Eno Essien: The Power of Words
“From as far back as I can remember, or when I was in school – I used to say to my mum that ‘By the time I’m 25, I will be doing something and people will know me that this is what I’m doing.’” At that point, Eno had no idea what she would be doing, but whatever it was, she knew she was going to stand out. Eno uses the analogy of a growing palm tree to describe her entrepreneurial journey. “You know how you see the palm tree, it stands strong and then it shoots out and it looks beautiful and it has a shade and all of that. For me, Rheytrak was like a seed I had. I had cleared the ground and planted that seed and I had watered it and I kept watering it and I kept weeding the ground and I kept speaking to it.”
Eno may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer when she was younger, but she wasn’t pressured to be one. “I wasn’t a brainy child. I struggled to understand classes, I didn’t know how to read and you see, my parents never beat me for failing or anything like that.” At that time, children were usually expected to follow the regular and popular career paths. “My childhood ambition was to become a doctor and looking back now, maybe because of the lack of guidance and counseling, the normal thing to do was go to school, come out, become a doctor, nurse, lawyer, or engineer; we didn’t know other things. I wanted to become a doctor and I was a science student who struggled.” Unable to gain admission to study Medicine at the university, Eno settled for Microbiology at the University of Calabar. It was during one of the strikes that she discovered she actually enjoyed the business of buying and selling. “I remember having a neighbor from whom I would get stuff then
After her youth service, Eno started off selling perfumes. While she was doing this, she met a man who told her he liked her marketing drive and that she would do well as a marketer, but she didn’t think much of it. On another occasion she met someone who tried to sell her a GSM car alarm, which she declined, saying that she didn’t need it. Then one day, a friend’s car got stolen while they were on a visit to another friend’s house. “So, I thought, just like that, they just take your car and that’s the end?” That was when she connected the dots – she’d been told she was a good marketer and now she had a product that she could market.
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