You’ve probably asked this question yourself. Your generator is acting up, you need a photographer for your sister’s introduction, or the AC in your living room has stopped cooling. You don’t open a search engine. You open WhatsApp and ask somebody.
That is how most work moves in Nigeria. One person trusts another, and that person passes the contact along. It works, and it has built a lot of good businesses.
But look at it from the other side. If you are the plumber, the caterer, or the makeup artist, your income depends on who happens to be thinking of you on the day someone asks. You could be the best in Surulere and still miss the job because the person with the need doesn’t know a single person who knows you.
Referrals are valuable, but they are also a bottleneck. Your reach is limited to your friends’ friends.
A few small things help you widen the circle:
- Have one place where your work lives. A WhatsApp status that disappears after 24 hours doesn’t count.
- Say plainly what you do and where. “Event photographer, Lagos Mainland” is easier to remember than “creative visuals”.
- Make it easy to pass you on. If a happy client can forward one link instead of retyping your whole story, they will do it more often.
Word of mouth will always matter here. The goal is for your name to travel further than the people who already know you.