Rekindling the Flame: Tips to Relaunch Your Port Harcourt Catering Business

Hello and welcome to the show. If this is your first time listening to the show, apologies because this is going to be a freestyle episode. So don't expect my ideas to be as structured or as coherent as they normally are because today is one of those shout out episodes, one of those episodes where I've interacted with a listener of the podcast. And typically what I do is, you know, sometimes we have very long conversations.

That's for for people who reach out and, you know, if we end up having nice conversations, sometimes we take it off the chat and we actually have a phone call. And for this lady in particular, her name is Zena and she owns a business, Zena's Delicacies. And please check out on Instagram, Her Instagram is at Zena's under score Delicacies and Zenas is ZINAS. And then of course, underscored and then DELICAC i.e. S So Zenas delicacies.

We had a conversation I think was maybe about a 30 minute conversation. She's a third year student at University of Port Harcourt. So yeah, we had some nice conversations there on that bit because my cousin went to University of Port Harcourt, but that was back when cultism was a thing back in that uni. And but she says that things have calmed down in in Uniport now. So that was good to hear. Well, my father-in-law went to Uniport as well, although he claims that cultism was never a thing in Uniport.

I guess it's one of those generational things that, you know, a couple decades back, you know, the university was saying and then cultism became the thing and now the school is saying again, where was I? Anyway, Anyway, she's an online food vendor and her mom is a chef and she does some work out of her mom's kitchen. I checked out her Instagram handle and, you know, that's where the conversations started off from pretty much because she reached out.

And everybody who reaches out, I try and check them out. I check out the socials because most of you who reach out happen to be business owners or people who in the process of starting a business. So you have some, you know, something on your LinkedIn or something on your WhatsApp. So I go ahead and I check out your socials and that's how we started having some of these conversations. But anyway, just like other people who have reached out in the past, she reached out because she wanted to say what's up.

And I sense that she probably had some questions or some things that she wanted to talk about. And so that's the reason why I took it off the the chat, took it off, took it off SMS. And then we just had a phone conversation, you know, that way it can be helpful real quick. And so the summary of our conversation is this. And I want to share the conversation, some aspects of the conversation that we had, because I think that there are some of you who might be in this sort of situation and some of the tips and tricks that I've given to her might be useful if you find yourself in this situation and you happen to be stuck as well.

Now, the reason why I said this episode is going to be scattered is because typically what I do is I get off the phone with these individuals and then I get a pen and paper and I try and sketch out, you know, a, a much more orderly, concise treatments of the ideas that we talked about. But things have been rather busy because there's a client that I'm doing some some work for. So far it's been a six. So far it's been a six or seven week engagement.

And, and let's just say I don't have time to make my podcast episodes as structures and as and as planned as they they used to be in the past. So OK, yes, I have. So she's been in business for two years. Zeno has been in two business for two years and she's currently at the stage where she's finding it hard to get customers. She wants to, she wants to try advertising to promote the business, but she doesn't know how and she doesn't know how to reach other people online or offline.

Because Xena is just like me. She's a she's a homebody, a homeboy or a home girl or whatever it is that we call these kind of people nowadays. So she spends all her time indoors, she's not talking to people, she's not talking to people much. And so for her reaching out to people either online or offline to try and get the business going again is is a problem. So I had a couple of questions for her. And that's the reason why I

recommend that we should always start off our conversations anyway by asking people questions. Because if you have a product or a service, you cannot make a successful pitch for how your product or service can help the person until you ask a couple of questions. Because questions are going to let you know what the problem is. And then you'll be able to know how your knowledge base, how your skill set, how your product or your service can apply to this person.

So I wouldn't have been helpful to Xena if I just went ahead and you know, throughout all those platitudes that people throw out over on the Internet, you know, aspire to require to refire and get what you desire and all that motivational crap. And you know, the whole platitude of, you know, prospecting or, or content is king or whatever the solution is. So I need to listen to figure out what the problem was and then come up with some solutions that can be helpful.

And that is actually what you should be doing. Like I've said. So if you're a tailor, sorry, not a tailor. If you're, if you're a a fashion designer and someone says, can you hook me up, I want a peplum dress. My sister is getting married, blah, blah, blah. It's not just a matter of saying, OK, peplum, Peplum is going to cost you 25K if you bring your organza. Yes, you know that peplum you charge 25K to make a peplum dress out of organza.

