YAP Proposal #248: Online seafood and home delivery (Dammy Okeleye, Nigeria)

My name is Okeleye Damilola Ezekiel, a 25-year-old young Nigerian. I am a graduate of Aquaculture and Fisheries Management from the University of Ibadan. I am an experienced fisheries and aquaculture manager and a farmer who currently runs a fish processing enterprise.

Because of my love for aquaculture, I enrolled in the South-South Entrepreneurship Development Centre (SSEDC) where I acquired entrepreneurial skills. I also did an internship at the National Institute of Freshwater Fisheries Research (NIFFR), Niger state, and at the National Institute for Oceanography and Marine Research (NIOMR), Lagos state. I have also completed a three-day Graduate Entrepreneurship Fund Capacity Training organized by Bank of Industry (BOI) and Growing Businesses Foundation (GBF).

The Project

We will be offering offline and online sales of fish products. The online platform will be for customers who are far from the office store and the customers that are close but have access to the internet, while the offline platform will be for customers that are close and have challenges operating internet facilities. These customers can reach out to us at our office store.

The offline package comes with live fish sales involving 2 stages. The first phase includes sale of live catfish to customers that prefer fresh fish, and the second phase involves sale of processed live fish (point and kill) as a grill fish. The grill processing will be cost efficient and attract more customers. This package will also provide more jobs for young Nigerians, as the processing will be managed by different independent processors and they will be given wages according to the sales recorded.

At our offline office stores, all our products will be available for the customers at all times.

The online sales involve delivering fisheries products and services to consumers at their doorsteps when they place orders on their internet-enabling device (phones, computers, tablets). The fish products we deliver include:

• processed fish,
• frozen fish,
• sea food (shrimp, crabs, and lobsters),
• live catfish.

There are stages that the orders will pass through before delivery, and all these stages are short and time efficient. The customer logs into our website, searches for the desired products, then selects specifications to suit their needs. Once the client places an order on our website, our booking staff receives the order, a call is put forward to the customer to confirm the order and the products are retrieved from stock or from the farmers we partner with.

We repackage the product to make it attractive. We then send the product through our delivery service worker (pilot).  It saves our customers time, brings scarce fisheries products closer to customers, and saves energy for our customers by keeping them from walking up and down searching for products.

Motivation

Passion to serve and create value from service drives the goal. There are numerous opportunities in the fisheries sector, and customers’ satisfaction is a major goal. The project will give me and my family self-esteem and increase our standard of living. Fulfillment comes in as we generate income and wealth for the family.

The enterprise will also provide a source of income for our employees and improve their living condition, as well as expose them to a work environment. Employment opportunities are provided for the immediate community and annual community development services will be carried out to improve our environment. Taxes will be paid to the government, thus increasing the national income.

I have undergone several entrepreneurship trainings at the Entrepreneurship Development Centre and Growing Business Foundation and am a graduate from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. At the University of Ibadan I attended several institutes for internships and as well capacity building workshops.

Currently I have applied for a loan at the Bank of Industry BOI in order to get funding to finance the project. The enterprise has been legally registered at the Corporate Affairs Commission CAC, Nigeria. The website of the project is still under construction and will be accessible starting in April 2016.

The vision and mission of this enterprise is to be a world-renowned producer, processor, seller and distributor of fish and fisheries products. We hope to bridge the gap between fish farmers and consumers and as well to improve and build a functioning fish producing and consuming nation.

We look forward to getting a wide market base that will prompt and create a large market for our fish farm, which we can use to supplement the demands of our clients.

The success factors for the project are the increasing demand for fish and sea food, as well as the limited access to seafood by the populace of the country. Incrementing the customer base is a major factor for the increase in turnover.

The age of technology is a factor of paramount importance towards our success as the world can now be navigated at a glance on our mobile devices. We plan to take full advantage of this technology for our online sales and home delivery services.

The USD $5000 grant will be used to acquire more processing kilns, freezing equipment and delivery tricycles and as well as to acquire stock to process and sell. The online service will be improvedso as to offer quality service delivery to our prospective customers.

Blogpost and picture submitted by Dammy Okeleye (Nigeria) – dammyoke1[at]yahoo.com

The content, structure and grammar is at the discretion of the author only.

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This post is published as proposal #248 of “YAP” – our “Youth Agripreneur Project”.

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