Ifeoma Chuks-Adizue is the Founder of the Uncommon Woman Movement focused on enabling career women to uncover purpose and birth the other God-given assignments in them while growing in their careers and holding down their homes.
She is a wife, mom of three, career professional, entrepreneur, transformation coach, author and Minister of God.
She is wildly passionate about helping people, especially women, find themselves and unleash their full potential in such a way that profits them, impacts the world and glorifies God.
Ifeoma is the Executive Director of Commercials at CAP PLC, where she leads the sales, marketing, capability and customer service functions to deliver the business objectives.
Ifeoma enjoys leading business growth and making sure more people truly enjoy what they do at work. Over the last 17 years while working at Procter & Gamble and Mondelez International, she has led global brands to deliver double-digit growth across Africa, even during an economic recession and COVID pandemic.
In 2012, in addition to her full-time job, Chuks-Adizue launched Deluxe Childbirth Service while on maternity leave, a business focused on reducing maternal mortality rate across developing countries by helping expectant parents give birth in the United States of America the right way, stress free and within affordable costs. Over the last decade, this business has served clients across the world from Nigeria and also partnered with the USAID/UNDP to improve maternal care in the IDP camps of northern Nigeria.
Ifeoma Chuks-Adizue is the author of three books including ‘The Uncommon Woman’ and ‘Made for More’.
She also serves on the Board of FINCA MicroFinance Bank as a Non-Executive Director. She is also the recipient of several awards, the most recent being the Exceptional Leader of Excellence Award from the Global Women Economic Forum.
What memories of your childhood would you want to share?
Growing up was fun. I grew up among boys so it’s not a surprise that I turned out to be quite a tom-boy. Even though, we were quite sheltered, I managed to have all the experiences of a typical child growing up in the 80s and 90s in Lagos. I loved reading novels and I remember reading the entire ‘Famous Five and Nancy Drew’ series as a child.
However, when I was about 9 years old, I became very sickly. I remember spending weeks in the hospital on admission. No doctor really knew what was wrong with me until we got referred to one Dr Egbuna Adazie. The speed at which I recovered made me want to be like him. Even though I had always wanted to be a doctor, meeting Dr Egbuna made me want to be a doctor even more. I wanted to help people get well and back on their feet. I wanted to be able to help people who had lost hope. I wanted to be so good that when a solution was needed, people would seek me out.
I did not become a medical doctor. I changed my mind at the last minute but, the desire remained in me – to help people get back on their feet and live fully, to restore hope with a smile and be a keenly sought-after solution provider. Interestingly, this has played out in all facets of my work-life, be it in my career or businesses.
Tell us about founding Uncommon Woman Movement and the goals including results so far
Interesting! There is a long backstory. In 2009, I started questioning the essence of my existence. From the outside, I had a great life but inside I felt empty. To make it worse, I hadn’t been promoted at work for years and it was beginning to affect my personal confidence. As expected, a stagnated career meant my income was not growing as much as I would have loved and soon enough, I began to actively seek out opportunities to bring in additional income, but every business I tried to launch failed woefully.
I went back to my source – God, and He began to teach me about the Proverbs 31 woman. At first, I was not interested as I felt it was just a myth. However, the insights were so mind-blowing that I became eager to share them immediately with women around me. I remember talking to you Kemi back then about these things God was showing me and asking for your guidance on how to start. You told me to take it one step at a time because it would be a journey.
Indeed, it has been a journey of me learning, applying the lessons to my own life first, and seeing it transform my life all round – from my marriage, to my career as I finally got promoted and even to my finances as I finally launched my first successful business with my full-time job.
With the transformation came the questions. Questions like ‘’Ifeoma how do you do it? How do you manage to effortlessly combine a full-time job, a business, marriage and being a mother of 3 children under the age of three?’’
I started actively sharing and teaching how I did it in 2015 and in 2017, I published my first book – The Uncommon Woman. A step-by-step guide to becoming a successful woman of skill, strength and substance. The response to the book launch was truly humbling and soon enough, we started monthly events and then online trainings.
In the last quarter of 2019, I started getting the push to focus more on career women as prior to this time, I was generally teaching all women who were interested in being and doing more. In 2020, we officially launched the Uncommon Woman Community strictly for career women where we offered regular trainings around entrepreneurship, career, marriage, parenting, personal development and so on.
Today, we have grown to over 5,000 women, of which 3,400 have been trained on how to identify the purpose-inspired business (or project) they can birth today, as well as how to launch it such that it can run on its own without adversely affecting their jobs.
Our objective is to lovingly kick career women into the knowledge that they are made for more, and then teach, guide and equip them to identify and birth this more even with their current responsibilities, all in a way that makes God proud and sets them up as positive influential pillars in their homes, workplaces and nations. Our goal is to grow our membership to 100,000 career women over the coming months.
In what practical ways are you helping people, especially women, find themselves and unleash their full potentials in such a way that profits them and impacts the world?
