Izu Aginwa was doing a reasonably effective job of avoiding his future business. He had a college ministry to run in Southern California. People around the church could see what he was doing with branding and social media. Entrepreneurs and artists wanted some of that help for themselves. He kept referring them to other people.
There is something quietly funny about a marketing business that begins with its eventual founder declining incoming leads. Aginwa had an audience, visible work and prospective customers. What he had yet to acquire was the conviction that these things belonged together. For a while, the people asking him for help were ahead of him.
The eventual company, Riches & Saint, brought him together with creative co-founder Lola Sanchez. The path there offers a useful way to look at Aginwa himself: someone whose work has repeatedly involved gathering people, understanding what they need and finding a way to move them toward a shared purpose. The agency gave those habits a commercial address. They had been developing elsewhere for years.
Atlanta, Nigeria, and a place at the microphone
Aginwa was born in Atlanta and spent much of his childhood in Nigeria. His parents were missionaries. Geography and faith belong near the beginning of his story because both were part of the life he actually lived, before the agency title and the client work.
Later, his leadership work included student life at a Southeastern University extension campus and youth work in Central Florida. In Southern California, he led The Vibe, a young-adult community at Abundant Living Family Church, and directed Southeastern University of the Inland Empire. These were roles built around people at a moment when they were deciding what to do with themselves.
At Evangel University, another small public moment placed his background directly onstage. He was selected to read scripture in Igbo at a convocation that also included readings in Indonesian and English. A university ceremony can make diversity sound like an administrative noun. Here it had a voice, a language and a student standing at the microphone.
The detail is worth keeping beside the later marketing career. Before audiences became a business concern, Aginwa had experience belonging to different communities and speaking within them. That sequence gives his professional vocabulary a personal history.
The resident assistant with a wider plan
In spring 2015, Aginwa was an Evangel junior studying Communication Studies, with a minor in Nonprofit Business & Social Enterprise. He was also a resident assistant in Krause Hall. His interests already crossed the boundaries between communication, organizations and service.
He described campus life through relationships. Gina Rentschler was among the leaders he credited with teaching him how to lead through both words and actions. Residence-hall work, he explained, had made him more deliberate about connecting with people and including everyone.
Asked about life after graduation, he could imagine returning to Nigeria or staying in Springfield to start a business. The place was open; the interest in young people was clear. He wanted them to understand that their circumstances did not have to determine their future.
It is an appealingly unfinished student answer. There was no polished agency origin myth yet. He could see several possible lives and a purpose that might fit inside any of them. Starting a business was already one possibility, alongside the wish to reach people beyond a church setting.
A thousand dollars, then a different job
An unpaid public-broadcasting internship in Chicago gave Aginwa practical experience with social media. Building websites helped him cover his bills. Later, the client work he finally accepted became Frsh Culture, a spare-time operation covering social posts, strategy and video. It brought in roughly $1,000 a month.
He paused the venture for a month to examine his strengths. Relationships, assembling creative teams and directing the larger picture suited him. Daily logistics and organization called for help. Rather than treat every task as a test of personal endurance, he began thinking about a business that could distribute the work.
By the 2019 account of the agency, Riches & Saint had reached roughly $4,000 in monthly side-hustle revenue during its first four months, then more than $15,000 a month in under a year. Those are historical revenue milestones, rather than a statement of present earnings or personal wealth.
The useful change was in the job description. A founder who understands where he contributes can make room for other people to contribute too. Aginwa was moving from doing the work himself toward organizing the people who could do it.
Historical revenue, not profit or a current valuation. Bars show approximate relative amounts.
The work has to travel
Today Riches & Saint presents its business around the connection between creativity and measurable growth. Its work spans brand strategy, identity, digital design, content production, development and distribution. A photograph, a website and an advertising campaign sit within the same commercial conversation.
The practical question is what happens after something looks good. A brand needs people to encounter the work, understand it and decide whether to act. The agency offers paid media, email, SMS and influencer marketing alongside the creative and technical services. The sequence matters: making something and getting it to an audience demand different kinds of attention.
For Aginwa, this gives the early interest in communication a business setting with visible consequences. A message has a recipient. A page has a visitor. An advertisement asks for a response. Beautiful execution still needs a reason to be there.
That is a demanding brief for a creative organization. The person approving the picture and the person watching the results have to be able to talk to each other. The portfolio is the beginning of that conversation; the customer supplies the reply.
Even the marketer wanted to be in the room
By February 2023, Aginwa was appearing on television as an agency owner and podcast host. The conversation concerned a subject that resists neat campaign management: dating. He described a busy life and the difficulty of making room for a relationship while pursuing his business ambitions.
For someone working in digital communication, his complaint about dating apps was particularly revealing. He felt that the quality he brought to an actual room did not fit easily inside an app. His professional world involved packaging messages for screens; his personal frustration concerned what those screens left out.
“So, I can’t do that on an app,” he said.
There is an agreeable limit to the marketing proposition here. A profile can carry a picture and some carefully chosen words. It still asks the reader to imagine a person. Aginwa wanted the encounter itself to do some of the explaining.
His comments also give ambition a recognizable cost. Work takes time, even when the work is going well. Building connections professionally does not automatically arrange the rest of a person’s calendar. The conversation catches him discussing that ordinary complication in public, with considerably less polish than a company service page.
The questions kept changing
Aginwa’s podcast appearances show a range wider than the agency introduction. In 2020, he joined The Osa and Abe Podcast for “It Was All A Dream,” an anniversary conversation mixing entrepreneurship with sports and entertainment. The episode included starting a business, the approaching Usman-Masvidal fight and uncertainty around college football.
That mixture gives the business talk some company. A founder can offer an opinion about taking an idea seriously and still join a conversation about the next fight. Expertise need not require a permanent change into conference-panel clothing.
Another 2020 appearance, on The Beautiful Struggle, focused on managing teams, building relationships with colleagues and staying connected with customers during a period of business disruption. It placed the emphasis on the people inside and around an organization, rather than simply on its output.
In an August 2025 conversation with Shane Miller, the subject was consumer psychology and content. The episode examined how understanding digital behavior could help content prompt an action: a click, a purchase or joining a community. The audience’s perspective was central to the discussion.
It is an exacting question to carry into creative work. What does the person receiving this actually want to do? The answer can change the message, the format and the place it appears. It also requires the maker to loosen their grip on their own enthusiasm long enough to consider someone else.
Taken together, these conversations suggest a useful continuity in Aginwa’s public work. The settings change from student leadership to business and media. The recurring concern is how people connect, participate and make decisions. An audience becomes more interesting when its members are allowed to be people.
“Strength is for service not status.”Izu Aginwa · on leadership and legacy
A purpose that fits more than one room
In his leadership conversations, Aginwa has described wanting to help people find purpose. One short formulation carries the thought: “Strength is for service not status.” It gives the ambition a direction beyond the title at the top of an organization chart.
The distance between a residence hall and a creative agency is considerable. Each has its own responsibilities, incentives and daily irritations. Yet both can make a person answer a similar question: what are the people around you able to do because you are here?
Aginwa’s career makes that a more interesting question than the usual account of a side hustle getting bigger. The early requests mattered because other people had noticed a useful skill. The business began to take shape when he took those requests seriously. There is a modest instruction in that beginning: sometimes the next piece of work is already waiting for an answer.