By the way, I know nothing about fashion. So please ladies, nobody should laugh at what I'm saying. So I don't know if peplum is still in style or if peplum is a thing that Niger babes have ever done. And I don't know if you can use organza to sow peplum. So I'm just freestanding here. So it's not just a matter of you say OK, no problem you want peplum. Peplum IS25K if you bring organza and it is a 75K if you bring Ghanaian lace or whatever.

So you don't just have that conversation, you know, you have a conversation with the person. Oh congratulations, your sister is getting married. Oh, when is the wedding, blah blah blah. Are you going to be on the bridal train? This and this and that and that. So what do you guys have planned? I'm sure it's going to be on the evening of partying and this and this and that and that. What's your personal sense of style? What the kind of things that you like?

When you say peplum, what do you mean exactly? Can you show me something on Instagram? Some of these things might seem like idol chat. There are some of you who think, just tell her that look peplum dress organza material 25K, give them give me the money be gone. But if you don't get a sense of the person's sense of style, color palette, what else? And then if you don't have those functional conversations, because there's some people who go to weddings and they just want to look pretty and elegant,

that's it. Then there's some people who, excuse me, there's some people who go to weddings and they don't not only want to look pretty and elegant, but then they also want to have a ball. Like they really, really, really want to dance. And so at my cousin's wedding, there's this fashion designer who did some magic because it was just a matter of a wedding dress. Bring the organza material. It's a 300K. It wasn't just that simple conversation.

They had a conversation about the whole thing, the whole day, how everything was supposed to go. And then they came up with this really interesting thing where the fashion designer made three dresses in one. Now I'm not a technical person so I don't know. I'm not a technical fashion person, so I don't know how they did it. All I know was my cousin did not have to get 3 dresses. It was one dress. So she came and she walked into the church and it was white and she had the is it the train or the ball or whatever.

And it looked nice and it looked wedding me. And then when was time to drag dance into the hall, it was still a dress, but somehow the ballpark was missing. And I think the shoulders were missing somehow. I don't know how they did it. And then after the dancing around and everything and you know the park where you go change clothes, she just went and touched up her makeup. And then she came out and was still a dress, but now it was mini and it was white and still mini and something.

But I don't know how they did a shot, but they did it. My cousin paid for one dress that was kind of modular. I don't know if, you know, they would finish one part of the ceremony and then you tear things off or maybe parts of it were detachable. I don't know how they did it. I just know that they, you know, they did it. So what was that? OK, what I was trying to say anyway, was I tried to listen to Zeno so I could give recommendations that are particular to her.

And so in running your business, whether you're a fashion stylist or whether you sell catfish or whether you you make a traditional soap, you actually need to listen to people so you can personalize your advice. Because if Zeno reached out to me to say, look, I have a problem and I just said aspire to refire to acquire what you desire, that's not going to be of much help. Or if I just told that content is king, that's not going to be much help.

Or if I told her that, look, prospecting is the successful base of any business, that's not going to be of any help. So I listened to that. I could personalize my advice so that my advice could be contextual. So I asked a couple of questions. Good thing for us. So she has done business with loads of people in the last two years. I say, how many people? Just give me a guess. Is it 20? She says more than. Is it 30? She said more than.

And I said perfect. That's good. It's good because for lots of folks who are trying to step their game up, they actually haven't done much. And that's a problem because if you haven't done much, there's not much of A foundation that we can go on. So now for someone who over the last two years has done business with more than 30 people, it means that there's a list of 30 or 40 people that you can call to say what's up, how you been?

And I haven't been in touch in a while, but I'm getting back into the game. Would love would love to cater for your parties, love to cater for your blah, blah, blah, you know, just have those conversations. So it's a beautiful thing. And so that was what I advised her to do pretty much that we were going to reach into a phone address book. We're going to reach into the previous her past database and we're going to try and re establish contact with people.

But of course I had to give her realistic expectations. There's know how that you've done business with someone over the last two years. You haven't done a good job of keeping in touch. There's no how that if you reach out to 40 people like that, you're going to end up getting business from 40 people. But the good news is you will get some repeat business from someone, someone or two. But then there's also the name of the game is also referrals to get repeat business and referrals.

