The dollars are already searching for you. The question is whether they can find you.
It is a cold Tuesday night in Manchester, sometime in September. A woman named Adaeze is sitting on her bed after a twelve-hour shift, phone in hand, doing what thousands of Nigerians abroad are doing at that exact moment.
She is planning December.
Her mother turns seventy in Ibadan on the 28th. Adaeze has not been home in four years. This party must be perfect: canopy and cooling, jollof that will silence her aunties, a tailor to sew for eleven people, a photographer, a DJ, small chops, souvenir packs, and a clean shortlet nearby for herself and her brother flying in from Calgary.
Here is what you must understand about Adaeze, because she is your December customer, and she behaves nothing like the customer who walks into your shop.
She cannot visit you. She cannot taste your rice or touch your fabric. She cannot send her cousin to “go and check the place” because her cousin has japa’d too. Everything she will ever know about your business, she will learn through a glowing screen at midnight, Nigerian time. She will search Google. She will ask the AI on her phone, plainly: “reliable caterer in Ibadan for a 70th birthday, December.” She will drop one nervous message in her family WhatsApp group and another in a UK Naija Facebook group: “please who knows a trusted tailor in Ibadan? Serious vendors only.”
And she is not looking for the cheapest. Read that again. She is earning in pounds and spending on her MOTHER. What she is desperately looking for is the vendor who will not disappoint her from four thousand miles away. Reliability is the product. The rice is secondary.
Now the painful part. Somewhere in Ibadan tonight, there is a caterer whose jollof would make Adaeze’s aunties stand up and salute. That caterer has no Google presence, a WhatsApp display picture of a flower, and last posted in March. Adaeze will never know this woman exists. The job, and the pound sterling attached to it, will go to a louder, lesser cook.
Every December, this exact tragedy repeats itself across every city in Nigeria, in catering, tailoring, shortlets, car hire, photography, events, gifts, home repairs rushed before family arrives, even hospital and eldercare arrangements. Billions in remittances flow home each year, and December is the season it pours. The vendors who eat from that flow are not always the best. They are the FINDABLE and the TRUSTABLE.
This article is about becoming both, before the season meets you unprepared. Because here is the secret the winning vendors already know:
December is not won in December. December is won in September and October, while the diaspora is planning on cold nights abroad. By late November, Adaeze’s list is closed. If you start marketing on December 1st, you are marketing for next year.
So let us prepare properly. Follow this like a countdown.
September: Become findable from four thousand miles away
Start with a humbling exercise. Bring out your phone, and search for your own type of business the way Adaeze would: “trusted [your business] in [your city].” Then ask an AI the same question. Did your name appear? If not, you now know exactly what she sees: your absence.
Fix the foundations first, and if you have read my earlier pieces on GEO and getting cited, this will sound familiar, because the diaspora customer is the purest example of everything I said. She depends entirely on what the internet and the machines say about you.
Set up or refresh your Google Business Profile with your real business name, your area, opening hours, and plenty of recent photos of actual work. Then handle the small detail that quietly kills international business: your phone number. Display it in full international format, +234 and the rest, everywhere it appears. Adaeze cannot call 0803. Her phone abroad does not understand it, and the two minutes she would spend figuring it out is the two minutes she moves to the next vendor. Make sure your WhatsApp Business is active on that number, with a catalogue, because WhatsApp is where every one of these deals will actually close.
Then answer, publicly and clearly, the questions every diaspora customer carries. Put them on your profile, your pinned posts, your catalogue, a simple page if you have a website. Do you take bookings from abroad? How does payment work from the UK, the US, Canada? Do you collect a deposit, how much, and what confirms my booking? Can you deliver to my mother in Enugu if I pay from Toronto? Do you send photos and videos of progress? What happens if something goes wrong?
That last set of questions matters more than price. Silence around payment and process reads as risk. Clarity reads as professionalism. And write your December availability plainly, with dates: “Now taking December bookings. Weekends of December 19th and 26th filling first.” Scarcity stated honestly is not pressure. It is information a planner in Manchester urgently needs.
October: Build the trust that replaces her cousin
In the old days, the cousin went to inspect the vendor. You must now BE the inspection.
