Hi, I’m Olushola Awode. I’m a chartered logistics professional and commercial growth specialist based in Lagos, Nigeria, and I run this site with one purpose: to explain how goods move around the world, and what they really cost, so simply that anyone can understand it.
My career sits at the meeting point of two fields that are rarely found in the same person. On one side, logistics and supply chain: freight forwarding, customs, cross-border trade and the commercial machinery behind them. On the other, digital marketing and revenue growth: building brands, winning clients and turning attention into income. More than ten years of doing both, side by side, has given me a view of this industry that most specialists never get: I know how the freight moves and how the business around it makes or loses money.
Credentials, in plain words
I am a Chartered Master of Logistics Management (Ch.MLM) and a Full Member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Supply Chain Management (MCILSCM), the professional body that sets standards for logistics practice in Nigeria. “Chartered” means the institute has examined my experience and knowledge and vouched for it at its highest professional level; it is not a certificate from an online course. I am also a Certified International Trade Logistics Specialist (CITLS), which covers the rules and paperwork of buying and selling across borders. Underneath all of that is a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Lagos, which is where I learned to break big, confusing systems into small, understandable parts. That habit is the whole method of this site.
The view from every seat
Most careers in logistics run straight up one ladder. Mine ran sideways, through almost every seat in the business, and that turned out to be the point.
- March to November 2016, Fincon Engineering Limited (Marketing and Operations Lead, and Project Coordinator). My first job, and my first lesson that selling a service and delivering it are two halves of the same problem.
- Cloud17 Solutions (Business Development and Strategy Analyst). Working directly with the founder on market expansion, investment presentations and deal structuring. I learned to speak the language of the boardroom early.
- November 2016 to April 2017, SelloutNG (Digital Marketing Manager). Running campaigns across digital, communications and creative design, leading small teams, and building go-to-market plans for corporate and personal brands.
- 2017 to today, international freight forwarding in Lagos. I joined a Nigerian freight forwarding and logistics company as Marketing Manager and, over nine years, moved through nearly every function it has: overseas coordination with partners in China, the USA, Europe and West Africa; buying freight and negotiating with shipping lines, airlines and agents; preparing quotations, invoices and tender submissions for oil and gas majors; vendor registrations on platforms like SAP Ariba and NipeX; customer service when shipments went wrong; coordinating bonded warehouse operations; supporting the CEO and COO on strategy; and building the company’s brand and digital presence from nothing. In May 2026 I was promoted to Business Performance Manager, the role that looks across the whole company (sales, operations and finance) and asks where revenue, margin and cash actually go.
- March 2022 to November 2024, Udacity (Digital Marketing Tutor, alongside my main role). Mentoring students around the world in SEO, paid advertising, analytics and content. Being asked to teach the discipline I practise remains one of the things I’m proudest of.
When you have sat in the sales seat, the operations seat, the marketing seat and the finance seat, you notice something the specialists cannot see from any one window: the money is almost never lost inside a department. It is lost between them. That is what I write about here.
What I actually do
Logistics and supply chain. Air, sea and project cargo forwarding on the China, USA, Europe and West Africa lanes into and out of Nigeria. Overseas agent coordination. Nigerian trade compliance: Form M (the bank form that registers an import), PAAR (customs’ advance calculation of what you will pay), SONCAP (the product standards certificate) and the customs duty computation itself. Freight buying and rate negotiation. Cross-trade shipments (goods moving between two countries, neither of which is mine). Warehousing coordination.
Business performance and commercial strategy. Per-shipment costing and profit analysis, pricing and margin management, quotation conversion tracking, KPI design and executive reporting, tender and bid management, and the tools that make all of it repeatable: duty estimators, port dwell and demurrage exposure models, costing templates.
Digital marketing and brand growth. Full-funnel digital marketing (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, SEO, email and content), campaigns across print, TV and radio, and brand building from zero. I have generated more than $1 million in cumulative B2B client revenue, including $250,000 from a single account in one year, and built a logistics company’s LinkedIn community from nothing to more than 7,000 followers. Certified by Google and HubSpot.
AI in daily work. I use AI tools every day for commercial analysis, document review, writing and automation, and I build small AI-assisted tools for the problems small and mid-sized forwarders share. Most of the calculators and toolkits on this site started that way.
Why this site exists
Logistics is one of the oldest professions on earth. It feeds cities, stocks hospitals, fills shops and drives the world economy. It keeps working through every recession, because whatever happens, goods still have to move. Nothing about modern life happens without it. And yet the industry hides behind big words and strange abbreviations that shut ordinary people out: the trader who cannot understand her own customs bill, the student who cannot picture what a forwarder actually does, the business owner who pays charges he cannot name.
I decided to be the person who simplifies it. The Logistics Files is my free library of essays, checklists, toolkits and calculators, written in plain English for anyone, anywhere in the world. Every technical term is explained the moment you meet it: hover over any dotted word on a computer, or tap it on a phone, and the meaning appears. If you ever find a word that is not explained, tell me and I will fix it.
A note on what you’ll read here
Everything I write comes from more than a decade of real work, with real shipments, real documents and real mistakes, across many companies, partners and countries. All of it is anonymised and the views are entirely my own; they do not represent any employer, client or partner, past or present. Where I share numbers, they are illustrative, drawn from public sources, or altered so that no company’s confidential information is exposed. You can read the full Disclaimer.
Work with me
I’m open to advisory work, speaking and training, and to senior remote engagements with organisations that value people who understand both sides of the commercial equation: the freight and the funnel. See the Work with me page, email me at olusholaawode@gmail.com, or connect on LinkedIn.
Olushola Awode, Ch.MLM, MCILSCM, CITLS. Lagos, Nigeria.