Mo Abudu established Vic Lawrence & Associates (formerly Newage Communications Limited) in 1993 as a privately-owned specialist human resources development company offering services in executive development. The name of the company changed from Newage Communications Limited to Vic Lawrence & Associates Limited in March 1998.

At the heart of Vic Lawrence's mission was the provision of quality executive training and development services, working with its international alliance partners to design, manage and deliver quality programmes for the private and public sectors in Nigeria.
In the year 2000, Mo Abudu was keen to rapidly grow the company by increasing its range of services and client base. However, she realized the need to raise the profile of and institutionalize the business by making significant investments in people and infrastructure.

In 2001, VLA expanded its service offerings to include recruitment and selection services. Mo Abudu found the expertise that she had acquired from successfully managing a high street recruitment firm in the UK for several years invaluable in achieving this goal.

By 2002, VLA again expanded its offerings to include Human Resource Solutions, providing services in the areas of Reward and Performance Management.

With VLA's business growing rapidly with the attendant significant increase in market share in the area of training and development, the organization identified a need for the development of a good quality training and conferencing facility in the Lagos area specifically geared towards the delivery of its training programmes and corporate retreats. Vic Lawrence decided to promote the development of a purpose-built executive centre with residential facilities.

Vic Lawrence approached SME Manager Limited which agreed to consider an equity investment in both Vic Lawrence and the Executive Centre: The Protea Hotel, Oakwood Park located in the Lekki axis of Lagos State. The Protea Hotel, Oakwood Park is a purpose built complex, offering state of the art training and conferencing facilities.

Partnering with SME Manager provided Vic Lawrence with the credibility required to attract high potential human resources and penetrate blue-chip customers that hitherto may have been difficult to access.
Furthermore, SME Manager focused extensively on institutionalizing Vic Lawrence, which has developed into a robust institution.
Three years after the investment, not only had Vic Lawrence been able to increase and improve the quality of its service delivery; its customer base also increased significantly. The company also surpassed some of the leaders in its industry; increasing turnover by 400% and staff strength by over 500%.

Given the significant profitable growth recorded by VLA between 2001 and 2004, the need to further strengthen the management with high caliber talent was identified by the Managing Director, Mo Abudu. This was important to enable VLA consolidate its position in the industry. The indications were that taking on such top level people into management required that their interests needed to be aligned with the Company, hence Mo’s decision to invite shareholding partners into the company.

Since the minimum investment period of three years specified under SMEEIS agreement had been achieved and the business really did not require an additional cash injection, in June 2004, the Managing Director (Mo Abudu) approached SME Manager with an acceptable buy-out offer in collaboration with an experienced Human Resources professional, Alero Otobo, former Head Human Capital Development, United Bank of Africa (UBA) and Bunmi Lawson, former Executive Director of FATE Foundation. Both Alero and Bunmi then joined the company as Executive Directors and part owners.
VLA was the first organization in the SMEEIS scheme to successfully exit. The exit of was completed in March 2005.

VLA reached a new dawn with the leadership of Mo Abudu, Ola Ogunneye (General Manager) and other members of the VLA team. During that period of its development, the VLA team consisted of five senior industry sector heads, specializing in the fields of telecoms, oil & gas, manufacturing, finance and public sector services.

This highly specialized team equipped the firm with the required capacity and competence to understand the people management and HR issues within the identified sectors and to proffer effective solutions to diverse HR consultancy assignments. These customized solutions include: learning management, recruitment and selection, induction, career development, performance & reward management and exit management.

From November 1, 2005, the operational model for all VLA assignments has been governed by the principles of the People-Centric Strategy™.

People-Centric Strategy™ is an innovative organizational improvement programme designed to advance and add value to an organization's bottom line through the deliberate alignment of the goals and needs of its people with those of the organization.

The People-Centric Strategy™ is a VLA trademark, developed by VLA and wholly owned by VLA.

More than ever before, our main preoccupation at VLA today is development of new and more effective ways to partner with your organization to eliminate the attendant stress that accompanies your day-to-day human capital processes, while positively impacting your bottom-line. This goal is achieved through our unique outsourcing model that is geared towards adding value to the overall performance of your organization.