Richard Nnadi, widely known as Duke of Spades (@dukeofspadess), has spent more than 25 years building businesses across food, hospitality and technology, developing an entrepreneurial approach shaped by customer experience, operational discipline and the ability to adapt across industries.
His journey began in Nigeria’s nightlife industry with Escape, where five years of managing customers, teams and high-pressure service environments gave him an early understanding of consistency and service. He has since started more than 27 brands across Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Benin, while extending his entrepreneurial interests beyond Nigeria.
Today, Richard is building businesses including Eve After Dark, Jazzy’s Burger, The Kitchen Syndicate and SendChops, with ambitions that extend across Nigeria, the United Kingdom and other international markets. In this Spotlight Interview with CA, he discusses building businesses that can survive beyond early momentum, lessons from entering the UK market and what it takes for African brands to earn trust beyond their home markets.
CA: After more than 25 years building across different sectors, what has shaped your approach to entrepreneurship most?
Richard: Every sector I’ve worked in has taught me something the others couldn’t. Nightlife taught me about people and energy, food taught me about consistency and operations, and technology taught me about scale and precision.
What I’ve come to believe is that entrepreneurship isn’t really about the industry you’re in. It’s about how well you understand the customer in front of you and how disciplined you are about the systems behind the scenes.
I don’t walk into a new business assuming I know the answers. I walk in assuming I need to earn them again.
CA: Having started more than 27 brands, what separates businesses that last from those that lose their early momentum?
Richard: Early momentum is the easy part. Almost any idea can get attention in its first few months if the concept is interesting enough.
What separates the brands that last from the ones that fade is what happens after that initial excitement wears off, when you’re relying on systems instead of novelty. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that the operational backbone matters more than the idea itself.
A great concept will only carry you so far. What keeps a business alive is whether the infrastructure behind it can hold up once the crowd stops watching.
CA: Eve After Dark moved from its Nigerian cloud kitchen model into the UK. What did that experience teach you about entering a new market?
Richard: We got this one wrong before we got it right. When we brought Eve After Dark to the UK in 2023, we assumed the brand recognition we’d built in Nigeria would carry over. It didn’t.
We ran the cloud kitchen for two years, but eventually switched to a physical restaurant on Kingsland Road in Dalston. People needed to walk in, taste the food, meet the team and experience the brand before they trusted it.
Whoever you were before arriving in a new country doesn’t automatically transfer. It’s a new community, and you have to reintroduce yourself from scratch.
CA: Why has building operational systems before marketing become so important to you?
Richard: I’ve seen too many businesses put all their energy into how something looks before they’ve worked out how it actually runs.
Marketing can get you a first customer. It can’t get you a hundredth one if the operations behind the brand aren’t solid. When you build the systems first, the brand becomes something you can scale with confidence because you already know it can hold weight.
CA: How is The Kitchen Syndicate extending that philosophy to other entrepreneurs?
Richard: There are people who are excellent at marketing, building brands and reaching customers, but they get stuck because the operational side is too heavy to build alone.
Jazzy’s Burger was the first real test of this idea. Partnering with Don Jazzy showed me the gap I was trying to close. He brought the audience and cultural weight. I brought the kitchens, logistics and operational backbone.
The Kitchen Syndicate takes what worked with Jazzy’s Burger and makes that infrastructure available to a wider group of people.
CA: SendChops takes you further into technology. What inspired the idea?
Richard: This one is personal. Since moving to the United Kingdom, I’ve experienced what many people in the diaspora go through, sending money home and later finding out it wasn’t used for what I intended.
SendChops came directly from that experience. The idea is to make sure that when someone sends support home, it arrives as something real and verified, such as a meal or an essential, instead of money that can end up somewhere else.
CA: What does successfully scaling African brands globally mean to you?
Richard: It isn’t just about exporting a Nigerian brand to Nigerians abroad. It’s about building something that earns its own audience in a new market.
At Kingsland Road, roughly 75 percent of our customers aren’t Nigerian. They are people from different cultural backgrounds discovering West African food.
Success to me isn’t just brands existing in new countries. It’s each of them earning genuine local trust in every market we enter.
