Ep.17: How Osita Ifezue Increased a Non-Profit’s Reach by 300% Using LinkedIn

Transcript

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Welcome to Scale Tales – the business storytelling podcast where entrepreneurs, executives and experts share firsthand accounts of those magical moments when they achieved something bigger than even they could have imagined.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and one thing I’ve come to appreciate about the topic of scale is that it’s more than just about revenue. Scale can also include things like total reach or audience size and, as we learned in the last episode with Jahnavi Gurjer, it can include the impact you have on others. Our next tale comes from someone who also focuses on impact rather than revenue and it’s turned out to be a huge part of his business winning formula.

This is Ep. 17: How Osita Ifezue Increased a Non-Profit’s Reach by 300% Using LinkedIn

Hello, my name is Osita Ifezue. I am what you would call a storytelling strategist, I am a serial entrepreneur, although I don’t like to use that word. But the idea is I create businesses. And in terms of creating businesses, I focus on creating value or more like solving a problem. Currently I am in Helsinki, Finland. My scale tale started in Lagos, Nigeria, back in 1999.

And it started with a company I called Impact Communication. That’s where my story of becoming an entrepreneur started. Back in the days when the GSM came to Nigeria and it opened an opportunity.

The government privatized the telecommunication sectors. And what happened was that it created opportunity for a lot of private people to come and find one way of either selling products and services or connecting people to telecommunication gadgets that would facilitate doing business. Fast forward, I came to Finland to study in 2005 and was working after studying for medical technology company called Plan Maker. And I was there for about 10 years. But, somehow I felt that even though the job was well paying, there’s this thing that was, you know, itching behind my head, “Hey, you should go do your own thing.”

And I remember talking to a few people back in the days that I’m going to start a business in Finland, I’m going to leave my job. I then went back to school to do a master’s degree. But the response I was getting from people was that I must be crazy to leave a stable job and transition to become an entrepreneur.

Because the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Finland now wasn’t the same way it was back in the days. A lot of businesses that started failed. And being from the African background and in a country where a lot of the people were mainly with Finnish backgrounds, it was kind of hard to break into the business sector. So I thought about it, but eventually jumped and I started a company called Bosita Consulting I tried as much as possible to take businesses from the Nordics and connect them to the African market.

This idea of connecting Nordic businesses to African businesses was a unique concept that Osita met with an equally unique sales approach.

I would dress up, take my bag, check out offices that I see have good products or services that I think if I introduce to some other person somewhere, they might find it interesting and then connect these people together. So that was the goal, and that was how I started. I was knocking on doors, and I could remember some of the responses that I got from people. It felt like this is a crazy move.

This is not possible because this is new in terms of someone coming to connect people with the Finnish and African market. So not a lot of people were really ready to take the chance on me in terms of giving me the opportunity. But I persisted. I kept going at it, and luckily I still have that company. Yes, it’s a consulting company, but I actually want to develop a product, a service that is actually concrete and find a way to use the consulting company to sell or market whatever I’m building. And that led me to think about another project, which was the Elementary Project.

What I did with that was try to sell Finnish education, which at that point was number one in the world. So we’ve got a lot of interest from people coming to see, Okay, this is a system that, if mirrored elsewhere, would really work. So we started developing projects around that, and that was my startup that actually started moving very well. We got the right team together.

We are doing a lot of planning. We had a lot of meetings. We were designing the services and product that we could showcase to government officials, education, people that come to Finland, and we would show them around and take them places and try to have them implement the reports that we give them back in their home countries. But one year into this project, just right at the point of scaling it, it failed. And it was so hard to accept that failure because we put a lot of work to it together with the team.

At this point in his entrepreneurial journey, Osita had one failed business and one that still exists. Although that failure hurt financially and psychologically, he learned some important lessons in building and scaling teams.

What I did, in retrospect, was try to learn lessons of the mistakes that I’ve made, mistakes in gathering the right team, moving at the pace that your team could. Right now, I treasure it because I’m using some of the lessons that I learned from the failure of that business to build better businesses.

Now, it didn’t stop there. After that business failed, I was still running my consulting company. I was trying to get products and services in the right hands. And that also opened up another door in the middle of the corona virus. We opened up an Afrofusion restaurant in Finland. This was the first time that something like that was happening. Normally in Finland, African restaurants don’t work, it just opens up and closes.

So we thought, Okay, we’ll do like a different model, which was make a fusion of the Nordic food and the African food together. You know, introduce something that people were not too familiar with and the business ran for about a year and a half and it closed again. So this is the second business I’m closing in a space of five years or so. And you would think this is the time to stop.