So also had to set the realistic expectations. You've done business with people over the course of two to three years. You haven't done a good job of keeping in touch. There's no way that forty of them are going to give you a referral. Well, the good thing is one or two might give you a referral. Then the third thing I told her was this whole thing of I'm a homebody, I'm a homeboy, I'm a home girl. You know, it's just me.

I'm just chill. I'm an introvert, you know, blah, blah, blah. And please, when I say things like that, I'm not being derisive or insulting to you guys because believe me, I am one of you 'cause I told you, you know, that you can't catch me outside. If you see me outside the house, it's because of the kids or it's because of my wife or it's because I think, you know, there's money to be made. So apart from that, I'm chilling.

I'm in the house and you know, I'm in the house fiddling with chess or studying or watching movies or, you know, what do I really do with my times off anyway? So I'm just trying to say that I am one of you guys. So I told her that the problem is not that somebody is introverted or somebody is laid back or somebody is is shy or, you know, that's not the problem. The problem really is that most people or most people who have that kind of emotional or psychological make up or situation or whatever, they don't have a plan for what the conversation is supposed to be like.

And so because of that, the prospect of the conversation is daunting. It's just because you don't have a plan. That's the reason why it seems so daunting. But even if you have a simple plan, which is show up, say hello, compliment her on her hair, because I have been in that situation, you know, my comment is surprised to some of you, but I haven't always been the talkative, chatty type. And so there was a certain point like around that kind primary school into junior secondary school where talking to girls was not easy for me.

But that simple plan of show up, say hello, compliment her hair, even that that simple three steps was enough for me to get a couple of conversations going. And yes, eventually I got my heart broken in like SS1 when one idiot stole my girlfriend because I was in boarding school and she was not. So I had to send letters back home to her. I didn't know that this idiot was taking my letters and reading them. And anyway, she had to.

Guys know my babe, but that's the story for another day. So what I'm just trying to say is if you have a simple plan when it comes to personal stuff, show up, say hello, compliment her here, the conversation, there's some sort of plan so you have some sort of confidence. So it is in the business context, you need to have a simple plan of I'm going to go here, I'm going to say this or I'm going to do this and then things will flow a lot easier.

So I told her that her first assignment and remember, I keep telling you guys on the podcast that, you know, reach out. Fine, I'll talk, I'll chat to anyone. I have my ways of sniffing out people who I think are reaching out for free business advice. And if you're reaching out for free business advice, you will be fined out pretty quickly. I've been doing this for a while, so you can't pull the fast one on me and I will deal with you accordingly.

But for people that I really think I'm the tight spot and that I can help, one way that I use to Ouija guys art is I always give people assignments because I have noticed that people who are reaching out for freebies, they don't like extra work. They want you to give them a magic bullet. And I have no magic bullet for everyone, for anyone. So I give people assignments and I notice that there's a huge drop off I can, I'm never tired of talking to people because I

can get rid of 99% of the people who reach out by just giving one assignment. And so I give her an assignment and luckily she has started responding on that. So that's good. So I know she's I know she's serious. So anyhow, first assignment was let's look through our phone book. We need to figure out who it is we've done business with in the last two to three years, Come up with the list. And as I was saying, and as I gave her that assignment, she now said, OK, when I come up with the list, am I should the message be something like this,

this, this is that, that, that. And I was happy to hear that because it shows that she even gets the program. She knows that there's going to be some sort of outreach when we have come up with the, with the short list of these individuals. But I told her that the messages are going to be contextual. It depends because there are some people that you did business with two years ago and you had a wonderful time working with them.

They had a wonderful time working with you and they really, really love you. They would love to give a referral, they would love to give a testimony out. They would love to give a recommendation, they would love it, whatever. For those people, the message will be different. There are some people you did business with over the last two years who you can't really remember them. They might they can't really remember you.

The messaging will be different. And then there are people that you did business with them, you tried your best to, but there were one or two issues and the messaging with them will be different. So I told her messaging later. First off, let's just sit down, come up with the list and let's see how we can use our existing database or existing contact set to either get repeat business or get referrals. Because it's a whole lot easier to get business from people that you've done in the past than trying to go out and chase new strangers.

