When Affiong Williams walked away from a comfortable job in South Africa to start a dried fruit business in Nigeria, many would have wondered her decision. The idea was mettlesome, dangerous, and almost unheard of in her dwelling country. But for the founder and CEO of ReelFruit, the choice marked the beginning of a lunge that would take nearly a decade to bear fruit, quite literally.
Fast forward to today, and Williams’ tech-enabled agribusiness has raised $3 million in Collection A funding, and broke into the UK and US market. Her story exemplifies the energy of persistence, innovation, and an unyielding belief in a imaginative and prescient.
A leap of faith
Starting a business wasn’t always in the cards for Affiong Williams. In fact, her early dreams have been rooted in medicine. After earning a level in Physiology and Psychology, she intention her sights on medical college, ideal to realise that it wasn’t the apt fit.
A put up-graduate diploma in Business Administration opened up fresh potentialities, nonetheless it was her first job at Endeavour South Africa, an entrepreneurship reinforce organisation, that actually ignited her passion.
“I cherished working with entrepreneurs,” Williams recalls. “I cherished that they created jobs, stood for values, and took risks with outsized rewards.”
After four years, her passion for entrepreneurship had grown too stable to ignore. In 2012, she returned to Nigeria, armed with a trunk elephantine of dried fruit and a imaginative and prescient to revolutionise the market.
The road less traveled
Affiong Williams’ entry into the dried fruit business was no longer without challenges. Initially, her plan was to form fruit juice, however with restricted capital, she pivoted to dried fruit, a market that was largely untested in Nigeria. “I didn’t know a lot,” she admits. “If I had done extra research, I probably would have shelved the idea.”
What adopted have been years of hard work, uncertainty, and self-doubt. She hawked her prototype products around Lagos, slowly gaining traction. With out the sources to create a factory, she labored out of her apartment, receiving early investments from family and associates who believed in her imaginative and prescient.
Her husband, then a pal, equipped the first significant injection of capital, allowing her to lease place of job space, purchase a van, and hire a small team.
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Pioneering a market
Williams’ company pioneered an entirely fresh sub-industry in Nigeria. For the first five years, she struggled to convince investors of the potential of dried fruit. “Other folks didn’t accept as true with in the colossal image,” she says. Instead of raising large rounds of funding, she centered on securing smaller amounts tied to achievable milestones. This strategy of scaling gradually, by means of measurable successes, eventually paid off.
By proving her idea in smaller steps, doubling sales, opening fresh locations, and launching additional products, Affiong Williams built investor self belief. Nine years after starting, ReelFruit closed a $3 million Collection A spherical, cementing the company’s place as a leader in the dried fruit market.
Lessons in leadership
Certainly one of many most valuable lessons Williams learnt along the way was the importance of sharing her imaginative and prescient along with her team. In the early days, she feared that discussing her lengthy-term goal of becoming an rupture-to-rupture business with global exports would appear out of touch. But as she opened up, she discovered that her team rallied behind her ambitious imaginative and prescient.
“I’ve also learned to be extra audacious,” she adds. “I old to be apprehensive in business, always expecting the worst, however I’ve gotten bolder about what we can achieve. That boldness has caught on with the team, and I’m pleased with that.”
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Navigating Nigeria’s challenges
Doing business in Nigeria comes with its contain odd intention of challenges. Williams sources raw materials from as far away as Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, navigating advanced logistics and macroeconomic instability.
Certainly one of many most complicated challenges has been building a 24-hour wintry storage facility, which her team eventually constructed by means of rate-efficient, homegrown solutions.
Despite these hurdles, ReelFruit has continued to thrive, focusing on increase and efficiency. Williams is mercurial to credit her team for their resourcefulness and resilience in the face of adversity.
For budding entrepreneurs, Williams provides valuable advice: “Understand your industry higher than anyone else, commit to constant learning, and leverage stable networks. In Nigeria, especially, networks are crucial.”
Her lunge also highlights the importance of patience and time. “If somebody had told me it may perhaps take five years fair to create our first factory, I would have said ‘No way.’ But that’s part of the path of.”
Beyond business, Affiong Williams emphasises the need for balance. As a runner and recreational football player, she believes in having activities out of doorways of work to maintain a healthy work-existence balance.
“Entrepreneurship can eat you, however you have to create space for other facets of your existence,” she adds.
She is a recipient of the inaugural Veuve Clicquot “Daring Woman Award” in 2022, the WIMBIZ Entrepreneur of the Year and Forbes 30 below 30.
What’s next for ReelFruit?
Certainly one of Affiong Williams’ largest goals is to take Nigerian-made products to the arena. ReelFruit has already exported its products to the UK and launched an e-commerce store in the US. “We want to dominate this space and demonstrate a path for Nigerian-based companies to assist global customers,” she says.
ReelFruit’s factory, located in Abeokuta, continues to increase production capacity, allowing the company to work with extra farmers, introduce fresh fruit varieties, and add fresh product lines for various customer segments.