This is the time to kind of focus on something else. But no, I started thinking, Why are these things happening in terms of failure? And that is where I learned the lesson that when I focused on the value I am creating, things tend to go better. When I tried to bring people that shared the same value with me, it worked better.

This second failed business led to a moment of introspection which paved the way to Osita’s epiphany – to focus on value and impact rather than money. He used this epiphany to start, yes, you guessed it, another business. He named it Njiko Storytelling.

And that was the beginning of my learning to do business.

For so many years, I had this thing behind my head itching me that, ”This is what you are really good at.” But I felt it was more like a hobby. The idea is I communicate very well with people. I do public speaking, and for 25 years or so, I’ve been training myself in that field. But I didn’t feel that this was supposed to be something I should make a business from, but I gathered all the lessons that I learned from running Bosita Consulting, the contacts that I have made along the way, knocking on doors, the failures that I’ve had in these two businesses.

I started focusing on that path, and that was where we kind of pushed from. And now the business is scaling and I’m getting the traction that I need in terms of, okay, this is what I want to do, and this is how I want to grow a business.

But wait, there’s more! Once Osita figured out the ingredients it took to run two successful businesses, he was ready to start yet another one.

I don’t know if I mentioned it in the beginning, but my biggest achievement so far from all these things I’ve been pursuing is actually this organization called Integrate. Integrate is a nonprofit organization. We harness the potentials of immigrants living in Finland. And one of the things that has made me so happy about this is because we try to see how do we better than lots of people around us, how do we grow from zero?

Because if you look at the climate of Finland in terms of immigration and in terms of people getting access to jobs that they need, it’s a problem that we’ve been dealing with here. When I arrived Finland, that was one of my challenges. I came here to study economics, but very early on I realized that no one was going to employ me in that field. So I thought to myself, what I was going to do is a detour, take a three-year vocational course, get a job, then continue pursuing my education.

And that was what happened. I knew the challenge that immigrants were facing around this. And I thought, How can we solve this? I started talking to people on the streets. We have a problem here. How do we solve it? How do we make it better? The situation we have in terms of getting access to jobs, getting the right resources for businesses for immigrants. And what turned out from that was this organization called Integrate.

We have been operating for six years and we are so happy that we operate with nonexternal funding. So that means our model is we don’t focus on getting any money from anywhere, but on reaching people in the grassroots. We hold events, panel discussions where people come together and they share their pains, their experiences and other people offer tips that these ones could use to kind of better whatever they are dealing with or what they are facing.

We developed this product from that which is In the Spotlight series. And In the Spotlight series kind of shines light on anything that affect the life of an immigrant and try to offer the perspectives of immigrants to the locals and also that of the locals to the immigrants, so that they are able to create this synergy that would help in kind of improving the lot, not only of the immigrants, but also tapping into the benefits that immigrants bring to the community.

An immigrant is like a diamond, a rough diamond that is discovered, they come from somewhere else and they’ve had experiences, they have cultures and ways of doing things that if harnessed properly, they could be adding to that value. And that’s where the Finnish society comes in, where they try to polish these guys, make them ready for the job market, make them ready for the business or the entrepreneurial sector, so that at the end of the day they would then contribute more to the society.

And that is really close to my heart because when you think about what drives me is the fact that when I look at people and I see that we’ve offered help to them in a way that they are able to overcome whatever challenges that they are dealing with. And we’ve had this where people come back to us and say hey,

“What you’ve been doing with Integrate is really good and we appreciate the effort.”

And the fact that we are doing that with only the team and no external funding makes it more precious in that way.

Immigration, and best practices for managing it, is a growing concern in many countries. When I visited Finland, I noticed right away the ease and fluency with which native Finnish people switched between English and Finnish. But that’s the case in many countries, what makes Finland an interesting case study is, as Osita says, the fact that their country is the only one in the world where Finnish is the predominant language spoken.

Yes, it is a very big problem. And that’s one problem that I don’t know if there’s a simple way to solve. Because if you understand or if you know the Finnish language, it’s a very difficult one. It’s not spoken anywhere else than here. So one of the biggest problems, or back in the days when I came here as a student and I was asking people, Why would you not want to learn the language? Why not even make an attempt?

And one of the problems that I discovered then is that people were always thinking, I need to get out of this ecosystem. So I had no motivation to kind of learn this language. That would be like open doors for me. Finland is a country that speaks very well English. If you’ve been here, you jump on the metro, you ask someone any question, they respond to you in English. And this creates a problem for immigrants.

But that being said, we face more challenges other than the language. Finland is a country that is still quite homogeneous. It’s becoming a bit diverse now in terms of. People from mixed race becoming like the next generation. And this is where the challenge now is coming for the country to accept. How do we now bring these people into the fold?

