Portfolio · Olushola Awode · Lagos

I make freight and trade make sense, then I build the tool that proves it.

Ten years across freight forwarding, customs clearance, overseas coordination, commercial pricing and business performance, arriving through an unusual door: I came into the industry as a digital marketer and had to learn the trade properly in order to sell it.

That combination is what this page is evidence of. Chartered in logistics, and able to build the thing rather than only describe it. Everything below is live, free, and open in your browser in one click.

Ch.MLM MCILSCM Certified International Trade Logistics Specialist (CITLS) BSc Physics, University of Lagos

What I am open to

Senior commercial, trade compliance and business performance roles with international employers, based in Lagos or fully remote. Also advisory and training work with importers, exporters and freight forwarders.

Eleven working tools, built and published

Each one exists because a real problem kept appearing in real files. Each one is free, needs no sign-up, and runs entirely in the visitor's browser so nothing they type is sent anywhere. Open any of them and use it.

Demurrage and Storage Clock

Importers, forwarders

Shows what a container waiting at a port is costing right now, what one more day will cost, and the date the rate jumps to the next band. It loads the published tariffs of real terminals and shipping lines, so the visitor supplies only two dates.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Landed Cost Calculator

Importers, buyers, traders

Works out what one unit costs by the time it reaches a warehouse, then the break-even price and the margin at a chosen selling price. It reads the tax rates from Nigeria's tariff schedule when you type the product name.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Customs Duty Calculator

Importers, agents, students

Finds a product in Nigeria's full tariff schedule by plain name or code, returns every charge customs will raise, lists the agencies and certificates that product needs, and explains what each charge funds.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Quotation Builder

Freight forwarders

Builds a complete quotation, scores it out of twelve against the things that cause disputes, then issues it under the user's own logo as a PDF or an Excel file. It calculates chargeable weight correctly for each mode and flags when the trade term contradicts how the duty has been priced.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Shipment Profit Calculator

Forwarders, operations managers

Takes a closed job and separates gross profit from what it actually kept, after the cost of money fronted, bank charges, exchange movement, team hours and anything written off. Then it names the leaks.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Rate Bank

Freight forwarders

A rate library stored leg by leg with the supplier and the expiry date. It flags rates that have gone stale and detects when two live rates for the same leg disagree with each other.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Temporary Admission Permit

Project cargo, oil and gas, exhibitions

Two tools on one page. The first works out the bank guarantee customs will demand for equipment entering duty free, charge by charge, and prices what holding that guarantee costs per year. The second takes the dates printed on a permit and returns the days actually usable, the days lost before the equipment arrived, and every notice deadline.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Oil and Gas Tender Readiness Check

Forwarders, contractors, suppliers

Explains how a logistics company qualifies to work in Nigerian oil and gas, then checks a company against twenty eight requirements, twenty of them mandatory. It returns a verdict rather than a score, and a gap list ordered by how long each gap takes to close.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Can I Import This?

Importers, buyers, traders

Checks a product in plain words against the import prohibition list, the absolute prohibitions and the permit regimes, then returns one of three verdicts and, where permission is needed, says which body grants it and when it has to be obtained.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Shipment Planner

Importers, exporters, buyers

Builds a dated plan backwards from the sailing date rather than forwards from today, marks which steps stop a shipment and which only delay it, adds the free-day clocks after arrival, and exports the whole thing as a calendar file with a reminder on every deadline.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

What To Ask Your Forwarder

Anyone hiring a freight company

Builds a tailored list of questions from the shipment direction, the transport method and whether the forwarder is new, then gives each question the reason it matters and what a good and a bad answer sound like. Copies to the clipboard or opens as an email.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Open it →

Plus three small calculators for the questions that come up every day: Printable Checklists, HS Code Finder, Chargeable Weight Calculator, CBM Calculator and Container Fit Calculator.

How they were built, and why that matters more than the tools

1
Start with documents, not courses

A course teaches the version of the industry that is written down. Completed files show the version that actually happened. Between those two sits everything worth knowing.

2
Reconcile, do not just read

Put the quotation next to the invoice and ask what changed. Put the supplier's bill next to the supplier's own quote and ask again. That gap is where the answer is.

3
Write it for somebody outside the trade

If it cannot be explained to a teenager it is not understood well enough to charge anyone for. Every tool here had to survive that test before it was built.

4
Then build the thing that computes it

A tool is the exam. You cannot build a working demurrage clock without genuinely understanding free time, bands and who charges what.

The rules I held myself to

  • Only published sources. Every rate loaded into these tools comes from a tariff its operator publishes openly, and carries the source link, the date it takes effect, and the date I last checked it. Where a published figure was too old to be safe, I said so on the page rather than quietly using it.
  • No employer or client data. Nothing here uses a rate I was given privately, a figure from a client file, or anything from any company's system. The patterns are real; the numbers are public or the visitor's own.
  • Arithmetic checked by hand. Every calculation was verified against a worked example before it went live, and the tools state their assumptions rather than hiding them.
  • Plain English throughout. No tool assumes the reader knows what a bill of lading is. Every term is explained where it first appears.

A build for a real business

The tools above are free and public. This one was built inside a working freight company, so it is told as a case study, with the company and its figures left out on purpose.

Going digital in freight forwarding

Case study · Microsoft 365

Many traditional forwarders still run on manual steps, phone calls and memory. This is how I found the first bottleneck in one of them and began digitising it, starting with payment approvals.

The problem it solves. Delays, wasted time, extra port charges and unhappy customers, all caused by work that cannot be seen or tracked.

What it demonstrates. Finding the real cause behind complaints, and fixing one process at a time so people trust the change.

Read the case study →

The route I took here

I joined a freight company as a digital marketer. I built the website, wrote and ranked the content, ran the paid search, designed the funnel and optimised it. For more than a year it produced very little real business.

The problem was not the marketing. I was selling a service I did not understand, to a buyer I had not defined. In business-to-business freight nobody buys transport, they buy the removal of a specific fear, and the fear is different for a procurement officer, a finance controller, a factory manager and a small trader. I had been writing one message for all four.

So I learned the trade in order to sell it. What followed was the part that matters commercially: leads that converted, deals that closed, revenue that showed up on the bottom line, awards, and a move out of pure marketing into overseas coordination, quotations, tenders and eventually business performance, which is the job of looking across a company and asking whether the machine is actually making money.

A decade later I noticed I had started answering from memory rather than knowledge, so I did the same thing again deliberately: back to completed files, back to first principles, and this time writing everything down in public. That is what this site is.

The short version: I understand the freight, and I understand the commercial engine, and I can build the tools that connect them. That combination is rare, and this page exists so you do not have to take my word for it.

Writing

Plain-English essays on how goods really move and where money is lost. The tools came out of these, not the other way round.

Read the essays →

If any of this is useful to you

If you are hiring for a commercial, trade compliance or performance role and want to talk, or you move goods and something above made you want a second opinion on how your shipments are priced and cleared, write to me. I answer everything.

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