Member Profile: How Certification Transformed Coastal Grain Trading's Business

When James Okafor founded Coastal Grain Trading in 2018, he expected that building a successful business would primarily be a function of commercial relationships, market knowledge, and competitive pricing. After three years of solid but unspectacular growth, he reached a different conclusion.\n\n"We were winning on price and losing everywhere else," Okafor told Certivade Magazine. "When I started tracking why we were losing in competitive situations where we weren't the highest price, the answer almost always came back to the same thing: buyers didn't have confidence in our systems and processes. They couldn't verify who we were."\n\nTHE CERTIFICATION JOURNEY\nThe decision to pursue ISO 9001 certification followed a lost contract with a multinational food manufacturer. "We made the shortlist, gave a strong commercial presentation, and came second — by one evaluation point, in the quality systems category. The buyer told me directly that they needed to see ISO 9001 before they could appoint us. I went home and started the process the same week."\n\nThe certification process took eight months from initial gap assessment to first certification. Okafor describes it as more demanding than he expected but more valuable than he anticipated.\n\n"The audit wasn't just an exam to pass — it was a systematic review of our entire operation by someone who'd seen 200 similar businesses. They found three things we needed to fix that weren't on my radar. Two of them would have caused real problems if they'd gone uncorrected."\n\nTHE COMMERCIAL RETURN\nWithin twelve months of certification, Coastal Grain Trading won four contracts that explicitly required ISO 9001 certification as a qualification criterion — contracts with a combined annual value of £1.4 million. The certification cost, including preparation, assessment, and first year's surveillance, was £11,000.