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“Business is going great. We just finished our first year in August. The transition is definitely challenging. Things I learned in football have helped me in real estate: I have to be self-motivated and self-disciplined.”
As a professional football player, Bilukidi never wanted to be seen as different. He wanted to fit in, to be one of the guys. But, at 6-5 and more than 300 pounds, he was different.
“I never was a person who wanted attention,” he said. “I wanted to succeed, but I wanted to do it low-key. People looked at me, they saw I was tall, big, athletic and they asked what I did. If I didn’t want to get into a conversation, I’d just make something up. Now, in my business, attention is a good thing. People are interested in my past, what I used to do for a living. I tell them I used to play in the league and it builds a conversation.”
Bilukidi’s journey to get to the NFL was different. First, it was soccer and he excelled on an Internationals team that was one of the best in Ontario.
“I remember we were just a bunch of kids kicking the ball around and running all over the field,” he said. “We got lucky. We had this soccer coach, Joe Correia, he taught us a tactical way of playing. At the age of 10, we had a winning mentality. That’s all we knew how to do. We’d be hard on each other if we didn’t win. That mindset, always wanting to win, carried over into football and now into business for me.”
Bilukidi didn’t play football at St. Patrick’s High School, focusing instead on basketball, but, with some urging from friend Djems Kouami, he played minor football for the Cumberland Panthers. Attracting attention because of his size, he started attending football camps and got noticed. He left Ottawa to play at a junior college, Eastern Arizona, then received a scholarship offer to Georgia State, a program in its infancy. After 10 quarterback sacks in two years at Georgia State, he was selected in the sixth round of the 2012 NFL draft by the Oakland Raiders.
