Woolwich to Nigeria and back again. A short note on the long game.

I was born in Woolwich, in the south-east corner of London, in 1974. I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Nigeria. I came back to England as a teenager. I have lived in London and, more recently, Cornwall, ever since.

If you are a first-generation immigrant, a diaspora entrepreneur, or the child of one, that paragraph is likely familiar to you in its shape, even if the geography is different. Born somewhere. Raised somewhere else. Return to the first place as a half-stranger. Build a life inside two cultures, neither of which fully claims you.

I am writing this down because I think it is the most under-discussed origin story in British business.

What moving three times by fourteen teaches you

If you are lucky enough to be raised in one country by parents who were raised in the same country, your model of "how the world works" is handed to you whole. You do not have to assemble it. The assembly happens passively.

If you are moving between countries by ten, you lose that luck. You have to assemble your own model, consciously, from fragments. You figure out which rules are actually universal, which rules were specific to the last country, and which rules were somebody's personal preference that they told you was a rule.

That assembly is painful. It also turns out to be excellent training for running a business. Because running a business is exactly the same exercise. Which rules in this industry are universal. Which are specific to the last cycle. Which are somebody's personal preference that they told you was a rule.

The diaspora kid already learned that skill on the playground. The native kid has to learn it for the first time in their twenties. It is not a small head start.

What the trip back does

The part people talk about less is the trip back.

Coming back to Woolwich as a teenager after years away is its own kind of disorientation. The country has not waited for you. Your accent is wrong now. The friendships you had are either closed or gone. The cultural references are different. Your relatives expect you to re-slot into the family the way you were before you left, and you cannot, because you are different now.

That experience teaches you something specific. It teaches you that homes are not places, they are communities, and you build them, and losing one is not a catastrophe because another can be built. That belief is the quiet engine under a diaspora entrepreneur. We build communities as second nature, because we have had to, repeatedly, from childhood.

Watch a diaspora entrepreneur's business for five years and you will usually see this. They do not just build companies. They build rooms. Networks. Communities. Events. The business is a by-product of the community.

Why this matters for the work I do now

The clients I work best with at Global.Media are almost always people with some version of this story. Not always diaspora by geography. Sometimes diaspora by industry (the lawyer who became a healer), by generation (the first in their family to leave a manual trade), by orientation, by faith, by circumstance.

They share a specific posture. They know their world is assembled, not given. They know they are writing their own rules, because the handed-down rules did not fit. They know a book or a stage or a business is a way to codify the rules they have written so the next generation inherits them.

That posture is a gift. And it turns out to be the strongest raw material for building a lasting authority brand, because it is already carrying lived contradiction, which is what readers and audiences actually buy.

For the reader in two places at once

If you are reading this and you are still living in two countries at once in your head, I want to say one thing to you.

The back-and-forth is not a problem you will one day solve. It is the material. It is not getting in the way of your business. It is the business. Build from it, not around it.

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If you are thinking about a book that captures your own crossing, the practical place to start is Your book is published. Now what? An author's sales playbook. on Global.Media.