“That’s just the way to grow”

Seun Bammeke [BComm(Hons)/10] shares that his love of business started at a young age, watching his brother go out to school each day and come back with more than he left with. An Asper BComm alum, Bammeke is a serial entrepreneur today, starting and running multiple businesses since his formal career beginnings in logistics and supply chain.

His real first venture though was on eBay, purchasing and soon reselling sneakers on the early ecommerce site and slowly scaling up as more friends grew interested in the young man with the shoe connection.

“It started off of course with passion—passion for sneakers, passion for helping out friends—then I realized that if there was a market for something like this, if I can buy and sell shoes, what else is there?” he says.

Bammeke discovered a fascination for movement of goods, distribution, resale, and upcoming markets, a true supply chain enthusiast before he even knew what the field was all about.

It wasn’t until the second year of his Bachelor of Commerce degree (“after failing corporate finance once, and before I really learned how to study,” he laughs), that he took a supply chain course on inventory management.

Suddenly, Bammeke was finding inspiration, not just from products and markets, but from systems. He highlights the innovation and insight of Asper supply chain experts like Barry Prentice (Professor, Director of UM Transport Institute) and Srimantoorao Appadoo (Professor and Department Head, Supply Chain Management).

“I was so fortunate that I came into my degree at a time where supply chain as a major was very new, but Asper already had some of the best people working in that field,” he says.

“Supply chain management was really the genesis of what I would call a force multiplier, taking what I already had and then adding on system, structure, mathematics.”

He started to schedule all his classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, giving him a chance to immerse himself in academic knowledge while still finding time to pursue and dream up ventures.

Post-graduation, Bammeke worked in Manitoba, first at Gardewine and then at Manitoba Hydro, before relocating to Toronto to push his entrepreneurial goals forward with a series of online business models that spanned pharmacy services and digital transformation.

In both early roles, he appreciated the exposure to scope—organizations that were large enough to process significant contracts but small enough that he had direct contact with leadership and big stakeholders. At Gardewine in particular, his entrepreneurial spirit flourished as he saw opportunities to create tools that would make work more efficient, smooth out processes. Four or five years after entering the workforce, he decided to make the jump to entrepreneurship.

He credits his entrepreneurial success today to his ability to bring people together, his intuition for creating tools, and his refusal to see failure as an outcome.

“I don’t understand the term,” he says. “I think ‘failure’ is really something that I call ‘iteration.’ You iterate, you go, you find a wall, you pivot, you learn, and you adapt.”

Today, Bammeke’s primary business focus is Foreign Venture Group (FVG), of which he is Managing Director and Founder.

“I leverage my company’s vertically integrated services to help businesses improve, and in turn, I learn from them—allowing me to bring those insights back into my own company, test them, refine them, package them, and resell them. It’s a continuous adaptation process, like an organism that evolves based on its environment,” he says.

Beyond business, Bammeke says that he makes time every day for gratitude, faith, family, and giving back, remembering how his parents instilled this value in him even before online business and eBay and sneakers.

“It was really just seeing the example set by my parents and the community: passing it forward and asking as much as possible that those people also pass it forward, not caring to receive it back. That’s just the way to grow.”

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The Asper Bachelor of Commerce degree offers students the option to double major, allowing them to design a rigorous, academically sound degree rooted in their interests with plenty of opportunities to apply their learning through experience. Whether you’re an entrepreneur with a passion for supply chain, a marketing whiz that loves finance, or a future human resources professional interested in Indigenous business studies, there’s something for you and your future career here at the Asper School of Business. Learn more about our programs of study today.

Asper Staff