‘In the future, I would like to move to America, go to college, become a social worker, maybe marry maybe not married, four children hopefully, but don’t know if I’m going to adopt them or go through pregnancy because I don’t think I could go through that pain, I just don’t know’. — Toks 1997
Not only was I quite pragmatic even at my young age, I also basically wrote out my life. Everything I wrote at that age, I manifested. Even the ambivalence I had about marriage and children played out in the Nollywood saga that my life became. I was 30 years old the first time I rediscovered this essay in the ‘My Autobiography’ project I wrote for my GCSE English class. From that moment, I realised that I had been unwittingly writing out the chapters in the book that is my life. So I decided to become a lot more intentional in the choices I make for myself.
“What do you want your life to look like after this pandemic?”
Just over a year ago, this question really helped me to face some hard truths about my life and reality at that moment. Due to this, I made a decision to return to a profession I had long abandoned and subsequently re-qualified as a social worker. This was frankly a rather simple decision for me to make especially as becoming a social worker was a childhood dream of mine in a way becoming an entrepreneur was not.
According to Forbes, whilst 69 percent of startups survive the first two years only half reach five years. I am proud that Tokunbo’s Kitchen has made it to that lofty five years mark. But like many businesses in the hospitality industry, small and otherwise, we were hard hit right from the onset of Covid-19. And so it was that after over a year of feeling disillusioned with my status as a full time solo entrepreneur, the pandemic gave me the perfect ‘out’ from a food business that was simply no longer giving me joy.
I am now three months into my first full time employment role as a Hospital Discharge Social Worker. A month into this position, I was looking at my latest payslip till date and noticed my salary for that month equated the total business income I made in 2020. That lead to me tweeting about this in a way I am prone to do as Twitter is basically a place I go to share my self reflections and much more.
Little did I know that this would become my first ‘viral’ tweet. What was most interesting for me to observe at that time was how many people (mostly men) gave their unsolicited advice on just what they felt I had clearly done wrong with my business endeavours.
Many were unaware that I have always had a side hustle since I was 14/15 years old. Nor could they know that I had been running Tokunbo’s Kitchen full time for five years in which time I have had many financial successes. How could they know about that glorious weekend in which I made over £10,000 simultaneously managing three food events across London. Neither did they know that I have been making a conscious decision to pivot away from food since 2018 and actually became less invested in building the business from mid 2019. Most importantly, 280 characters were not enough to ‘brag’ about the fact that the only food events I did do in 2020 were at Soho House after they sought me out.
You could say that I have seen the good, the bad and the damn right ugly sides of entrepreneurship. And frankly what I have found is that being a solo entrepreneur feels like being the sole driver through a seemingly never ending road trip.
Often times when people talk about their desires to become an entrepreneur, they talk about it in terms of the freedom that it affords them as well as their desires to become their own boss. What is less shared or talked about is the consuming loneliness that comes from solo entrepreneurship. Nor do we hear enough about just how hard you actually have to ‘grind’ to make the same level of income you have being in the job market. And even when you do ‘hammer’ and start to turn over a profit, any astute business owner would know to immediately pour back most of that profit into the business to ensure your cash flow stays in the black during the low periods that every single business experiences as well as to pay for those unexpected business expenses that ALWAYS pop up at the times you can least afford them.
Legacy is what comes to mind whenever I reflect on what has been my greatest success as an entrepreneur.
I think about how when I started in 2015, there were very few African chefs in the diaspora doing ‘pop-ups’ to showcase the greatness that is our culinary feats. I reflect on how two years into my food business journey I was invited to be a guest chef at the New York African Restaurant Week as well as a speaker at The Food People’s industry event on food trends to discuss the emergence of West African Food as the next emerging trend to watch out for. I am extremely proud to have been featured on BBC news, locally and internationally multiple times. I was the first Nigerian food pop up to be on Uber Eats as well as the first Nigerian chef to be invited to host a cooking class at Google’s London HQ. In 2019, I launched the first London African Food Week in collaboration with Facebook, Google and Channel 4.
My biggest flex however is knowing I inspired one of my staff who has now gone to culinary school to actualise his own dreams and goals of becoming a chef. That right there is an impact that cannot be measured in monetary terms.
I share all of this to show that running Tokunbo’s Kitchen has definitely brought me many moments of ‘success’ even when this wasn’t necessarily reflected in my bank accounts. Still, it has also brought me many moments of despair and lows that I am still feeling the impact on. Nonetheless, my decision to return to full time employment in no way minimises the joys that entrepreneurship has given me. And that really was the point I was trying to make in my viral tweet.
