HUMBLE BEGINNING,GLOBAL SUCCESS: EDOKA IDOKO.
Most times, alot of persons feel rising from scratch doesn’t amount to success, it is a very big misconception as I have seen people rise from nothing and humble beginings. If you agree with me, follow me through the story of Edoka Idoko, a story of resilience, determination and greatness. In the story/ history of Benue, it’s recorded that it’s occupants were mostly farmers or civil servant. Benue men and women were never known for involving themselves in business,until recently, a lot of them are embracing business thereby making money and a good name for themselves. One of these numerous entrepreneur happens to be Edoka Idoko.
Edoka Idoko was born on the 28 April,1985 at Kano state. He is the founder and CEO of Ojirehprime, a financial service company in Africa. He studied Science Education at Benue State University, Business Management at Qualifi UK, and Organizational Leadership at Harvard Business School.
In early 2016, he found himself in the commodity market selling rice and also also being an intermediate between the importer and retailers. He sometimes connected the retailers as well, he felt he needed to do more for himself and life and then decided to move to Lagos State. While in Lagos,he decided to leverage technology to bring more light to what he was doing. He was squatting with someone and had a Samsung tablet whose battery lasted only 40mins when charged. He got someone who helped build a site using his faulty tablet.
A year later, he successfully got 54 customers that were shopping from him regularly. That was a huge progress and he decided to mail the customers to appreciate them, because that was the only thing they could afford. During this process,he discovered despite them having a payment schedule,96% of the customers made payment through bank transfer for the reasons of not wanting to expose their bank cards, for fear of fraudulent activities.
That was just the answer to their questions, they decided to make prepaid cards for their customers. When asked in an interview, he said “Between then and the close of 2019 we already had about 40,000 cards in circulation and this number of cards in circulation were from customers that did not care about our e-commerce site. We thought we wanted to use this to drive e-commerce, but they got it for something else. We took that 2 years to interrogate what is happening, we now realised that this product meant different things to different people For some, it was budgetary control, for others it was utility cards, for others it was savings.
They used it for different purposes and they were largely young persons and not the older ones. We found a lot of students using the cards to keep their money in their accounts; put something they want to spend for the week and ensure they do not go beyond.
We found people saying that they refused to collect a card from their bank because it was connected to their accounts they didn’t want to spend. However, if they take our cards, at the beginning of the week, they would put exactly what they need for the week.
They do not have a bank card, hence they are holding themselves accountable to ensure that they stick to the money for the week. They will repeat the same process next week. They now have to go to their banks once a week. When the numbers started ramping up, we took the whole of 2019 to understand what we were building”. He discovered he was operating in two different industries and seperated the E-commerce from the fin-tech and that brought about the birth of Ojirehprime financial services. The whole of 2019 was used to understand the customers. The growth continued when they came across a US based company that had similar stories like them and it was the motivation he needed to keep pushing. When life throws at you a thousand challenges to quit, always have a reason to keep holding on. He kept building the company and believed in what he was doing. when asked,he said one of his fond memories was between 2017-2018 when he slept on the street for 4-5 months because he couldn’t afford to pay for a decent home. His family were in Abuja but he choose to remain quiet about his suffering because he saw it as price payment. As at 2022, the company moved it’s headquarter to UK with the help of the UK government.This was done because the vision of the company is to build a global banking services for Africa.
The story of Edoka Idoko is that of humble begining,global success. No matter how tough it gets,if you don’t give up and keep your gaze and focus on the dream,it will be achievable.
