How hospitality brand is mentoring next generation

It was his dream the current Co-Chief Operating Officer of Quilox made him decide that working with its founder, Honourable Shina Peller, to build a top of mind brand within Nigeria’s luxury nightlife niche. With over a decade on his shoulder, SholaQuilox is proud of his feat but he is not also oblivious of the lessons he has earned every step of the way.

Due to the openness of the Quilox Brand, Farinloye is also able to extend himself by crafting brands outside Quilox. He is also the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Vibe Tribe Limited, and CEO of Stopover Restaurant/Lounge. These shows that apart from the culture curated at Quilox, Vibe Tribe and Stopover benefit immensely from the duplication of excellent culture.

Farinloye is not resting on his laurels, he wants to see other hospitality brands gain traction, provide quality service and retain customer satisfaction that align with international standards.

“There is really no point in learning everything I have learnt and keeping it for myself,” he said.

For SholaQuilox, there is a need to take advantage of the global attention on Nigeria, and build proper standards and a service culture for the Nigerian nightlife industry. Because a poor nightlife culture, he believes, “will reflect poorly on you regardless of how impeccable your own brand’s service is, and a good culture with create a positive impression of you too.”

The nightlife economy can be fraught with challenges. It houses both high-profile, politically exposed persons, celebrities and their influential fans, professionals who are looking for spaces to cool off steam from the stress of office engagements, among other profiles.

SholaQuilox maintains that it takes experience, strategy and systems to balance managing the expectations of the different people that throng the nightclubs, lounges and hotels. It also takes discipline to ensure security and empathy to sustain trust among the people.

The potential of Nigeria’s nightlife and hospitality is huge but it remains stalled by poor service culture. The nightlife continues to thrive despite the gnawing socioeconomic and security challenges.

In 2024, MO Africa Advisory stated that $4.32 billion was spent during the Detty December festivities in Lagos alone, with 60 per cent being domestic travelers. In 2025 alone, Moniepoint reported that Nigerians spent between N360 to N900 million in clubs, lounges, nightlife centres, and night time food vendors.

SholaQuilox believes that the industry can still grow in leaps and bounds with more investment in professionalism, standards and the overall delivery of quality service. It is this philosophy that has guided the Osun-born Chief Operating Officer in his relationship with the people he mentors.

“He never made you feel small for not knowing something,” says one young event designer who worked under his orbit in the early stages of her career. “He made you feel like not knowing was the beginning of something.”

That quality, a generosity of knowledge paired with an absence of ego, has quietly made Farinloye one of the most consequential figures in the evolution of Lagos’s hospitality and nightlife scene. His name may not always appear on the flyer, but his fingerprints are often on the thinking behind it.

For Farinloye, it is not enough to share insights to a few people when the entire ecosystem should undergo a drastic revolution instead of a few sparkles amongst a small club owners and hospitality players. He feels that the excellence spirit that has shone among few of his mentors should permeate the entire ecosystem if a mentorship institute is operationised as part of his legacy to the hospitality industry.

Unfortunately, news of the shutdown of clubs and hospitality centres over safety regulations remain heartrending for Farinloye, stories of lamentations of poor service leading to rippling lounge visits among other clubs usually trouble SholaQuilox, raging negative commentary of service staff in other clubs, staff who know no better and have remained untrained to understand that the hospitality industry engages both international tourists and well-travelled nationals. All of these concerns on quality over hype have made SholaQuilox conceive the idea of the Quilox Institute alongside his fellow COO, Akinlabi Abiola-Peller, J-Boi.

To understand Farinloye’s influence on the next generation, one has to understand what he built for himself. He emerged at a time when Lagos nightlife was on the rise in terms of glitz, but didn’t have much in the way of structure and strategy. He became one of the first of the handful of people who understood how to close that gap between paparazzi and structure consistently.

While rising through the ranks in the hospitality, he brought to bear his knowledge of marketing from the Lagos State University. This helped to understand business, psychology and communications. With over a decade in the sector, he recognized that for hospitality to transcend merely forgettable entertainment to well curated nightlife experiences.

What Farinloye understood early was that nightlife is fundamentally a hospitality business, not an entertainment business. The difference sounds semantic, but it changes everything. Entertainment asks, “what are we offering?” Hospitality asks, “how will people feel?” The first question produces lineups. The second produces loyalty.

He helped curate specially themed events and concepts around that philosophy, developing a reputation for spaces that felt considered — where the sound, the light, the flow of crowd movement, and even the behavior of staff was all part of a designed emotional arc. Guests often couldn’t articulate why they’d had such a good time. That, in his view, was the point.

Lagos has no shortage of young people who want to be in the nightlife business. What it has historically lacked is structured pathways for them to learn it well. The industry is largely self-taught, driven by trial and error, with wisdom guarded rather than shared. Farinloye has, largely informally, pushed back against that culture. He always stressed that professionalism would open new vista for the sector.

Over the years, he has become a reference point for a loose but real network of younger promoters, designers, and creative entrepreneurs who found their footing in part because he made time for them. Some came through direct professional collaboration. Others reached out on a hunch, and found their messages returned. Several have spoken publicly about conversations with him that redirected the entire trajectory of their careers.

“You can’t have lasted this long in this business without having taken one or two people under your wing at some point,” he said. “But it was mostly informal mentorship, no curricula, no formal programs, no certificates. That is why we launched Quilox Nightlife Institute.”

Instead of mentoring the one or two people who have the kind of access to me that allows them to learn by observing my decisions, why don’t we widen the pool and create courses why more people can learn without even need to interact with me at all?”

Among younger promoters, the through-line in how they describe Farinloye’s influence is less about specific advice and more about a shift in professional self-conception. He tends to push people from seeing themselves as party-throwers to seeing themselves as experience architects — a distinction that, once made, is hard to unmake.

He notes: “We are developing the QNI course to not just teach theory or be a series of ‘how tos’ that do not reflex reality. We are looking at where people can learn that interior mood for example, is not decoration, It is communication.

“Why mentees learn that everything a guest sees before they’ve had a drink the texture on the wall, the height of the ceiling, the temperature of the light is already shaping what they feel and what they’ll spend.

“The goal of planting that thinking into the younger minds working on emerging venues across Lagos, is to quietly reshape what nightlife in the city looks and feels like.”

Creatives working in adjacent fields, music programming, brand partnerships, hospitality marketing, describe a similar influence. Farinloye tends to hold a longer view than most operators in the space, asking not just whether an event will sell out, but whether it will mean something six months later. Whether it will have built something an audience, a reputation, an idea.