In an interesting chat, Christian Okoli (@brain_okoli) described the arduous yet exhilarating entrepreneurial path of managing BueAfric Media (@blueafricmedia), a public relations and marketing agency he co-owns with his partners Chukwuanugo Osadebe (@anugo_osadebe) and Michael Ikechukwu (@michael.ei) in Enugu, Nigeria.
AFC :Tell us about yourself and why you chose to be an entrepreneur.
CHRISTIAN : Wow! It’s my pleasure. My name is Christian Okoli, and I’m from Enugu State. I graduated in 2019 from the Department of Business Administration at the Enugu State University of Science and Technology. Entrepreneurship found me (if there’s anything like that) before I decided to chase down the path. While I was in junior secondary school, I began selling food to other students and would sometimes borrow capital, which I paid back after my sales. And then, during my senior secondary education, I progressed to men’s wear and accessories for the sole purpose of survival. As a striving pan-African mediapreneur, I became popularly known as the Mayor of the East because I am consistently amplifying the essence of sustainable investment in Nigeria, especially in the Southeast and South South.
AFC : What piqued your interest in brand consultancy?
CHRISTIAN : I have an interest in deriving results for anyone I offer my services to. I started brand consultancy at 19 years old because most brands conducted business with little-to-no impact or track record. I was opportune to partner with BlueAfric Media’s co-founders, Anugo Osadebe and Michael EI Ikechukwu, who are still active in pitching solutions to brands, the government, and notable personalities that welcomed our strategies and brought us onboard to implement them for a better outcome. We’ve been going strong for 10 years. Summarily, creating impactful solutions in my community jump-started my consulting career.
AFC : How did you start “BlueAfric Media”?
CHRISTIAN: The journey of BlueAfric Media started shortly after I declined an offer to study business abroad. I was 19 at the time, and my father was furious with me. He saw it as a step towards ruining my future because “What has Nigeria got to offer its youths?” Many people held the same viewpoint as he did and kept giving me pieces of advice. But my mind was made up. I saw a need in Enugu State; the state needed to be recognized globally, it needed to have a place in the global market, and it needed to be placed on the world map. This factor inspired my partners and me. We also saw the wonderful works of Debola Williams, and that was a model for us.
So, we started BlueAfric Media, but in a restaurant. We kept meeting at the restaurant, piecing ideas together and developing them with our skills, even though we had grave financial challenges. Out of that restaurant grew something impressive, and we are happy that all those ten (10) years of hard work finally paid off because Enugu is finally getting the recognition it deserves. We have extended our branches to Abuja, and presently, we are penetrating the Ghanaian market, because if the work is good, why does it have to be limited to Nigeria alone? As the company grew, the dream grew with it, so we had to expand.
In addition, Blueafric Media’s Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Chukwuanugo Osadebe, further tells their story, saying, “A different purpose had brought us together, but after a lengthy discussion on the challenges Enugu State faced PR-wise, we decided to join our individual skills and knowledge to proffer a solution, but we had to kick-off with zero capital and merge our individual services to raise funds to build further.
The Third co-founder, Michael Ikechukwu (E.I.), adds , “We began our journey as enthusiastic young minds with a dream of creating something in the media industry. This drove us to conduct extensive research and analysis of various media agencies, which enabled us to gain a better understanding of the services they provide. Armed with this knowledge and our passion for media, we decided to establish a 360-degree media agency at first. A decade later, we have evolved quite a lot.”
AFC : How has the agency grown since its inception?
CHRISTIAN: These 10 years have been crazy because there were times we couldn’t pay salaries; there were times we couldn’t find the best hands to work with; and there were also times when other companies took the best people we had. I won’t blame them because the company wasn’t paying much at the time due to inadequate finances. We shut down twice, and that period was a learning process for us because we were more focused on scaling the company and made a lot of mistakes along the way, which led to the shutdown.
I wouldn’t necessarily say they were mistakes because, as budding entrepreneurs, we concentrated on making things right, and our mistakes built us. At one point, I was also trying to gain admission to the university, and it was very difficult to find a balance because once I got into school, I would be studying, working, and doing an internship at another company all at the same time. There were days I woke up and felt like giving up, but we are here now.
AFC : Are you more concerned with the expansion of your agency or profitability?
CHRISTIAN : At this point, Blueafric Media will be focusing more on expansion because Blueafric Media has been in business for ten (10) years. In 2023, we explored Rwanda because it’s part of the projected regions we aim to operate within. It does take more than a cluster of clients to operate successfully, hence the essence of expanding into other countries.
But our goal at this point is to drive the vision of the brand. Blueafric Media is a pan-African media company. We’re studiously working on solving the visibility and communication challenges our brands encounter in Africa. How many people are we helping solve their problems? How many clients do we have across Africa? These are our main focus right now. If it’s about profitability, we would have focused on doing only government work, because that’s where you benefit more. For the next 5 years as a company, we are focusing more on expansion, not just for Blueafric Media but also on the diversification of our subsidiaries.
AFC : How do you generate leads and sales for the agency?
CHRISTIAN : On a scale of 1–10, 8 of our clients usually come from recommendations and relationships we’ve built over the years. We pitch to brands and get offers to work with some, but for a certain caliber of clients, we’re keen on maintaining quite a cordial relationship with them. Most of our services are one-off or recurring; it depends on the projects at hand. Another key factor is the efficacy of our services rendered and the recorded client satisfaction rate.
