Mara Okafor runs a logistics company for independent grocers — eleven people, profitable, deliberately boring on the outside. She is also, by her own description, a recovering thought leader. We spoke over coffee in the Reading Room about the years she spent building an audience instead of a company.

On founder theatre

“For three years I had a persona doing my job,” she says. “The persona announced things. The persona had frameworks. Meanwhile the actual business needed me to sit with a shop owner in Leyton and watch him count stock at eleven at night. You cannot post your way to that kind of knowledge.”

Her rule now is simple: everything important happens in rooms, most of them small. “I stopped broadcasting and started hosting. Eight people, one table, real problems. My company is built out of those dinners — suppliers, hires, two investors. None of it happened in public.”