Because if you understand the Nordics, it’s been a center of excellence. But for them now to open the door for people to actually come in is something that is very, very difficult for them. And this is something that we are trying to change, changing the mindset, seeing the importance of having a diverse team and not being afraid of change. Because one thing that a lot of immigrants want to do when they come here is contribute as much as they want to the society.

They want to add value. But in my conversation with people early on, you find out that they were already thinking, if this society is not going to offer me the opportunity, I’m going to look for it elsewhere. And that is what happened. A lot of the guys I studied with eventually left Finland. You find a lot of them in Nigeria, in the UK, some went to Canada and even the U.S. and if you look at these guys, they’ve done very well because people know the value of the Finnish education.

They know that these guys that are coming to us, they are well equipped, we don’t need to do so much work in getting them ready. Well, that’s the thing that Finland is not seeing yet. Unfortunately, the Finnish system sees integration from the problem side. So that’s why more emphasis is placed on this person is coming or he doesn’t know the language, but not considering that this person might have worked for a multinational company elsewhere, might have multiple degrees elsewhere.

So having that balance and bridging that gap, because we do a lot of work actually, even though it’s Finnish that is spoken, we do a lot of work in English. Finland is so international that there are lots of companies coming here and they do transactions in English so the language is not like the core problem, but it’s more like the society opening itself up to accept what is different. And that has been one of the major challenges that we are seeing. So the language in itself is not the main problem, but it is a part of the problem because a lot of people don’t have the motivation to study it. And the motivation happens only when you know that if you give this your 100, you’re gonna get something back. People give energy to learning the language, but they are not still able to get jobs. So you got a lot of questions coming, like,

“I’ve learned this language. I have the Finnish citizenship. Why are there not opportunities for me? Why are these doors not being opened?” 

And that’s something that we are trying to now see through our organization. How do we educate the Finnish businesses to see diversity as something that should be part of their core value? The fact that they are trying to tap into the value that people bring, like that rough diamond where they have to probably polish a bit, and when they polish it, then these guys are ready for the job market per se.

From being diamonds in the rough to becoming rare commodities. I now see a thread that is connecting all of Osita’s businesses along his entrepreneurial journey. He’s expanded his original core ideas of introducing and connecting Nordic businesses to African markets to include connecting all immigrants in Finland to opportunities that create win-win situations. Coming up after the break, Osita will share a success story with one of his non-profit’s clients using this very business model.

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Welcome back! Before the break, serial entrepreneur and chief storyteller, Osita Ifezue, shared his burning desire to start a business. There were some failures along the way, but once he focused on scaling impact, his ventures became successful. One of those ventures is a non-profit called Integrate. Listen as he shares how they scaled impact for a couple of their clients using LinkedIn. Here’s Osita.

Companies that I’ve worked with Integrate are in the nonprofit sectors. So, what we’ve tried to do is form a lot of collaborations with people whereby we are not having external funding. We’ve worked with the Helsinki Think Company, they have about 5,000 followers on their Instagram page. So, when we get to their place to hold these events, we try to find ways that we can get into their community and push as much as what we can from our grassroots level to keep them engaged.

And this is something that we’ve tried to build by having these events in various places. We go to wherever you have your organization, we try to push our events there, bring our people from the grassroots. And we find that this has a multiplier effect. And that multiplier effect is also for the benefits of the company. And that’s what we are trying to sell when we push in terms of this collaborative effort how do we bring value from the grassroots level to kind of build on what they have?

We’ve noticed that when we do that, their engagement not only with the people that they have, but with our people, which they at times feel it’s a very small community, but very organic. So that organic effect makes it so that people are able to pass on the information about them to their closest community. And that’s something that has also created this opportunity for bigger organizations and bigger firms when they work with us.

Galvanizing those communities through events conducted in their location led to an increase in engagement on the Helsinki Think Company’s LinkedIn page by 300%. Osita mentioned achieving a similar result for another company called Luckan.

We had our events in their place and what we tried to do with them was kind of have like this long-term partnership that for the next 3, 4, 5 events we are going to be having it in your location. And what happened within that time is that their engagement also in LinkedIn grew about 300%.

If you’re not familiar with how LinkedIn works, then you’ll have to trust me when I say that a 300% increase in engagement is a remarkable accomplishment for a business account. Unlike other popular platforms like TikTok and Instagram, it can be particularly challenging for business accounts to grow an active presence on LinkedIn in comparison to individuals. It’s a long game, so it’s not surprising that Osita reported it taking about seven months to achieve this growth.

