Oluwakemisola Eesuola, is a passionate entrepreneur, business consultant and the lead director of Suremercy Foods, a subsidiary of Suremercy Global Synergy Limited.
As a serial entrepreneur, the graduate of Chemical Engineering, has been able to make great success in her business, Suremercy foods, which makes Kulikuli among others. Kemisola noted that the business was a child of destiny and birthed out of the burden to ease people from the stress of market runs and began during COVID-19 -April 2020.
According to Eesuola, Supremacy Foods began with meat, pepper and vegetable sharing and used the meagre profit from it to take care of family needs “because I started it as a side hustle. By December 2020, I was thinking of what to give my customers and the the thought of kulikuli came to my heart. I gave few of my customers and the review was great. They started asking for more but I was not interested in adding kulikuli to my side hustle again.
“The pressure becomes more, I ordered for N2,500 worth and packaged it. I made N6,000 from the first sale. I dared again with N5,000 and it grow to N10,000. By the end of January, 2021, I had lots of friends who came around showing interest in the business. When I started, I never saw myself doing this business in the future. All I wanted was to have more money to take care of the immediate need of my family after resigning as a teacher in July, 2020 but as I grow in it, the vision became clearer.
Starting kulikuli business was one of my greatest feat but still staying in it could only be God because I am a serial entrepreneur”.
Challenges
All business comes with its peculiar challenges. Eesuola noted that, one of the challenges she encountered was scarcity of supply of good groundnut for production, inability to separate the business finance from her personal finance, logistics challenge as she had to change her logistics supply severally and had to take responsibility for their nonchalant attitude to customer’s order.
Success Tips
Breaking even as an entrepreneur can be an ardours task. Eesuola was determined to lessen the mistakes that young businesswomen make and she adopted a saving culture.
“One of our process of breaking even is discipline about savings. After learning the hard way about eating up my capital, I get more serious about it.
“As much as I know that loans is good for business growth, I try to avoid it for a start and start saving up for future and reinvesting. Our sharing formula we used for some time was 50% (salary and running), 30 (reinvestment) and 20% (savings).
“I was accountable to my business coach, Pastor Femi Adisa as he told me again early this year that “keep saving for the future will need,” she said.
Marketing
For Eesuola, a mother of two, marketing her brand of Kulikuli is geemane to her. She said: “ As a personal brand, my mantra has always been quality over quantity and I ensured I transferred this to Suremercy Foods. One of the ways we used was through word-of-mouth and testimonials. 90% of our customers shared their reviews with us and we were able to capture the taste bud of customer who had never eaten kulikuli before,” she said.
Processed For Export
For Oluwakemisola Eesuola, packaging her product for export was needed for growth and also to increase revenue. She began with having a store in the United Kingdom.
Speaking on this, Eesuola said, “I started with one store in the UK (Northern Ireland) and it has been a learning curve as I want to maximize profit. Our focus for 2024 is exporting in it’s fullness. We are presently working on our certification too which will help us to put ourselves in the lime light well.”
