Chisom Okafor understands the power of relationships and how a good network can keep you booked and busy. He has practiced this throughout his career, leveraging relationships to excel in business, marketing, music production, content creation, and talent management. PiggyVest spoke to Chisom about his business partnership with Aproko Doctor, transitioning from industry to industry, and the time he made a killing in stocks. 

Hi Chisom, tell us about yourself?

My name is Chisom Okafor. I’m a marketing professional and entrepreneur who has worked in several industries over the past nine years. One thing I really believe in is the power of building relationships. I believe that when the relationships come, the money will follow. I’m this way because I’m horrible at saying goodbye, so I’ve worked to build and nurture relationships in all the environments I’ve found myself in. 

Even my friend and business partner, Nonso Bobby Fidelis Egemba (Aproko Doctor), is a relationship I’ve nurtured over the years. 

What did you study in school, and what was your first job when you graduated?

I studied biochemistry in school, but I always knew I wouldn’t practice. While I was in school, I started exploring music production. I did this from 2012 to 2020, and I really enjoyed it. 

How did you find marketing?

I got introduced to marketing by a friend who found a course online and sent it to me. I took the course and found I had a real interest in marketing. So I took it seriously, found more courses and found mentors. I did a bit of pro-bono work at first until I felt competent enough to apply for a marketing role in an established company. 

My first marketing job was at a media buying agency. At the time I joined, agencies were transitioning from media buying to offering 360 marketing services, but the agency I worked for was struggling to transition. They lost a lot of their clients, which gave me time to explore coding and a couple of other interests. However, I had responsibilities as a first son, and I didn’t see opportunities for growth at this agency, so I started looking for other opportunities. 

A friend recommended that I apply for a position at Red Media Africa. I interviewed, passed, and took my first full-time marketing role. 

What happened to your music production career? Were you able to juggle both?

I put my music production on hiatus in 2020. The music industry in Nigeria is unstructured and heavily dependent on relationship building and the benevolence of your collaborators in order to gain any measure of success. A lot of artists wanted free work, and I wanted to be paid. So, it was tricky to constantly gauge which projects to insist on payment and which ones to take on as a future investment. 

I haven’t entirely left music; I’m prioritising financial stability for now. But I intend to return when I have built a level of success and credibility. People have told me I have a knack for artist management and music direction, and I would like to explore that when the time is right. 

Were there any other things you did to make money at that time?

I did some work for Brandocks, a company that helped companies create their own brand merchandise. The company’s big idea was ahead of its time, and it closed prematurely. However, working for them exposed me to meeting Mr. Ohiole, a competitor at the time, who made me very interested in the merch business.

Mr. Ohiole ran a company that produced shirts. After Brandocks closed, I was out of a job and getting broke because of familial responsibilities. I had about ₦40,000 in my account and needed a way to multiply it. I reached out to Mr. Ohiole and got a quote for how many shirts my money could get me. I made the shirts, designed a few legends. 

I applied a marketing technique I had read about called the ‘power of three’, where you give a client three price options, which makes it easier to close a sale. I also leveraged my community on Twitter to market it. And I started selling a lot of shirts—enough that it became a significant source of income for me. 

That’s amazing. Do you still run the business?

COVID happened to the t-shirt business. Before the pandemic, I developed a system for producing the shirts and getting them to my customers, but the restriction of movement significantly increased the price of production and logistics. I persevered for a bit, but eventually, I had to scale back the business and only take specific clients who could afford the increased rates. 

But it’s not all bad. My shirt business was how I met my business partner and best friend, Aproko Doctor. He wanted to start a t-shirt series, and I was recommended. He ordered a few custom shirts for me, and from that working relationship, we became friends. 

How did you go from friends to running a business together?

I was working in marketing, and influencer marketing was gaining traction at the time. However, agencies were terrible at engaging influencers or getting results from influencer campaigns. I saw a niche there, but I didn’t have the branding or visibility to start a business myself, even though I had 10,000+ followers on Twitter at the time. 

