Tonye Cole Recalls Living on Wife's Salary While Building Sahara Group

Businessman Tonye Cole, best known as the co-founder of Sahara Group, has shared the sacrifices he and his wife made in the early years of building his business, revealing that they survived on her salary for nearly three years while he invested everything he owned into the venture.

Speaking on the Afropolitan Podcast, Cole said he and his business partners poured all their savings into the business and agreed not to pay themselves salaries during the startup phase.

According to him, two of his business partners relied on proceeds from their clothing store to survive, while his wife, who was a medical doctor undergoing her housemanship at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), became the family's breadwinner.

"My wife was a medical doctor at the time, doing her housemanship at LUTH. For that period, we lived on her little salary. She was in Lagos, I was living in Port Harcourt. I had to trust her, and she had to trust me. She paid the school fees, the electricity bills and everything else while I focused on building the business," he said.

He said the couple went nearly three years without any income from the business itself.

"For about two and a half to three years, we took everything, all my savings, everything, and put it into the business. None of my partners or I earned anything from the business. We all had to survive and support ourselves from other sources," he said.

Cole said the experience taught him the importance of trust and sacrifice in marriage, adding that couples who genuinely believe in a shared vision should be willing to support one another.

"Today, I can afford everything. My wife is a trained woman; she doesn't have to work. The compounded interest of those sacrifices paid off. By far, compounded interest works beautifully," he added.