Most careers in logistics run vertical. You join an operations desk, and ten years later you are very senior at that same desk. You know your lane the way a pilot knows a runway.
Mine ran sideways.
Over the past decade-plus I have worked in marketing and operations for an engineering firm, sat beside a founder building growth strategy and investment cases, run multi-channel campaigns for corporate brands, and then spent nine years inside the freight and logistics industry, where I never stayed in one seat for long. I coordinated overseas partners across China, the USA, Europe and West Africa. I bought freight and negotiated with carriers and agents. I prepared quotations and invoices, registered vendors, assembled tender submissions for oil and gas majors, handled customer service when shipments went wrong, supported executive strategy, built brands and digital presence for logistics businesses, and mentored digital marketing students for a global education platform along the way. Today I work in business performance, the job of looking across all of it and asking whether the machine is actually making money.
For a long time I saw that zigzag as a weakness. The specialists around me had depth I envied: the clearing veteran who could quote the customs tariff from memory, the sea freight manager who could smell a demurrage problem three weeks before it arrived. When you have been rotated through six functions, you know a little about everything and you wonder if you truly know anything.
Then I started noticing something. When a shipment went wrong, the specialists could each explain their piece perfectly, and the loss almost always lived between the pieces. The quote was priced right, but nobody told the client about the storage clock. The clearance was done well, but the invoice went out three weeks late. The sale was won, but the cost of the money fronted to win it was never counted. Every seat had a window; no seat had the whole room.
That is when I understood what the sideways career had actually given me. I have written the quotation, chased the shipment it became, marketed the company that issued it, defended it in a tender, apologised for it in customer service, and analysed its profit at year-end. I have seen the same naira travel through every department, and I have seen exactly where it goes missing on the journey.
The industry taught me this the honest way: through partners and counterparts, not just employers. Working with forwarders and agents on three continents, American and European multinationals, Chinese consolidators, Indian and African agents, network partners at conferences from Lagos to Dubai, you discover that the problems are astonishingly universal. The paperwork differs; the leaks rhyme.
There is one more thing the zigzag taught me, and it might be the most useful: how to explain this industry to people who are not in it. Because I had to learn every function as an outsider myself, I never absorbed the curse of the expert, the inability to remember what it was like not to know. Ask a specialist what a PAAR is (the Pre-Arrival Assessment Report, customs’ advance calculation of what an importer will pay) and you may get a lecture. Ask someone who had to learn it at 9pm with a shipment stuck at the port, and you get a straight answer.
Here is what I believe: logistics is one of the oldest professions on earth, it drives the world economy, it keeps working through every recession, and nothing about human life happens without it, yet it hides behind big words and strange abbreviations. Somebody should simplify it for everyone. I have decided to be that person.
So that is what this page will be. Over the coming weeks I am going to write about this industry the way I wish someone had written it for me: plainly, honestly, from the documents up. How cargo actually clears in Nigeria in 2026, step by step. What the customs bill is really made of, and how to estimate it yourself before the assessment surprises you. What working with forwarders across three continents reveals about where the money leaks, patterns that belong to no single company, because I have seen them in a dozen. And alongside the writing, tools: free calculators, checklists and toolkits, built for the importer, the exporter and the young logistics professional trying to learn this business faster than I did.
I hold the industry's chartered credentials, and I am proud of them. But the thing I trust most is not on any certificate: it is the view from every seat.
If you move cargo, or you are building a career in the business of moving it, follow along. The first practical piece drops next week.
Olushola Awode is a Chartered Master of Logistics Management (Ch.MLM), Full Member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Supply Chain Management (MCILSCM) and Certified International Trade Logistics Specialist (CITLS), based in Lagos. He writes at olusholaawode.com.