Hey, 25
It’s exactly 1:50 AM as I write this. Usually, I would be up at this time, working. But this time, I am thanking.
I have been so lucky to have the fullest twenty-four years I can imagine for a young man. Lived in three states and traveled to twenty-one. Began my first business at seventeen, got my first job at nineteen, left my parents’ house at twenty-one, did uber at twenty-two while in school, hosted a conference reaching over a thousand students across over thirty universities from three countries, got nominated for an award for young African leaders, and now running businesses after school. Phew! What a life!
In all of these, I am most grateful for a couple of things;
Discovering purpose, grooming relationships, finding love, family, and work.
I’m going to share a hilarious story — one of the several experiences in my business and life journey.
I began my seafood business with one post on Nairaland that got over forty thousand views (40,000+) in one day. From that day till today, I get calls for all sorts of seafood products. But I got this one call, the call that was going to change everything, I thought. On the other end of the phone, was a young lady, who said she had seen our post on Nairaland, and her company wanted to do business with us. They needed a supplier for prawns in large quantities for export. We scheduled a meeting for the next week. Chris and I went with our samples.
We got to the office, somewhere in the high brow areas of Ikeja. The office was serious but not intimidating; the furniture was limited to only the necessary but still comfortable. We sat around the table, with the young, well-dressed lady sitting across. She seemed a little more excited than we were, and we concluded that she either was probably further from the boss than we thought, or maybe we were the breakthrough they had been looking for; look at us. She took our samples, examined it, asked a few questions, and said she loved it, but her boss will have to sit with us for proper negotiations. I asked her what numbers we were looking at, and she said a ton (1000kg) per month. I almost stood, because how can you not stand with that figure? You mean transactions of N5.5m per month. I didn’t even know this was a joke compared to what was to come.
Around this time, I worked for a company that has shaped me in ways I didn’t realize. But I hated my job, and this was going to be liberty at last. I would leave big. I had plans.
A day later, the young lady called again, this time a little less excited and troubled. “We want you to supplies of prawns, but right now we need fish maws, it’s so scarce. Do you guys have that?” My first response was, “What’s fish maw?” She did some explaining, but I knew I needed to do my research. She sounded like I needed to get them fish maw if I was ever going to supply prawns. I spent the rest of the day researching. I found the gold of the sea.
–Fish maw is the commercial term for dried swim bladders of large fish like croaker and sturgeon. It has no fishy taste and absorbs the flavors of other ingredients. For the Chinese, it is considered one of the big four delicacies of the sea
In China, fish maw was more than a delicacy; at some level, it became currency. 1kg of fish maw sold for between $700 to $1200 or much more, depending on the grade. This was a drug. Interestingly, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (animal conservation guys for the sea) banned fish bladders’ harvesting. So this was partly illegal, especially in China.
I called her back and asked her what quantity they needed and what deal they had on the table.
“We want to export a ton per month of both fish maw and prawns to Hong Kong.”
“Okay, we can supply the two products.”
“How soon can we see a sample.”
“Emm, give us two weeks.”
It took us a month to finally find a supplier. Our supplier, Mehmet Bilen, was the owner of a big fishing company with more than six fishing trawlers operating in Senegal and Turkey. He was in Senegal at the time and was skeptical about doing business with us. His first response was that they weren’t into the business anymore. After some persuasion and assurance that I was probably a drug lord like he was, he agreed to prepare us a sample only that it would take him three weeks to prepare and have it shipped to us in Nigeria.
The next challenge was money. I remember trying to raise money for the 1kg sample I needed, N143,000 was the cost price for the grade I got. I was going to sell it for $500 anyway, so no biggy. N32,000 profit per kg, which was N32m. Man, if this wasn’t God, I thought. I kept this very low key until it was time to raise funds for the sample. I traveled to Port Harcourt to pitch to my aunt. I was already notorious in the family for starting businesses, so I went here with some reputation. She had not heard of my failures yet. She got her husband involved because we needed a domiciliary account, they both went to the bank with me, and we made the deposit. I will never forget.
Mehmet was a sincere businessman. He kept us in the loop of all the processes, from fishing to harvesting the bladders, cleaning, and drying. It was such a tedious and delicate process. Any mistake was a dollar at risk, too dry, the value drops, not dry enough, and it would get spoilt before it got to us in Nigeria.
Our product finally got to Nigeria, and we went to our potential clients. The young lady had set up a meeting with her boss. Now here was the problem. When we got to the boardroom, our client could not speak English and only communicated through a translator. He looked at the product for less than a minute and said something in Chinese. “It wasn’t cleaned properly.” the translator said. We were dazed. More than two months and debt for “it wasn't cleaned properly?” I had made sure our supplier cleaned the maw properly. I emphasized it every time we spoke. I looked at the translator and tried to convince him that it was. He murmured something to his boss, and his boss replied. “Please let’s get back to you,” the translator said.
Later that evening, the young lady who had become our friend and ally sent me a message saying that the Chinese guy actually liked the product but gave that off because he planned to beat the price down.
I had spent three days preparing for this meeting, reading everything I could lay my hands on about the Chinese culture and doing business with the Chinese. I didn’t expect this. It was against their culture. The Chinese only do business with friends and not with strangers, so they usually invite you for a meal first, ask about your family, and get to know you a bit before even bringing up business. Any Chinese business you see in another country has a friend link in there, no matter how big.
I spent most of the time scheming about how this deal was even going to be possible. How would I receive that amount of funds? I thought about how I would pay my supplier in Senegal (there were so many international payment restrictions) and how I would get the products transported from Senegal to Hong Kong without directly monitoring? How I would tell this guy that the products weren’t even here? I thought about how I would tell my client that it would take us at least three months to prepare up to 1000 kg of one of the rarest commercial products in the sea (fish maw from croaker fish).
In the coming days, we had more negotiations. The translator wanted a cut; we weren’t ready to because that wasn’t how we planned to run the business. Of course, we would say “thank you” from our purse, but we were not comfortable with his model. He decided to sabotage the deal. He translated the wrong things and made it extremely difficult to have a direct conversation with his Chinese boss. We even offered to bring along our translator, but he ensured that we did not have an audience.
After several months of battling, we decided that it was time to call it quits. We went back to focusing on our standard seafood products, but we learned lessons. Lessons that stays with you for life. First, nothing is impossible. We did a lot of impossibles to get that sample. Secondly, the fastest way to get to where you want is to go slowly. Looking back, I probably would have lost a lot pulling off that deal, including business integrity. Thirdly, failure is part of the plan. If you succeed at everything you try to do, you may not learn so much, especially character.
I was 21. Let’s see what 25 brings.