Let me tell you about one of the women that joined the Uncommon Woman Community two years. At the time she joined, she had stopped working for a while. She went through one of our trainings where she got to identify the purpose-inspired business idea she could launch. The idea was to launch a baking school. She felt scared and inadequate, but for every excuse she came up with, we had practical trainings to burst through them. Long story short, she launched out and today, she has grown that business.
Another lady not only changed jobs to a field she had always loved after over seven years of being stuck in her career, but she also wrote and published her first book and part of the proceeds goes to supporting the less privileged teens around her.
These kinds of transformations are possible because at the Uncommon Woman Movement, we have a mix of free and paid resources designed to help career women have results like this and more.
For example, we believe that the journey to unleashing one’s full potential starts from the inside. As such, we have a Made for MORE 5-Day inspirational that teaches career women the key things to know and expect as they take up the challenge to be more, and it’s available for free on our website – www.uncommonwomanmovement.com. There is also a ‘31-Day Made for MORE bootcamp’ that takes the learning, self-discovery and launch out to another level. We have seen some participants start off even before the bootcamp is completed.
Then of course, we have the Uncommon Woman University, home to our signature program that goes in depth into our Uncommon Woman Learning Framework – D’SUN. Here, we go step-by-step into uncovering purpose, how to identify the ‘more’ to birth, how to get support from God and your spouse for your dreams and how to launch this ‘more’ either as a purpose-inspired business, project and/or promotion at work, without dropping the balls at home. For those launching a new business, we teach how to start it such that, it doesn’t interfere with their job and brings in new clients even while they sleep.
What makes Uncommon Woman Movement different from other women, business, or career platforms available today?
A few things…one, our focus is career women. To be specific, career women who are asking questions about the essence of their lives and deeply desire to be and do more.
Two, we don’t believe that the saying – Face your lane – as it pertains to choosing between career and entrepreneurship, applies to us. Sometimes, this makes us sound crazy, but the truth is that somehow, the women that get drawn to our message have been graced to play and win on both lanes.
However, we need to be wise and this brings me to #3 difference.
Three, we don’t teach starting a business the regular way. We understand the realities of career women such as limited free time during the day. As such, we guide them on how to identify purpose and a business based off it because this usually would be something that comes naturally to them, and gives them a huge sense of fulfilment. We then teach them how to automate this business such that it can run even while they are at work.
Last but not the least, we understand that all the facets of a woman’s life affects her output. As such, we don’t just focus on personal development and business/career growth, but also how to achieve all these whilst enjoying a loving relationship in her home.
As Executive Director Commercial at CAP PLC, how are you leading the sales, marketing, capability and customer service functions to deliver the business objectives?
Now this really gets exciting! I joined CAP PLC in February 2021 and I am largely responsible for leading my entire team to design and implement strategies that enable our brands – Dulux, Sandtex, Caplux and Hempel, win in the market whilst delivering superior value to our shareholders.
For example, our objective last year was to grow the business by about 50%. The strategy was to drive this growth via a stronger team, expansion, and innovation. This meant redesigning the organogram with focus on these priorities and empowering the team to deliver their targets. By the end of the year, we had successfully merged with Portland Paints, opened fifteen new Dulux and Sandtex outlets, launched our innovative range of Caplux surface preparation products and most importantly, ended the year with a significant increase in the number of the exceptional performers in the team. This contributed to growing the business ahead of our growth target.
This year, our focus is to profitably sustain growth. My responsibility is to ensure all teams within my function are doing their part excellently; and so far, one thing I can say is that, I’m blessed to have the team I work with. Our recently released interim Q3 results show the business is growing revenue and profits double digits versus same period last year.
Read also: Blessing Omakwu, Head of Goalkeepers, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
What makes CAP PLC tick? What are you further looking forward to achieve?
Growth makes us tick at CAP PLC. Sustainable growth to be precise.
By the end of this year, we would have doubled the business revenue in a space of two years. This is testament to the exceptional and resilient nature of the leadership team and entire organisation.
As a business, we are excited about the future and are looking to achieve more over the coming years in line with our vision of creating a new Africa inspired by colours.
Over the last 17 years while working at Procter & Gamble and Mondelez International, what was the experience? What did you learn? What are you grateful for?
When I count my blessings, I count starting my career at Procter and Gamble (P&G) three times as it greatly shaped me and the kind of leader I am today.
So, what did I learn? For starters, I learnt first-hand how to treat people with respect and genuine care which is not very common in Nigerian workplaces. You don’t have to scream and run people down to achieve business results. Same way, treating people with respect and kindness does not make one a weak leader.
I also learnt ownership and strategic thinking. In P&G, no matter how young you were, you owned your area of the business. In meetings, you would be expected to share your thoughts first and this of course would force you to be on top of your game and strategically think through it end to end.
Working in Procter and Gamble built my capacity for work. In my earlier days in P&G, we used to tease that one person’s work in P&G would be done by two to three people in other companies. This capacity for work has come in very handy as I grow in my career. When the going gets tough, you can be sure to see me roll up my sleeves and get in the trenches with my team.
