Around Easter, Jade Magnus Ogunnaike flew to Montgomery, Alabama, for a client meeting and found her own family’s surname carved into the National Monument to Freedom.
“That brought my work close to home in a way I can’t manufacture from my office in Manhattan,” she said.
Ogunnaike is president of Soft Power Studio, a creative communications agency that has gone from one client to 25. She is a Howard University graduate who started community organizing at 19 and later ran major campaigns at Color Of Change.
Most of the new business arrives by referral, and she refuses to read that as luck. “A huge part of our business comes through referrals, but I don’t confuse a referral-based business with a passive one,” she said. “No client walks up to my front door and introduces themselves.”
So she got on planes. Washington, the Bay Area, Martha’s Vineyard, New Orleans, Chicago, all of it to sit in a room with somebody who might hire her. Before a trip she calls people who live there rather than reading the place off a feed. “I talk to everybody,” she said.
The cost is not hidden either. One deal took a 12-hour round trip for a single meeting. “I closed the deal,” she said.
Her advice for Black women founders is three steps long: decide what the trip is for, contact people before you leave, follow up when you get back. “Work travel can be glamorous, but it is still work,” she said.
