly realised this was not a technology problem. Software existed. Plenty of it. But much of it was either too expensive for small businesses, too fragmented, or built around assumptions that did not reflect how businesses in Nigeria actually operated.
“The tools weren’t designed for our environment,” he says. “The tax structures are different. Compliance requirements are different. Even the way businesses grow here is different.”
That observation would eventually become Opsuite. Not another software tool, but what Ibitoye describes as a business operating system designed from the ground up for African businesses.
Before development began, throughout 2025, Ibitoye embedded himself with businesses. He observed how they managed inventory, tracked staff attendance, processed payroll, recorded sales and engaged customers.
Data was constantly being entered twice. Teams relied on spreadsheets. Decisions were made with incomplete information. Business owners often discovered problems long after they had already happened.
He came away with one conviction: businesses should not have to spend their energy moving information from one place to another.
Today, Opsuite brings together eleven modules into one platform. Inventory management, point of sale, accounting, customer relationship management, analytics, digital signage, attendance management, payroll and visitor management are all connected through a single dashboard.
The idea is simple. A sale should not only record revenue. It should automatically update inventory, create accounting entries, capture customer information and attribute performance to the employee involved.
“One event should trigger multiple actions,” Ibitoye says. “People should focus on running their businesses, not on transferring data between systems.”
Before going public, Opsuite piloted the platform with three businesses: a salon, a gym and a technology company. Each started with just a few modules. One business saw revenue increase by 145% within two months. For another business, the impact was more about what products moved fastest, where losses were occurring and which staff members were driving sales.
Integrating systems allowed the owners to spend less time supervising daily operations and more time making business decisions. The common feedback across the pilots was not “automation” or “efficiency.” It was clarity.
“Opsuite helps us manage our clients, staff and sales. Now we always know exactly how much we have made in a month,” says Esther Otenaike, owner of Ellasplace Salon, Spa and Ladies Gym in Abuja.
For Dream Catchers Academy, the platform became part of preparing for scale. “A lot has become easier,” says Executive Director Seyi Oluyole. “The software is helping us position ourselves as an organisation ready to scale.”
One area where Opsuite has gained attention is compliance. When Nigeria’s Tax Act 2025 came into effect, many small businesses found themselves struggling to understand the changes. Payroll systems were slow to adapt, while others simply continued relying on spreadsheets.
Opsuite’s payroll infrastructure was built around the new framework, automatically handling PAYE calculations, pension deductions, NHF and NHIS contributions. Businesses with annual turnover below ₦50 million can also generate financial records aligned with applicable tax provisions.
For Ibitoye, compliance should not be an afterthought. “Business owners already have enough problems to solve,” he says. “They shouldn’t have to worry about whether payroll calculations are accurate or if their books are compliant.”
Opsuite (opsuite.io) launched publicly on May 1, 2026, with a seven-day free trial and pricing tiers designed for businesses at different stages of growth. But for Ibitoye, the ambition extends beyond software.
Across Africa, millions of businesses sit in an uncomfortable middle ground, too sophisticated for notebooks and spreadsheets, but unable to access enterprise systems built for large corporations.
Yet these businesses form the backbone of the continent’s economy. “The challenge isn’t that African entrepreneurs lack ambition,” he says. “The challenge is that many are trying to scale without the systems that make scale possible.”
Nearly two years after sitting in an MBA classroom studying operational and strategic excellence, Ibitoye believes he is still chasing the same idea. Businesses cannot improve what they cannot see. And perhaps one of Africa’s biggest opportunities lies not in creating more entrepreneurs, but in giving existing ones the data-informed tools they need to grow.