What am I grateful for? This will be an interesting one. Looking back now, I’m grateful for losing my job at P&G in 2017.
Today, when I look at the state of the teams (and people) I’ve worked with after leaving P&G and their state today, I see that I am simply an emissary who was sent to experience the best of workplaces, so I could recreate that in the teams I would go ahead to lead in the ‘real’ world.
The growth in my people and impact I’ve been privileged to lead in Mondelez, and CAP PLC would not have been possible if I did not lose my job in P&G because this young girl had no plans of leaving. I was happy and working on getting promoted. The brand I was leading at that time was the best performing brand in the business. However, it happened, and I count it as a divine move.
Share with us on leading global brands to deliver double digit growth across Africa even during an economic recession and COVID pandemic. How were you able to achieve this?
My first experience leading in a crisis was during the 2016 recession. I took over leadership of the Oral B brand in August 2016, right after a massive devaluation of the Naira necessitated a price increase on the brand. This meant that the brand was now higher priced than the market leader, and for the first time in a very long time, the brand missed its monthly target. I heard a fellow Nigerian colleague jokingly say that when the brand was handled by an expatriate, the business was doing well and now I had come in to jinx the brand.
Something went off inside me. I made up my mind that the brand would grow whether the economy was in a recession or not. I prayed about it and got to work.
So, what did I do? I got my whole team and we went out to the field to speak to consumers and the trade. I needed to understand how consumer choices were being influenced by the recession and increasing product prices. I needed to understand how they were making their tooth-paste purchase decisions in the light of these new realities. Was it based on how much they had available or their brand preference?
We found out that Oral B users were not switching to cheaper brands. They did not know if their children would like the new brand, which if they did not would mean a waste of their money. We found out that they also believed that if a brand was not pricing up at that time, then the brand was most probably cutting down on its quality.
With all this information, my team and I went back to the drawing table and came out with a pricing calendar that allowed us to cover up for the devaluation in small frequent price-ups. Each planned pricing would be backed by a marketing activity to ensure minimal loss in sales as consumers adjusted to the new price. This way the brand would keep growing profitably.
In order not to lose any consumers even with the activities above, we launched a mid-tier product to cater for the needs of consumers who wouldn’t be able to afford more than N200 per time for toothpaste, as this was the price before the recession.
We ranked the key drivers of the business and continued investing in the top 3 to bring in more new users despite the higher price. By the time I was leaving the business, it had grown double digits as against an expectation of a business decline.
My second experience leading in a crisis was during the recent COVID pandemic. One of the brands in my portfolio was Richoco, a cocoa beverage brand in Ghana.
We knew that Ghanaians were passionate about anything made in Ghana and their heritage, but we had never leveraged on this insight even though Richoco was made in Ghana using Ghanaian cocoa. So, we simply changed this.
We created a campaign leveraging this insight and changed our communication tag-line from ‘’Creamier and Smoother’’ to ‘’Made from the finest Ghanaian Cocoa’’. As the awareness grew, the team on ground in Ghana made sure the brand had strong branding and product sampling at all national heritage events that could hold during that period.
As COVID-19 restrictions eased, we started neighbourhood sales drives and even launched a ‘Back-to-School Campaign’ where the grand prize was an all-expense paid tour of Ghana’s Heritage sites. This was something parents were very excited to have their children participate in. By the end of the year, the business grew almost thirty percent as compared to the previous year.
Tell us in detail about Deluxe Childbirth Services including why it was set up
It sincerely was a God-Inspired idea. I’d had my first baby in the US and was there again to have my second baby. One of those days, I was having a personal 1:1 with myself on how to create additional sources of income, and the first question I asked myself was “Apart from your job, what do you know how to do that people ask you for advice on?” I jokingly responded “I know how to give birth to babies in the US back-to-back, and now with my 2nd baby, I know how to get great deals”. The medical cost for my second baby was almost half of the medical costs incurred during my first baby.
Once I said that, a thought dropped “So why don’t you turn it into a business?” I laughed it off saying it would sound like a scam. I had no idea how I’d charge clients and I could not imagine how I’d handle with my full-time job, so I decided I would write a book instead with the step-by-step plan and sell that instead. I shared my idea with my husband who thought it was a great idea but did not think the idea of a book would work so proposed making it a service. I disagreed and he left me alone.
Anyway, I ignored the idea for over 9 months until one day in Sept 2011, I read that Nigeria had the 2nd highest rate of maternal mortality in the world and I was troubled. I started writing the book immediately at least for those who could afford to travel out to access better care. By December of same year, it was ready for sale, but guess what? I sold only 1 copy.
My husband reminded me that until I made it a service, it would not fly and so tail between my legs, I went back to my drawing board. The objective was to offer a service that helped expectant parents access childbirth services in the US the right way, stress free and within affordable costs. Our first test in January 2012 yielded a client almost immediately. Based on her feedback, I re-tweaked the plan and Deluxe Childbirth Services was officially launched in February 2012. We got a client the next day and we have worked with over 500 clients across different countries.
