Bonito Spa, running a physical business in Lagos
I founded and ran a spa in Lekki for about a year and a half. It is paused, not closed. The reasons are power, water and a road, and they are the story.
Context
In 2024 I opened a spa in Lekki, Lagos, and ran it for about a year and a half alongside my engineering work. It is the one thing on this site with no code in it.
Problem
Software fails in ways you can log. A physical business in Lagos fails in ways you can see from the street. I wanted to know whether I could run one: hire, schedule, keep the lights on, keep customers coming back, and make the numbers work.
Constraints
The estate controlled the power and the water. When either went, we did not get a say.
An inverter that could carry the lights and the small equipment, but not the full load when the estate supply was out for long.
An access road in poor condition, which decided how many people would make the trip twice.
A team that needed paying whether or not the road was passable that week.
Decisions and trade-offs
Open long hours. The spa ran around the clock, seven days. That is a staffing cost, and it was the right call for a neighbourhood where people’s free time does not line up with a nine to five.
Size the backup power to the real load, not the hoped-for one. The inverter covered the essentials and no more. Covering the full load would have meant a generator, fuel, noise and a different cost base. I chose the smaller system knowing it capped what we could run during an outage.
Pause rather than push. By 2025 the three constraints together, power, water and the road, were setting the ceiling on the business more than anything I did inside it. I paused it rather than pour money into problems I did not control. It is paused, not closed, and the difference matters to me.
What was hard
Not being able to fix the thing that was broken. In software, if the road is bad you build a better road. Here the road belonged to someone else.
Running a team of people who were not engineers, with rotas, cash and customers, while doing the engineering job in the same week.
Result
A year and a half of operating a real business with real staff and real customers in Lagos, and a clear-eyed decision to pause it.
What I took back to engineering: respect for anyone running a physical operation here, a sharper sense of which constraints are yours to change, and no patience for plans that assume the power stays on.