Aproko Doctor was starting to gain traction as an influencer, so I approached him with a business pitch. I pitched that we create a company that serves as a middleman between agencies and influencers. I understood marketing, and Aproko Doctor understood influencers.

Together, we started the Greenvault. Aproko Doctor served as the face of the business, interfacing with clients while I managed our influencers and campaigns. We amassed our first group of influencers and got to work. 

It takes a lot of money to start a capital-intensive business like marketing. How did Greenvault circumvent this?

One of the things that really saved us money when we were starting was getting the buy-in of our influencer network. We approached each person individually, explained our business model and explained why we would have to pay much less than some individual influencers were getting at the time. We even had influencers do test campaigns for free to show competence. 

That allowed us to start the business with very little savings and pay influencers directly from the campaign revenue.

What did Greenvault do differently to differentiate itself from traditional marketing agencies?

When we started our company, brands only engaged influencers through agencies, and agencies didn’t really trust influencers to get results for customers. The result was poor communication, low trust and even worse results. What we successfully did was convince brands to trust influencers and allow them to market products in ways that were authentic to them. What they were doing was no longer working, but no one wanted to admit that. 

We were different because we delivered results. We had a well-known and credible ambassador in the influencer space. We also took accountability very seriously, collating extensive reports that showed the impact and earned media that we generated with our influencer campaigns. 

One of the most impactful campaigns we did was for Hypo Toilet Cleaner, which was trying to compete with Harpic, the market leader at the time. The account manager for the brand was a former course mate of mine. Someone reached out to him to pitch for the account, and they mentioned me. He reached out directly, and I pitched for the account with a few radical ideas. I asked that we run a testimonial campaign where we ditch hashtags, which were common for campaigns at the time, and suggested we use a business owner who actually worked in the cleaning business. 

The campaign was so successful that they came back to us to repeat it several times, and Hypo won a prestigious marketing award for it.

Covid has put influencer marketing on hyper-drive. The influencer market is far more saturated than it was in 2020. In your experience, what has changed about the influencer marketing space?

People are more sceptical about content and quick to fact-check creators to see if they are genuine, and if the content you post is organic or paid. This is partly because the platforms themselves are paying for engagement, and people will do anything to make quick money by generating views. Only influencers with a ‘high-trust quotient’ are able to share on the internet and not have it questioned.

The other thing is that a large following does not directly correlate to influence. There are so many ways for individuals to buy or grow a following, and that following might not care about the content that is being posted. 

Greenvault, the agency, now has Greenvault Studios, the content incubator. What motivated you to start this business? 

Greenvault Studio was birthed from us being unable to create and curate quality content at our own convenience. Aproko Doctor’s former management had a scandal, and he had to part ways with the brand. The problem was this management was handling content creation for the Aproko Doctor brand. He was also struggling to edit his videos because that takes a lot of time and expertise. We decided that doing these tasks in-house was the best solution to our predicament. 

We started by buying one camera and hiring a videographer to shoot and edit Aproko Doctor’s content. Now, we have a studio and multiple cameras, and we have started managing other creators and splitting profit when they get sponsorship deals. We signed Dr. Zobo, who makes health-related content for women and Diet Gee, who makes nutrition-focused content. 

We are trying to pace ourselves as we expand. It’s good that we have explored content and seen the possibilities, but for now, we are focusing on the ideas that get us more traction. We made our first film, ‘Stitches’, available on Youtube, which builds on Aproko Doctor’s brand of edutainment. The difference is that where he uses satire to communicate when he influences, the films will use storytelling to convey our message. The goal is to have one short film every month. It’s a huge commitment that will cost us a lot of money, but we will find a way to do it. 

What was the biggest mind shift you have had to make since starting to build Greenvault and Greenvault Studios? 

I had to overcome my mistrust of collaboration and my tendency to overwhelm myself with work and accept that I can’t do it alone. I am learning to apply this lesson to my work and my personal life. I used to be against having help in the house, but I realised I was overworking myself at the office and at home, and everyone around me was suffering when I refused to delegate. 