And then I told another added benefit is that for someone who considers yourself a homebody like me, by the time you have practice with people that you already know or you're kind of familiar with, when you're now stepping out into the field and you start talking to strangers, it's going to be less daunting or less intimidating because you've had practice, you've had a couple of conversations. If I remember someone that I

spoke to who didn't quite buy the idea, So excuse me, but then this is what she did. She went over and beyond. The lady bought 10K worth of credit and loaded her phone and then she bought a notebook. And then she took her viral and then she wrote it down, you know, all the names and everything. And then she started calling these people 1 by 1 by 1 by 1. And by the time the weekend was up, she said she was totally tired because she called over 50

people. But she was so happy she did because people had feedback on this. People had feedback on that. One person said, hey, where have you been? I lost your phone number, blah, blah, blah. There's this, there's this is that. She got a few more orders. And she said it was a wonderful weekend because even though she was tired, she got some affirmation. She got some business. She now got a clearer sense of who our ideal customer was.

Because, you know, you call some people and by the time you're done, you remember, like, look, when I did work with this guy, I didn't like him anyway. He didn't like me. The money wasn't great. Why am I even bothering me? Guys like this? And then you call somebody up and like, I remember this, babe, we had fun, was good, the money was great. My profit margin was 50%. So I should be calling more people like her. So you always get a good, you always get a good return when you engage in these sorts of activities.

So yeah, bottom line. So for Zena Zena's delicacies, please check out our Instagram handle. For those of you who are based in pH, her stuff looks real nice. You know, try out place an order. So was my recommendation to her, and it's also my recommendation to those of you who might be in a similar situation where it's been 2-3 years, you're kinda in the slump, you don't have any ideas about how to get customers or stuff like that.

Well, yes, advertising. On the advertising thing, I told her, look, just chill for now. Don't advertise just yet because before you throw money at advertising, for those of you who've been listening to the podcast recently, maybe the last week, you remember that two or three episodes ago I talked about, I spoke about how you need to be good at organic content 1st and see what vibes is your organic content before you now throw money behind advertising.

So it's the same thing. Yeah, you will advertise. Before you advertise, you know, you need to look at your Instagram because her Instagram is well populated and she has lots of followers. So look at Instagram, get a sense of what hit, what didn't hit, what's working, what's not working. Use organic content and experiment. You'll get a sense of what works, what doesn't. Then the one that works, that is the one that you will now say,

OK, Facebook advertising or Instagram advertising, weekly budgets, budget 7K to boost this particular post and then you start seeing the results. Because you've used organic 1st to see that these kind of videos work, these kind of pictures work these kind of whatever work. So that's why I told her that for advertising, just chill. First, let's finish with the with the with the phone book. Then let's see what else. I think that was the summary of the thing on on the phone end.

But we quickly took a really interesting detour because she was talking to me about also lacking inspirational for content ideas. And I told her the same thing that I've been telling folks for the last couple of months, which is that now that we all have smartphones and that AI is readily available, this whole thing of I don't know what to post, it's not a valid idea anymore. It's not a valid excuse anymore. These AI tools are good assistants, office secretaries,

whatever. They are good ideation tools and we should use it as such. So start off the conversation by saying the usual, 'cause when I have these conversations, what I say is I say Chargi BT I say Gemini, that's from Google. Perplexity, perplexity. And you know all the others. So I called all of them and you know this big, I mean Zeno, sorry Zena rather. So Zena knows of them, but she doesn't have any of them. And oh really?

You don't use air? She say, yeah, I do. Now this AI available on WhatsApp. And I was shocked. I was like, you have AI on WhatsApp. I, you know, I didn't get the memo because I don't have it, but she does somehow. So if any of you work out WhatsApp, please can you guys roll out the AI feature to the rest of us? Because I don't have AI on my WhatsApp. And since then I've met another person who says they actually do have AI on their WhatsApp and AI

on Facebook. And then she says that she also has AI on Snapchat. And I was shocked. I was like, Snapchat, people still use Snapchat. I just assumed that Snapchat was dead, but apparently Snapchat is not. It's alive and it's, well, I guess all people like me are not on Snapchat. So anyway, we use the AI tool on Snapchat. It came up with a real basic prompt and it came up with six content ideas. I can't remember anyway, but it came up with six content ideas.

And I just told her, look, you know what? These six ideas are going to be the template. So idea one is for Monday, idea two is for Wednesday. You know, so basically content from Monday till Saturday is sorted because you've been at this for the past 2-3 years. You already have over 1000 photos on your phone. So all you have to do is take one photo, apply one idea and you're sorted. So for the one that says, OK, there's one idea, that Snapchat.