During onboarding and offboarding, we’re able to set expectations that we dutifully exceed. This way, clients consistently record positive results, and our services are valued. Being solution-oriented reels in leads generically. We also have other clients we’ve obtained from PR and strategic advertising, but maintaining good relationships bumps up our leads.
AFC : As a brand consultant, what distinguishes you from the competition?
CHRISTIAN : Consultants are quite meticulous professionals. What distinguishes me from others is the type of value I bring when I consult for brands. It’s not about money, because, over the years, we have diversified, and we have a system in place to cater to monetary provisions. Shifting from this point, I actually don’t consult for brands I don’t ‘believe’ in.
No matter how much the brand is willing to pay, I won’t pitch to them or accept certain offers. Before coming onboard, I must have ascertained where the pain in their shoes is, strategies to alleviate that pain, and agreed with the clients on implementation. So, it’s not about money. First of all, I have to believe that I can make a change, then consider if I’m prepared to take on the project. This is also a guiding principle that our company also adopts.
AFC : Can you tell us about the most difficult part of running an agency?
CHRISTIAN : I I would say the disadvantages outweigh the advantages because we started when people had zero idea what PR and marketing were and didn’t want to give them a shot. People saw us only as social media managers, so we strove to explain what we did as a PR agency. However, I think it gave us a pioneering advantage because it placed us among the top 3 media companies in the southeast. It also gave us practical knowledge of how advertisements work and how people and brands think in the southeast—from our experience of being in operation for almost a decade.
This alone has helped us grow our brand and subsidiaries. BlueprintAfric, for instance, can easily be named among the top 3 online pop-culture platforms in the southeast as well. I even like to believe that BlueprintAfric is the number one inspiration for other founders to situate hybrid media brands in the southeast. We were the first to build communities in sections, which is what we are doing with the sub-platforms under Blueprint Africa. In summary, the southeast has not been an easy place to crack, but it is opening up at this point.
AFC : How do you ensure that your services are effective?
CHRISTIAN : We’re huge on impact. For most projects we take on, we have guiding metrics and outlined deliverables put in place to ensure our services move the needle. So, to achieve results, we’ve got teams on track to execute and deliver the promised results. For our clients, numbers don’t tell a lie. They expect a lot from you once you’ve been committed to a service, so judging from our project reports and clients’ feedback, we know how well we’ve been able to deliver.
AFC : What important business values do you prioritize, and why?
CHRISTIAN: No matter how big you want to become and how far you want to go in developing your company or brand, you must make sure you know the right people. You should also ensure that the people you have are happy with the way they are treated. Build as a team. A company cannot grow bigger than the people pushing it because the company is the people. Our core strength in BlueAfric Media is the people, because they are not just the “staff.” They are regarded as the company’s partners. In a nutshell, find the right people and partner with them. Being an entrepreneur has also taught me to be patient and polite.
AFC : How do you stay creative and up-to-date with industry trends?
CHRISTIAN: We work with data and stay abreast of trends. As the creative and business ecosystem changes, we move with it. We’re always thinking on our feet; otherwise, you can be blindsided by new developments in AI and the like. You have to position yourself in a way that helps you adapt to new trends and even create trends, which we achieve through partnering with the brightest minds and engaging with industry experts.
We collaborate with various industries to create event mixes that draw people into a room for idea exchanges and detect changes within the national and international communities. Above all, through physical exercises, being part of creative communities, and being open to new experiences, we’re wired to be fluid.
AFC : Can you provide any client success stories or testimonials?
CHRISTIAN: We’ve recorded multiple success stories across various business sectors and government administrations. No matter the scale, we ensure that every project is executed properly. One of the projects I enjoyed so much because its impact moved from the grass roots to the international record is the Enugu State Government’s SME Agency.
We were able to put the state on the map when the World Bank ranked Enugu among the top 5 Nigerian states with an evident ‘Ease of Doing Business’. We came onboard fully in 2022, and within months, we jointly delivered a massive win. Prior to then, the state government had little to no track record in the media space. We came in and redefined storytelling on a grass-roots scale to deliver impact. Currently, we have projects with impressive success stories that are being shared on our company’s social platforms. The majority of these stories are documented in our company’s portfolio.
AFC: What are your ambitions for your agency’s future?
CHRISTIAN: We are hoping that one day we will start building our products and marketing them.
AFC : Tell us about your other startups, “Ternion” and “Kudibar.”
CHRISTIAN : Kudibar is a community-driven ticketing platform. We are pushing a platform where people can follow up on their favorite event host, meet people that they attend the same event with, and become rooted in their chosen community while leveraging technology. We have recorded a number of successes in a lot of events, but every day, we keep trying to make it better. We are still in the works, but hopefully, we build something that evolves with time.
Ternion is a real estate company that focuses on making sure that people buy properties in bits. Mainly, we are not saying bring N50 million for you to buy one property; rather, we are saying, “We find the property and help you find alternative investment pockets to finance it. So within that under-ground, we’ve done a couple of projects and acquisitions. It is still something I don’t want to speak much about because it’s still in process, but once it’s fully launched, the market will benefit a lot from the solutions we are offering; young people can also buy properties of their dreams in bits without undue pressure.
Leave a Reply