Ozinna Obasi rarely looked a pinch of her childhood. At 8 she was moved from the city to the village; so she could learn the ways and culture of her father’s ancestral home. It came with the inconvenience of living in the rural areas- there was want for almost every basic things; she till the ground at the farm, fetched firewood before going to school, and fried ‘garri’ – cassava flakes, as soon as she got back from school. Ozinna wondered how she navigated all those herculean daily routine and still made it to school.
Unknown to her at the time, she was building skills necessary for her adult life. “My mum was a serial entrepreneur, even though my father didn’t want her to do any business, she was always springing up with one business and the other, I was worried about the male-gender influence on my mother but that made me resolute and that made me what I am today. It made me the rolling stone that I call myself; you better get out or you get crushed” Ozinna inferred to her tough stance in making the business enterprise work.
“My counsel to young ladies who saw and are influenced by the male gender exertion of power over their mothers is to relearn, refocus and be resolute in building their own life” she counseled young women entrepreneurs. Ozinna picked her serial entrepreneurial energy from her mother: “My mother will keep springing up with business and my father will keep crumbling it because he wanted her as a housewife but she was not meant to be, she had to keep doing business because of her children”.
Ozinna had her hands soaked in selling groundnuts, yam, clothing, ice-blocks, jewelry, and assortments of items while in and out of the university, then after school she made her way into the Nigerian Movie industry where she picked up movie roles. “I would say that all of my experiences in life formed and shaped who I am today” she affirmed.
Ozinna pulled the drive, the passion, and the dose of childhood selling skills into a network marketing business she was introduced to: “I never liked network marketing business but I dived into it because of the incentive of traveling and the reward of a car”. In 9 months she had qualified for her first trip and a car reward. At the moment she has built her network chain to more than 100,000 people in Nigeria and across Africa.
Though she referred to her resolve as ‘a rolling stone’; COVID-19 pulled her business to a halt: “The COVID experience came with the good and the bad; the good came with the birth of my daughter, it helped me to become a mother; now on the business, our products come from China and you know the pandemic started from China, our products were stuck, our customers who depended on the products started looking frantically for alternatives, it was tough” she quips.