Snapchat. Yeah, I said menu highlight of the day or something like that. Yeah, menu highlight of the day. So I told her if day one, if option one is menu highlight of the day, then when you wake up on Monday, scroll through your phone. And the example I gave was a goosey because I was going to say I'm not a great cook. But The thing is I don't even cook at all. So let me not say, OK, I can, I can make beans and I can make rice.

So I told her menu of the day, highlight of the day can be boiled beans with sweet potato because I know I can do that. So in my own case, if I was going to promote that kind of thing, my own menu highlight of the day would be today's Menu of the day's boiled beans and sweet potato was a recipe that was taught to me by one of my idiot roommates in OAU when I was in our wall hall in room 2O2. It's a special kind of meal because you know the beans are sweet.

You prepared like this, you throw in some, you throw in some sweet potato. It gives some starch to the whole thing. So the porridge is nice and thick. It's a good meal, it gives you energy. Something, something, something. That is my menu highlight for today. If you're interested in placing an order, one bowl is available at 15 per bowl. So they hit me up, check me at Uniport hostel room, something, something, something, or send me a WhatsApp message at blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah to place your order. You know, that kind of thing. So that was my own, the example that I gave using beans and and what's it called a sweet potato. By the way, if you're a caterer, I do not suggest that you try and do menu highlight of the day of beans and sweet potato. I don't think you're going to, I don't think your market will move. I think people are looking for stuff that is much more exciting.

But summary, what I'm trying to say is this AI is even more available than I thought. You don't need to have a ChatGPT account to use AI anymore. For those of you who AI has been rolled out to your WhatsApp, it's there. You can create a prompt. You can say I am a Nigerian. I'm a Nigerian young man living in Zamfara interested in starting a sculpt, a sculpt, a business as a as a sculpture, as a sculpture artist. Abby as an iron, OK as a sculpture artist I hope to sell to high end individuals and in between so so so and so living in XYZ parts of the city.

My current portfolio is something something something Stonecraft made of the something something period. What ideas? What ideas can you give me to attract high end clients that match, you know any? But you get the whole point, that whole story that I just said. The final thing would, would be Snapchat AI tell me how I can attract clients within therefore within kind of economic range and then send Snapchat AI is going to say something.

Some of those things will not make sense. Whatever doesn't make sense, disregard some of those things that it says will make very good sense. For the things that make very good sense, take it and apply it. Some work. For the things that work very good, do it again. Some will not work. For the things that don't work, disregard. You can see how when it comes to sales tactics or content ideas or things like that, we can use our mobile phones now to ideate,

to get good ideas, to get useful suggestions. It's not cheating. That's how business has always been. Before AII would sit down with my brother and I'll be like, hey look bro, I'm thinking about this. This is like how, how do you reason this thing? He would tell me what he thinks. The one that I like, I'll take. The one that I think is rubbish, I'll disregard. When I started off as a wedding photographer, I just come back to Nigel.

So I was living with Mumsy, you know, some things I even tell Mumsy as well. You know, I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking, what do you think? I talked to my babe. My babe is not my wife. And of course now we still have those conversations. So this is how we've always run things. We've always asked for advice. I'm just saying that now you can also get advice from these these digital tools. Anyway, it's almost 30 minutes,

so let me just bring it to a close. Shout out to Xena or Xena's delicacy, the third year student from the university in the University of Port Harcourt. Please check out our Instagram handle at ZINAS under score Delicacies. And if you're looking for a nice tasty grub and you're based in pH, hit up and I'm sure she'll be able to take good care of you. The reason why I shared this conversation was we discussed some useful ideas that I think should be able to help people who are in a similar situation.

So if you think you heard anything here that makes sense, any useful Nuggets take it wrong with it and hit me up. Let me know how it goes. Can connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Tavishima Ayede, I'm the host of the show. You can confirm the spelling of my name from the link. We're currently listening to this episode. My e-mail address is there for those of you who prefer to e-mail then also connect with me on WhatsApp like Xena did.

She hit me up on WhatsApp and I responded. I was about 8-9 hours late, but I still responded. I always do. The phone number is 08064662140. Country code is +234. So thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next recording. I think I'm going to go and try and make some beans and sweet potatoes. I'll let you know how it turns out, so I'll catch you guys later.