On Easter Sunday, I listened to a powerful message by Apostle Flourish Peters titled “The Gardener is Back.” It was a sermon about faith and a lesson in growth, stewardship, and deliberate cultivation, the principles that apply just as much to business as they do to life. A business only flourishes like a garden when it is tended intentionally, with care, strategy, and consistency.
Markets in Nigeria are fast-moving and highly competitive, so growth is rarely accidental. This is especially important in a space where MSMEs account for about 96% of businesses and nearly half of Nigeria’s GDP, yet many still struggle with survival due to inflation, rising costs, and weakening consumer spending power. Why? How?
I will explore this in the five Gs framework: Ground, Gardener, Garden, Grit, Gold.
Ground: Know Your Market Reality
Before anything grows, the soil must be understood. In business, this is your customers, their needs, and their behaviour. Many founders, like Tara Fela-Durotoye, founder of House of Tara, demonstrated this early in their journey by building around Nigerian women rather than importing foreign assumptions. Their successes reflect that markets reward relevance, not imitation. Strong businesses are built on a precise understanding of customer reality, not broad assumptions.
Gardener: Be The Strategist
A garden thrives on decisions and what you make of it. What is planted, where it is planted, and how it is maintained determine the outcome. People like Akin Alabi built Nairabet through strategic timing, positioning, and distribution choices that shaped its early dominance. This reflects that a business is not about activity, but about decision quality. Meanwhile, strategy today is no longer only about the business itself. It is also about the founder.
One of the most overlooked realities in modern entrepreneurship is that people no longer separate the business from the person behind it. In Nigerian markets, trust is fragile, and competition is intense; the founder has become part of the brand architecture. Research from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and global personal branding studies shows that over 70% of consumers are more likely to trust and engage with brands whose founders are visible and active online, because familiarity reduces hesitation.
This shifts the strategy into two layers: building the business system and building the founder’s visibility system. A weak founder brand creates friction even when the product is strong, but a strong one accelerates trust before marketing even begins. Strategy today is therefore operational and reputational architecture.
Garden: Organise Your Business Platforms
A garden without intentional arrangement of crops becomes chaotic and difficult to harvest. In business, the garden is your platforms, communication channels, and customer touchpoints.
Don Jazzy built Mavin Records by shifting from a traditional label model into a structured creative ecosystem where talent, content, and audience engagement reinforce each other. After Mo’Hits, he rebuilt the business with a clear system rather than relying on a single superstar act. Instead of a duo-driven structure, Mavin became a portfolio-based label where multiple artists are developed in parallel. This reduced dependency risk and created long-term continuity.
Audience engagement is structured around this shared identity. Instead of fragmented fanbases, Mavin builds a collective audience that connects with the label as a brand. Fans are introduced to multiple artists through one entry point, creating overlap in consumption and loyalty.
Don Jazzy himself serves as a central trust anchor. His visibility, consistency online, and cultural relevance strengthen audience confidence in every new artist introduced under the label. This trust transfer significantly lowers the barrier for acceptance of new talent. He is a good gardener for the garden.
Every part reinforces the other, creating clarity in a crowded entertainment industry. This principle extends to communications and visibility strategy. From my podcast conversations with founders, I realised that businesses do not fail from lack of activity; they fail from inconsistent narrative structure. When platforms are disorganised, even strong messaging loses impact. When structured, even simple communication becomes influential.
Grit: Show Up Every Day
The gardener must show up at his garden every day. Growth is rarely immediate. It compounds through consistency. In today’s Nigerian business environment, grit is no longer just about showing up frequently. It is about staying structurally committed in environments that do not reward immediate results.
Most Nigerian entrepreneurs underestimate how long it takes to build trust. Every day, there are shifting consumer priorities and unpredictable demand cycles; early traction is often mistaken for failure when it is simply a delayed response. As a result, many businesses abandon strategies too early.
Therefore, grit is operational stability. It is the ability to maintain output, communication, and customer engagement even when feedback loops are slow or unclear. It is continuing to show up in the market while refining quietly in the background.
There is also a communication dimension to grit that is often ignored. Inconsistent presence creates perception gaps. When a brand disappears and reappears unpredictably, the market begins to assign meaning to that silence, often incorrectly. Over time, this weakens trust even when the product remains strong. The most resilient businesses understand that visibility is not a campaign; it is a rhythm. And rhythm only works when it is sustained long enough to become familiar.
Gold: Harvest The Results
Gold, here, is not a single moment of success. It is a layered outcome. It begins with financial return, but extends into brand authority, market trust, and sustained demand without constant persuasion. At this stage, a business is no longer constantly explaining its value; the market already understands it.
This shift is critical in Nigeria. This is where leverage emerges. Strong businesses at this stage spend less energy convincing and more energy scaling what already works. Their systems begin to attract opportunities rather than chase them. There is also a reputational layer to gold that is often underestimated. When the market starts to repeat the brand’s identity without prompting, it becomes a template for other brands. This is the clearest signal that positioning has matured.
Brands that fail to define their position are forced into constant persuasion. The problem is rarely demand, but an unclear perception. Growth is not accidental; it is cultivated. In a competitive market like Nigeria, success belongs not to the loudest brands but to the clearest ones. Winning businesses understand their market, make intentional decisions, build structured systems, maintain narrative consistency, and harvest deliberately.
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Featured Image by Shkraba Anthony for Pexels
The post Kehinde Ajose: How To Build a Winning and Leading Business in Nigeria appeared first on BellaNaija – Showcasing Africa to the world. Read today!.
On Easter Sunday, I listened to a powerful message by Apostle Flourish Peters titled “The Gardener is Back.” It was a sermon about faith and a lesson in growth, stewardship, and deliberate cultivation, the principles that apply just as much to business as they do to life. A business only flourishes like a garden when
The post Kehinde Ajose: How To Build a Winning and Leading Business in Nigeria appeared first on BellaNaija – Showcasing Africa to the world. Read today!. Read More
