Femi Okonkwo

I run a print shop in Brooklyn that I started with four thousand dollars and a borrowed truck in 2019. The shop is small — three employees including me — and profitable enough to feed my family, pay myself a salary that approximates what I made in my last corporate job, and reinvest steadily in the equipment that keeps the work competitive. The five years it took to get to that point were the most educational years of my life. I now coach other brothers through the first three years of small-business operation.

Let me name the specific work. The first three years of a small business are not glamorous. The first year you are figuring out whether the business model actually works; many brothers find out it does not, and the right move is to wind down. The second year is the year you are trying to break even and not run out of cash. The third year is the year the business either reaches some kind of stability or it does not. Most of the small-business writing online is about the exciting parts. I coach the unexciting parts because the unexciting parts are where most businesses fail.

My typical client is a brother in his first eighteen months of running a service business — a printing shop like mine, a cleaning business, a barbershop, a small marketing firm, a food truck, a landscaping operation, an IT shop, a tutoring company. I have worked with brothers in product-based businesses too — small e-commerce, niche consumer goods — but the service-business pattern is what I know best.

The work I do is concrete. We start with the books. Most brothers in their first year of business are running on intuition rather than numbers, and the intuition is wrong more often than it is right. We set up basic bookkeeping in QuickBooks or one of its alternatives, build a simple monthly close discipline, and start tracking the metrics that will tell you whether the business is on the right track. Revenue growth. Gross margin. Customer concentration. Cash runway. Days sales outstanding. None of these are exotic. All of them are unfamiliar to most first-year operators.

From there we work on operations. The systems for scheduling, invoicing, customer communication, vendor relationships. The first employee, when it is time to hire one, which is one of the highest-stakes decisions in the first three years. The pricing work, which is where most brothers leave money on the table — almost every brother I work with raises prices in the second year of our work together, and almost every one is surprised by how few customers leave. The marketing work, which for service businesses is mostly word-of-mouth and referral cultivation rather than the social-media work that most online business advice suggests.

I am especially careful with the family-and-money dynamics that come up for many of the brothers I coach. Small businesses run by Black and African men are often supporting extended family in ways that complicate the financial picture. The mother-in-law who expects a job at the business. The cousin who wants a loan. The home-town development project that is asking for a contribution. We talk about these honestly. The brothers I have helped most are the brothers who learned to have hard conversations with family about what the business could and could not support.

My rate is ninety dollars per hour. I work in arcs of six months — biweekly hour-long sessions for three months, then monthly for three more. Sessions are by video. I am based in Brooklyn and I have limited in-person availability for brothers in the New York metro area. I work in English. I do not charge for the first thirty-minute call.

I am not the right coach for every brother. I do not work with brothers in venture-funded high-growth businesses; that is a different field and a different set of skills. I do not work with brothers in the trades — Darnell on this platform is the right mentor for that. I do not work with brothers running professional service firms — law, accounting, medicine — because the business mechanics are different enough that my experience does not translate well. For service and small-product businesses in their first three years, I can help.