Daniel Okafor

Grew a Cross Green logistics firm from 11 to 74 staff, sold it in 2011, and spent the first year of retirement bored and bothering his wife. Keelworth is what he built instead.

Daniel ran Okafor Freight Services for fourteen years — the first five of them, by his own account, "badly and heroically". The turning point was a health scare at 39 that took him out of the business for two months; it survived, which offended him, and then educated him. He rebuilt the firm so it ran on rhythm rather than adrenaline, grew it to 74 staff, and sold to a national carrier in 2011. He retrained as a coach because the alternative was golf. Daniel holds the ICF’s Master Certified Coach credential — around 4% of credentialed coaches worldwide hold MCC — and the CMI Level 7 Certificate in Strategic Management and Leadership Coaching. He still gets up at half past five, but nowadays it is by choice.

“Nobody builds a cage on purpose. They build a business, one reasonable decision at a time, and the cage is the bill.”

Coaching focus

Owner-dependenceLeadership teamsExit preparation

Writing

• Working ON the business: what it actually means in practice