Uche Ukonu Jnr is an operator and venture builder based in Lagos, Nigeria. His expertise is helping companies, firms, and other stakeholders execute special projects, optimise operations, and validate product/project pilots for scale across West and East Africa.
He also founded and bootstrapped Smallchops.ng to profitability, worked as Chief of Staff in EdenLife’s food production arm (Homemade), and most recently led the team that executed one of the largest single-entity owned electric vehicle (EV) ecosystems in Nigeria.
- Explain what you do to a 5-year-old.
I help people build their biggest ideas properly so that they don’t fall apart. Sometimes “adults” have powerful ideas, but they’re messy, like toys everywhere on the floor. I help organise the toys, decide which ones are important, show everyone how to play together properly, and make sure they remember how to play nice even when I’m not there.
- You’ve built, fixed, and scaled across food, mobility, and venture projects. What’s the first thing you look at when you’re dropped into a “messy” operation?
The first thing I look at is the definition of what success is to the sponsors and stakeholders of the operation, and this usually comes from gaining clarity on what the success indicators are, their dependencies, what the operating environment currently looks like, what the execution risks are, and how much time there is to convert the “messiness” to excellent execution.
Once success is clearly defined, the mess usually becomes a systems problem, and systems can be redesigned and optimised.
- You bootstrapped smallChops.ng to profitability. What did building without venture money teach you that funded founders often miss?
Bootstrapping taught me that revenue is the truth.
When you don’t have venture money, you can’t hide behind projections or vanity metrics. Customers either pay you, or you adjust, or you die. You learn to design systems that generate profit early, become allergic to waste, and you build for and with customers, not for investor signalling.
Funded founders sometimes optimize for growth before they understand their economics. Bootstrapping forces you to understand the economics first, because you don’t have a warchest to insulate you from them.
- As Chief of Staff at EdenLife’s Homemade arm, you were close to food production at scale. What’s one operational lesson consumer startups underestimate?
One thing consumer startups underestimate is operational complexity at scale. They usually find out too late how unforgiving it can be. Demand is exciting, but if your supply chain, quality control, and cost discipline aren’t tight, growth actually magnifies your problems.
So the real work isn’t growth. It’s designing repeatable systems where quality, cost, and speed can coexist, because scale doesn’t fix weak systems. It exposes them.
- What’s harder in Nigeria right now: building demand, building infrastructure, or building patience?
Definitely patience.
Infrastructure is hard, no doubt, and demand is expensive, but patience is hardest, because Nigeria today rewards short cycles and fast wins, not the long cycles and coordinated trust required for the transition from ICE to EVs that we built the ecosystem for.
We operate in a high-volatility environment, so, understandably, everyone wants fast results because the environment feels uncertain. So while infrastructure is technical and demand is strategic, patience requires a mindset shift, and changing a human mind is one of the hardest things there is.
- Across West and East Africa, what’s one assumption operators make about “scaling regionally” that usually proves wrong?
Inexperienced operators tend to think that scaling regionally is duplication; there’s usually an underlying assumption that ‘if you can make it work in x, it would work anywhere’.
The truth is that scaling regionally is less about copying operations and more about re-understanding context on everything from regulation, to consumer psychology, to infrastructure reliability, capital cycles, and even to how trust is built; and if you don’t redesign for context, scale becomes friction.
- Tell us about something you love doing that you’re terrible at, and something you’re great at but secretly don’t enjoy.
I love to write, literally all forms, from philosophical reflections to poetry and fiction, but I’m absolutely terrible at keeping them brief and easily-digestible. I’m also really great at building and driving the adoption of processes that reinforce systems I design, but I would much rather live in a world where people could naturally stick to the designed processes from the moment they are communicated.
