Offscript with Debbie Izamoje Okolie
The Brila Media Group CEO on inheriting a legacy and reinventing it for a different era.
“To run Brila the way my father did will be me failing because that was purely radio. My duty is to run Brila in a different way, but excel in a way that also pleases my board and my predecessor, and the people who know about the history of the business.”
There are many ways to inherit a legacy. You can be groomed for it from childhood, spend years preparing for the eventual handover, and walk into the role believing it was always yours. Debbie Izamoje Okolie’s story is different. When people hear her surname, they often assume the succession was inevitable. Her father, Larry Izamoje, is one of the most recognisable figures in Nigerian media. He founded Brila FM in 2002 and built it into the country’s most influential sports radio station. But for years, the younger Izamoje wanted nothing to do with the station.
In fact, there was a time when the mere suggestion that she might one day work at Brila was enough to earn an immediate rejection. “I was like, God forbid. I would never.” Today, she is the CEO of Brila FM and is orchestrating the transition from a single radio station to Brila Media Group, a suite of media products that has expanded the company well beyond terrestrial audio.
Izamoje Okolie grew up inside the world she would eventually inherit. Her parents made sure that she and her siblings understood the value of working hard and of surviving in the world on their own. “We would do internships with their businesses. If you needed something, you would get paid for chores. They were very big on instilling work values in the three of us.”
For Izamoje Okolie, this arrangement meant she could always be by her father’s side at work. “I was a daddy’s girl even though I love my mom so much. For most of my internships, I used to kind of force myself to be placed within his own business, which at the time was Brila FM.”
At the time, sports radio in Nigeria was still a relatively new concept. There were only a handful of radio stations in Lagos, so Brila occupied a unique place in the industry, with athletes and sports personalities like Kanu Nwankwo and Jay-Jay Okocha as regular guests.
While most people saw these football stars through television screens and newspaper headlines, Izamoje Okolie saw them as people trying to live their lives despite being in the public eye. She saw their frustrations after a difficult game and heard stories that never made it into the papers. Without realising it, she was learning one of the most important lessons in media: the public story is rarely the complete version.
Those experiences sparked an interest in communication and storytelling. Izamoje Okolie wanted to study journalism, but her father disagreed, insisting that she study Information Management at the University of Sheffield instead. It would not be the last time her father influenced the direction of her life; after Sheffield came a master’s degree from University College London. Then executive programmes and certificates—Harvard, MIT, one qualification after another. “This was just my father pouring information down my brain and ensuring that I was prepped for the world ahead.”
But despite all that preparation, Brila was nowhere in her plans. Along with her sisters, she had been raised to understand that they were expected to build things for themselves. There was also a perception attached to family businesses at the time. Today, succession is often celebrated. Children taking over family businesses are viewed as custodians of institutions. That was not always the case. “When I was younger, there was this stigma around working in family businesses. People saw it as not being able to stand on your own.” To Izamoje, joining Brila felt less like an opportunity and more like a surrender, so she set out to build something of her own.
Entrepreneurship came naturally to her. At ten years old, she was selling handmade beads after church services. When her school taught students how to make dishwashing soap, she tried selling that too. “Anything that I could sell, I would sell.” She channelled that instinct into a communications agency called Image Boosters. Her friends, who were returning to Nigeria to launch businesses, needed help with public relations, branding, and digital communications. Izamoje Okolie already possessed many of the technical skills they needed. Her university training had exposed her to web design, information systems, and digital communication. She stepped in to help. One after another, clients began to arrive; soon, it was an established business.
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Image Boosters specialised in helping established companies communicate with younger audiences. Many of its clients were legacy institutions trying to navigate a changing media environment. They needed websites, digital strategies, social media campaigns and branding support. In many ways, the company was solving the same problem that would define her work at Brila. How do established institutions remain relevant in a changing world?
But her father had a plan to bring her back to Brila, and it started with hiring Image Boosters. On paper, it looked like any other engagement. The agency would help the company strengthen its digital presence and think beyond radio. There were websites to build, campaigns to run, social media channels to grow and a younger audience to reach. But the work placed Izamoje inside the business like never before, and her father continued to encourage her participation.
“He would say, ‘You can’t just be my client and stay in your own office. You need to have an office space here.’” So she got an office in the Brila Headquarters. Then she started attending marketing meetings. Then executive meetings and strategy discussions. Before she realised what was happening, she had become the company’s COO in 2020.
As Izamoje Okolie became more involved in Brila, Image Boosters began to occupy less of her attention. For a while, she tried to do both. It quickly became clear that she could not. Then came COVID-19. The pandemic forced her to reassess where she was spending her time and energy. During that period, she gathered the Image Boosters team and told them what she already knew. “My heart, my dreams, my strategies, everything looks like it’s no longer here.” Some members of the team transitioned into Brila. Others moved on to new opportunities. Image Boosters was never formally shut down, but it ceased to be the centre of her professional life. The succession she once resisted was now complete.
Yet taking over the family business presented a different challenge. Many successors treat preservation as success. They inherit a business and dedicate themselves to maintaining what already exists. Izamoje Okolie believes that approach misunderstands the assignment.
Larry Izamoje’s Brila was built for a different era; a radio station operating in a world where radio sat at the centre of sports conversations. The media landscape Debbie Izamoje Okolie is operating in is markedly different. Audiences move fluidly between platforms. Communities are built online. Sports content competes not just with other sports content, but with every other form of entertainment. For Brilla to remain relevant, it had to become something bigger than a radio station.
Today, Brila FM sits within the larger Brila Media Group. Alongside broadcasting, the company now operates an intelligence and research unit, a sports marketing agency, and a growing portfolio of digital products and experiences. Brila has also embraced the concept of “sportainment”, the idea that sports extend beyond what happens on the pitch. For Izamoje Okolie, sports culture includes music, lifestyle, personalities, fandom and community. This explains why Brila increasingly shows up at events, creating physical experiences that bring audiences closer to sports. “We want a case where you can experience Brila in person.”
The ambition extends beyond Nigeria. Izamoje Okolie sees Brila as a Pan-African sports media company. The future she imagines includes deeper engagement with sports ecosystems across the continent, from Ghana to South Africa and Morocco.
But some of her most important work is happening outside the company. In 2023, ahead of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, Brila organised outreach programmes to encourage interest in women’s football. During one of those visits, a young girl made a statement that stayed with her. “But football is not for girls. It’s for boys.” Football Girls Africa is her attempt at changing that perception. The initiative introduces young girls to opportunities across sports, not only as athletes but also as journalists, marketers, administrators, and executives.
The same motivation has drawn Izamoje Okolie into wider sports-ecosystem work, including roles with the Nigerian Women’s Football League, the Esports Federation of Nigeria, and other sports organisations. At first glance, these commitments may seem unrelated, but they are expressions of the same belief: that Nigeria’s sports industry can become significantly larger than it is today if the right people commit themselves to building it.
That conviction is what ultimately frees her from the burden of succession. Most successors spend years trying to escape comparisons with their predecessor. Izamoje Okolie takes a different approach. She largely ignores them. “The thing with succession is that you cannot really focus on the expectations of other people.” Nor, she argues, can you spend too much time trying to satisfy your predecessor. Different eras demand different answers. In many ways, this is the final twist in her story.
The young lady who once recoiled at the thought of joining the family business eventually became its leader. But she arrived at this point by exercising her independence, not abandoning it. She looked at a successful institution and concluded that preserving it would not be enough. It had to evolve.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of the subject’s name and company name.
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Love Debbie!!!