The single strongest thing you can do this month is publish proof, relentlessly, using the same weekly system I gave in the content article. But tilt it toward the diaspora eye. Film a real order being cooked, sewn, packed, delivered. Show your face and say your name; nobody wires two hundred thousand naira to a flower display picture. Walk the camera through your kitchen, your workshop, your shortlet apartment, slowly, honestly, generator noise and all. To a woman who cannot visit, that one video does the work of ten visits.
Then gather your witnesses. Go to every customer you served well and ask for a Google review. And find your previous diaspora customers specifically, anyone who ever ordered from abroad, and ask them for a few sentences: how they found you, how payment went, whether you delivered as promised. A review that says “I paid from London and she delivered to my mum in Surulere on the exact day, with videos at every stage” is worth more than fifty that say “nice food.” It answers Adaeze’s actual fear in her own language.
Understand the fear precisely, because it is the wall between you and her money. Every Nigerian abroad has heard the stories: the deposit paid and the vendor vanished, the tailor who delivered rubbish two days after the wedding, the “shortlet” that did not exist. She is not doubting your talent. She is doubting your existence and your integrity, because people who look exactly like you online have burned people exactly like her. You do not defeat that fear with promises. You defeat it with evidence, accumulated in public, week after week: named person, visible premises, documented deliveries, real reviews, consistent presence stretching back months. This is why October, not December, is when this work happens. Trust has a minimum cooking time.
One more October task: go where she is asking. The diaspora does its research in community spaces, Facebook groups for Nigerians in the UK and America, subreddits, alumni and hometown WhatsApp groups. You cannot barge in advertising; those groups devour spammers. But your satisfied customers can mention you there, and you can politely ask them to, whenever the “please who knows a reliable…” question appears. Three organic mentions of your name across three such threads will outperform any advert you could buy, and, as I keep preaching, those mentions are exactly what teach the AI engines to say your name too.
November: Prepare to deliver like a professional, because trust is only lent
Findable, check. Trusted, check. Now the part that decides whether December makes your name or ruins it.
Take bookings formally. Even a simple typed confirmation sent on WhatsApp, stating the service, the date, the amount, the deposit received, changes everything about how you are perceived, and protects both of you. State your deposit policy and keep it. Open a simple calendar, paper or phone, and respect it ruthlessly. The December disease that destroys vendor reputations is overbooking: greed collects five events for one Saturday, delivers two badly, and spends January begging for forgiveness in voice notes. The diaspora community shares vendor disasters with the same energy it shares vendor blessings, in the same groups. One December failure follows you for years. It is far better to close bookings early, loudly and proudly: “December 26th is now fully booked, thank you.” That sentence, screenshotted, is itself marketing.
Then adopt the habit that separates the beloved from the merely adequate: proactive updates. Do not wait for her to ask. Message first. “Good evening ma, fabric purchased today, see photos.” “Cooking begins Friday, video coming.” “Souvenir samples ready, kindly confirm.” Every unprompted update is oxygen to a customer coordinating anxiously across time zones, checking her phone in a night shift break. Vendors who go quiet after collecting deposits are the reason her fear exists. Vendors who report progress without being asked become the vendors whose numbers get forwarded around Houston with the caption “use this one, she is very sure.”
Mind the time difference in your responses too. Adaeze messages at her evening, which may be your midnight. You need not wake and reply, but reply first thing, every time. Speed of response, across every study of how buyers choose vendors, and across all common sense, is one of the loudest trust signals there is.
And then December comes
If you have done the work, December stops being a lottery. The bookings arrived in October and November, calmly, at proper prices, from customers who chose you deliberately rather than desperately. You deliver, you document each delivery as fresh proof, and something quietly wonderful begins.
Adaeze’s mother’s party scatters Ibadan. The aunties salute. And Adaeze goes back to Manchester and does what your best marketing could never do: she becomes your ambassador in the exact rooms you could never enter. The family WhatsApp group. The UK Naija forum. Her colleague planning a wedding in Enugu. “Use my person in Ibadan. She is very sure. I will send you her number.”
Next September, you will not be looking for the diaspora. The diaspora will be looking for you, by name, and the machines, having watched all of it, will hand your name over gladly.
The dollars are already searching. Go and be found.
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