Eight years ago, Maya Okafor sold coffee from a small stall at a weekend market. She had no business degree and very little money, but she had one idea: to sell excellent coffee that was bought directly from small farmers.
At first, business was slow. On some Saturdays she sold fewer than thirty cups. Instead of giving up, Maya started asking her customers for feedback. She learned that people loved the taste of her coffee but wanted to buy it in bags to make at home. So she started selling 250-gram bags with a short story about the farmer on each one.
The bags were an immediate success. Customers liked knowing where their coffee came from, and they shared photos of the bags on social media. Within a year, three local shops asked to sell her products. Maya used the profit to rent a small roasting space and hired her first two employees.
Growth brought new problems. Maya had to learn about cash flow, contracts and managing people. "My biggest mistake," she says, "was trying to do everything myself. I only started to grow faster when I learned to delegate and trust my team."
Today, her company has forty employees and sells coffee in over two hundred shops. But Maya still visits the farmers every year. "Our customers pay for quality," she explains, "and the farmers are the reason we have that quality."