It was because we have this event every third quarter. So we had three of those events in that community. And that’s basically that time that it took to kind of get it, get it going.

And that’s the goal because when we come to an organization, we are thinking, What can we offer them? And what we’ve been able to offer them is this very organic connection to people on the ground. Because we have a lot of people from the immigrant community that are oftentimes disconnected from the general information that people get but they are really active in going to events.

They are active in participating in whatever kind of information that would get them into doors, get them into places. So when we come in as the needed people, connecting them and having events in their location, we find that the engagement at that period kind of increases because now you have a lot of people sharing, and we kind of have a lot of information resharing in our community.

Building community without external funding for a non-profit organization is also another accomplishment Osita can be proud of. I wondered if he thought that a focus on fundraising or other traditional activities that non-profits engage in to bring in money would or could lead to bad behavior.

Yeah, you’re quite correct because at times I think that was what I say, putting the cart before the horse. The money comes. And at times when we think about success, we often think about success in terms of monetary value. Okay, how much am I gonna make from this? But when people come to our events, what we hear from them after they leave is,

“This was a great one! Where have you guys been?”

You know, things like that. And when you hear comments like ”The post you made helped us get a job, I didn’t know that this was in Finland.” That’s more impactful and that tend to stick more with people for a longer time than the money you give to them or the money they made.

So they tend to remember all the impact that we’ve made in their lives because we’ve actually given them the right information that would help them get some of the things or make their life in Finland easier. And that has been the primary drive because we often don’t focus on the numbers in terms of, how many followers do we get now, but more like how many of our followers are we pushing to get out from not having a job or not being or feeling like outsiders in Finland to kind of being more included or feeling that they are heard or seen in the country or in the community.

When the focus is on creating value, every other thing falls in place, including the money. And right now we are getting a lot of interest from organizations that are really looking to work more with us because we have that direct grassroots access. We have connection to people that are experiencing their own challenge and they know those that can solve it. And we are lucky to be one of those that they feel, yes, these guys can solve some of our needs, even though we are not handing them money in their pocket.

But some way we are opening doors for them to be successful. For example, the last In The Spotlight we focused on how we can find success in Finland. And the goal of that was to find ways to encourage people to build the spirit of resilience, to push irrespective of the challenge that they have. We don’t measure in monetary terms that success. But how have I been able to be a better contributor to my society? How am I bringing value and how am I creating that space for other people to tap into that value also?

There’s a quote by a famous American poet named Maya Angelou. “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” A major lesson from this scale tale is perhaps more esoteric in nature. There are some who may scoff at the idea of measuring success in terms of impact and not revenue. Osita’s tale challenges us to make sure that we are doing things that truly are of value and benefit to others instead of our work being self-serving.

Building a community that you can share your knowledge with and connect to your network of influencers and larger organizations for the community’s benefit is another key lesson from him.

Normally, I end an episode with additional lessons learned, but in this case it seemed more fitting to let Osita do it.

No matter what inconvenience or failure that you experience, never stop. It feels so bad when you fail. But failure is part of our success and when we picture things like this, even if I aim for the top of the mountain and I’m not able to get there, I might get to the hill and that’s far enough. If that’s how far I get, that’s good enough. But stopping to climb, it’s a no brainer. This is my approach when my businesses failed.

I thought, Yes, I’ve put a lot of money to it. I got in debt. Would it be a wise idea now to stop thinking of being a business, just get a job and apply the skills that you’ve had or learned from running businesses? No because as long as you got something to give to someone, until you are able to give that value, you shouldn’t stop. And that’s my push, that’s my drive. So even if my businesses still failed today, I’m still going to look at what opportunity do I have to create impact in the lives of those around me. And when you look so hard, you would find and that’s the push and that’s the drive.

As a recovering perfectionist, I learned the lesson of focusing on impact over money firsthand. Now my mantra is: “Leave it better than you found it.” Knowing that I left an individual, team, project, client, in better shape than when I began working with them is what gives me personal satisfaction and, it ensures I can go to bed with a clear conscious. Do your best and let go of the outcome. The only thing we can control are our reactions and responses.

We’ve curated a list of resources for you based on what Osita shared in this episode, including a link to his company’s and client’s websites. Click the link in this episode’s description or visit ScaleTalesPodcast.com to gain access. ScaleTalesPodcast.com.

Thank you for listening! If you learned something valuable from this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you’re listening.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I produced and narrated this episode. Audio editing by Olanrewaju Adeyemo. Music production and original score by Sabor! Music Enterprises. Video editing by Gladiola Films.

You’ve been listening to Scale Tales, a podcast by Equilibria, Inc.