Thoughts:
If your business stops when you fall sick, you own a job with a CEO title.
The cheapest money you’ll ever make comes from a customer who already said yes.
Nobody lifts a car with bare hands. Go and find your jack.
Nobody hustles like a Nigerian. That’s the problem.
You run ads. You chase riders. You call customers at 9pm. You answer “how much?” for the 400th time today.
And your sales still behave like NEPA light. On today. Gone tomorrow.
I was there. I thought the fix was MORE effort. More hours. More late nights. More prayers. More “I’ll sleep when I’m rich.” (It wasn’t.)
Think about the last time your tyre burst on the road.
You didn’t lift the car with your bare hands.
You brought out the small jack from the boot. One small tool. A whole car goes up.
That jack is a lever. A small push in the right spot moves a heavy load.
Most ecommerce owners I meet are pushing the car with their hands. People praise their hustle. The car stays where it is.
Effort adds. Levers multiply.
Your money comes from a chain.
People who see your ad/post, times people who order, times orders that get delivered, times naira per order.
So make all four 20% better and your money roughly DOUBLES. (1.2 × 1.2 × 1.2 × 1.2 = 2.07. I checked it twice.)
That’s how someone who works fewer hours than you makes more. Some of them never sat in a lecture hall. They found the jack.
These are the five I’d pull first.
1. Fresh bread sells. Stale bread sits.
One thing in your ad account drives almost half your sales. Most owners spend the least time on it.
They fiddle with targeting at midnight.
But in a Nielsen study of about 500 campaigns, the creative (the actual video or picture) drove 47% of the sales lift from ads. Targeting drove 9%.
And targeting is now dead, thanks to META AI.
Your ad is Agege bread. Fresh on Monday. By Friday, nobody wants it. So bake fresh ones.
Make five new creatives every day/week for your best product.
Same product, new angle: the problem, a customer review, the unboxing, the price question answered head-on.
Put your effort into the first three seconds. Keep the winners. Kill the rest.
One warning. A great ad sending people to a weak sales page is a Benz in Lekki flood.
There’s a hole your money falls through… and it opens AFTER the customer says yes.
2. Stop fetching water with a basket
You paid for the ad. You paid the rider. Then the customer says, “I’m not around. Come next week.”
Failed deliveries. The quietest leak in Nigerian COD.
Say you get 100 orders a week at ₦25,000. You deliver 55.
Your competitor with the same product delivers 75. That’s ₦500,000 more cash collected. Every week. Same ads. He just plugged his basket.
Plug yours:
- Confirm within the hour of the order during the day.
- Call again on or before the day of delivery.
- Send the rider’s name and number to customers.
- Chase every failed order the same day.
- Drop the logistics partner with the worst delivery rate.
Careful. Don’t “fix” your rate by rejecting every doubtful order. The percentage looks pretty while fewer packages land.
Once more orders land, the cheapest money in your business shows up… and the customer is already on the phone with you.
3. “Should I add meat?”
Every Mama Put asks it.
She doesn’t run a new ad. Same customer, same plate, bigger bill.
The first money from a customer is the expensive one. The ad and the delivery trip are already paid for. The second item rides along almost free.
Say your product is ₦25,000 and the 2-pack is ₦45,000.
If 3 in 10 customers take the 2-pack, your average order goes from ₦25,000 to ₦31,000.
About 24% more money from the same orders.
Put 2-packs and 3-packs on your sales page. Train your closer to offer the upgrade on the confirmation call.
Push too hard and people refuse at the door. Watch your delivery rate after you add bundles.
None of this helps if you’re reading the wrong number. And most owners are…
4. Cost per order is lying to you
You spend ₦300,000. You get 100 orders. ₦3,000 per order. You screenshot it. Genius.
Then only 50 get delivered. Your real cost is ₦6,000 per delivered order. If you make ₦5,000 profit per unit, you’re losing money and celebrating.
That’s Lagos-Ibadan expressway at night with no headlights. You find the pothole when you’re inside it.
Keep one sheet. Every day: ad spend, orders, confirmed, delivered, cash received. Divide ad spend by delivered orders. That’s your boss number. Skip the other 40 metrics.
So now you have four levers. Who pulls them when you’re down with fever?
5. The business that still works when you have malaria
Malaria knocks you down for two weeks. Do sales drop?
If yes, what you own is a job with extra stress.
The fix is an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).
It’s your mum’s jollof recipe written down. “Add small pepper” is a guess. “Blend 2 big pepper with 4 tomatoes” is a recipe anybody can follow.
Pick the task you repeat most. Record yourself doing it on your phone/pc. Turn it into numbered steps. Watch your staff do it. Fix the gaps. Step back.
One SOP a week. Keep each one to a page, because nobody reads a 40-page manual that’s not relevant to them.
A business with SOPs is something you can hand to your manager / family. A business without them dies when your phone battery dies.
While you read this, someone selling your exact product is testing their fifth new ad this week.
The owners I’ve seen grow fastest didn’t figure this out alone. Someone who had already lifted the car showed them where the jack goes.
It’s not your fault you’ve been pushing with your hands. Nobody showed you the jack.
Book a call with my team: https://ecomwing.com/call
We’ll look at your numbers and find the lever to pull first.
You can also join one of our programs: the Ecommerce Success Toolkit, Launchpad, Accelerator, Scaling or Multiplier.