You can’t be excellent at everything, especially when the work is creative. You can have a vision, but hire or collaborate with people who have the skills to bring your vision to life. If you have people on your team who bring their unique strengths to areas of expertise where you struggle, the results will always be better. Outsourcing frees up your time and allows you to cover more ground. 

You started a business with Aproko Doctor, who worked in a different industry and had a different trajectory and staying in business takes a lot of trust. How have you built financial trust with your business partner?

When we started Greenvault, we were not financially buoyant. Even Nonso (Aproko Doctor) was not as established in the influencing space as he is today. But I believed in him and the potential for the kind of influencing career he was building to generate a lot of revenue. That gave us a rare opportunity to build a strong personal relationship. 

There have been points in our growth where more money was coming from our influencer campaigns, which I manage, and points where revenue has come from his work as an influencer, but we have a relationship where we discuss everything and understand what each person brings to our partnership. We have always shared profits equally. 

There are times when we are bootstrapping on projects, and it falls to him to provide funding. But he doesn’t really bother about funding because we have built a relationship of mutual trust that I will handle the execution and ensure everyone is compensated fairly. 

We have a clear vision of what we intend to build together, and that keeps us on track. 

Running a startup is really hard. But it is even worse during times of economic uncertainty. What strategies have you implemented to future-proof your business against economic anyhowness? 

This is hard. We look at the future and assess the projects we want to execute, check what it is going to cost us, and if we have the money, we invest in all the resources we need to execute that future project now. An example of this is the cameras and video equipment we bought for Greenvault Studio for millions of naira. That equipment is now twice as expensive, and we have saved money in the long run. We invest in durable, long-lasting equipment so we don’t have to replace it often. 

We also invest in ideas that we think will generate revenue for us in the future. We start small and build as we go. 

Do you have a preferred method of saving?

My wife and I use PiggyVest. We have used the app for a very long time. We used to buy dollars, but that has become a little more tricky considering inflation. PiggyVest is the major way we save money in Naira. [You can use the Autosave feature to automate your savings.]

Are there any financial decisions you’ve made over the course of your career that you are very proud of?

When I was working in corporate, a team from Bamboo came to talk to us about investing in stocks. I was intrigued, so I went to Isime Esene, one of my bosses to explain how stocks worked. I downloaded the app and did a bit of exploring. I saw they were selling Sony stocks, which I recognised from playing the various iterations of the PlayStation game console over the years. 

At the time, Sony was gearing up to release the PlayStation 5, the fifth generation of the game console, so I took N120,000 from my savings and bought some Sony stocks. A year later, when Sony released the PlayStation 5, I checked, and the stock price tripled. I sold my stocks and made a decent profit. 

I set aside ₦500,000 from the money I generated to reinvest. I had been following up on 5G technology and read somewhere that Nokia was one of the companies that were building the 5G infrastructure. Nobody was buying Nokia stocks at the time, so I took that money and invested in Nokia stock. 

Sometime in 2022, Nokia made an announcement that skyrocketed its stock value, and my investment grew from ₦500,000 to well above ₦1 million. I cashed in my stocks, added a little money, and we bought our first car. 

Where do you see Greenvault in the next five years?

Our big picture is storytelling. We want to help people tell their stories and empower them by crafting narratives for them. 

I see us becoming an incubator for content creators who have interesting ideas but don’t have the resources or support to create them. I also see us being the go-to guys for 40% of influencer marketing campaigns in the Nigerian market. I’m not even focused on social media marketing and the other marketing sectors. Our focus is influencer marketing. 

We also want to explore building a lifestyle brand that will include clothing and accessories and give back to our community through partnerships organisations like Drink2School initiative, which helps children convert plastic to monetary value and send kids to school. 

What advice would you give to young entrepreneurs who are considering leaving paid work to focus on their own businesses?

Don’t leave your corporate job until your side hustle is self-sustaining. It is possible to start your side hustle with no resources and make it successful, but it is much harder than doing it with a cushion of savings. Your mental health is very important if you succeed, so anything that reduces pressure on you is very important. 

Also, you don’t have to leave paid employment to build a successful side hustle. If you love your work, you can outsource the daily running of your side hustle to competent employees and live the best of both worlds.