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Jimi Olaghere turned 30 this month. Years ago, his doctors said that would never happen.

Last winter was notorious for its low temperatures and stormy weather, but for Olaghere, it was life threatening.

“When winter came, things got extremely worse,” said Olaghere, who suffers from Sickle Cell Anemia. “The two past winters we experienced here in New Jersey were insane, so I’ve been getting really, really sick.

“I had a heart attack; I had a clogged lung. And I’m still trying to juggle this business of mine that I love so much.”

That business includes a collection of online B2B and B2C marketplaces that all funnel into Olaghere’s LLC, MelloMedia. And despite the setbacks induced by his condition, Olaghere did more than balance his entrepreneurial infrastructure with his health.

He grew it.

In contrast to the symptoms of Sickle Cell, which can leave him in pain on the couch for days at a time, Olaghere is an agile entrepreneur who is constant diversifying his endeavors. As a result, it’s difficult to define exactly what it is he does.

His first business was an online marketplace for freelancers called BagAWriter, which he started in 2010 at the age of 24 and sold a year later for a market share. After founding a small web development shop called Mello Labs in 2011, Olaghere started GeekCook, a wholesale, B2B provider.

He used his B2B business, Geek Supply, to broker a deal as a distributor of Turkish rugs for East Rutherford-based Well Woven, among others.

“I have this relationship, but I don’t have the capacity to make as much (product) as I want,” he said. “I thought, ‘Why not partner with somebody that has all these units already and I can help them sell online?’ ”

The idea paid off, and Olaghere has managed to nearly double his annual revenue within the first two quarters of 2015.

As Olaghere tells it, he has an added incentive to grow: The 30-year-old donates 10 percent of what the company makes to Sickle Cell charities.

“The way I’ve been doing it here is using capitalism as a way to inspire philanthropy and fund a philanthropic effort,” he said. “It’s not on big scale like the billionaires, but it helps.”

At first, Olaghere was uncertain about discussing the disease in a business setting.

“I didn’t want to talk about it because I was afraid people would see me as not strong enough or not well equipped to handle certain things. I was afraid that talking about Sickle Cell was going to come back and bite me, which, in some ways, it did,” he said. “I started noticing we were losing partners, I wasn’t getting invited to speaking situations like I used to.”

There isn’t an ounce of frustration or bitterness in the way he discusses this fact. Actually, Olaghere is extremely understanding.

He knows better than most how unpredictable of a disease Sickle Cell Anemia can be.

“One day I’m in the hospital, the next day I’m back here,” he said as he sat at his desk, which had prescription bottles of various opioid pain medications and canisters of medical marijuana among the business files and computer equipment.

“At one point, I didn’t think I was going to make it. A doctor told me I wasn’t going to make it through my twenties, so I thought that maybe this was it for me.”

Still, Olaghere believes that being open about his disease is good for his cause and, ultimately, his business.

“One thing I learned from e-commerce is you have to tell the story,” he said. “This is part of the story.”

By your bootstraps (or shoelaces)

During his early adulthood, issues with his health had brought him back to living with his parents in his homeland of Nigeria.

“I have these periods where I get extremely sick and my parents, who still live in Nigeria, told me in 2006, when it first got really bad, ‘We just want you to come here,’ because life would be so much easier for me,” he said. “I’m not going to lie: Business is another reason my Sickle Cell is a lot harder. So, my parents are big champions of me coming home and not doing anything.”

“I saw my doctor and he said, ‘If you go back to America, you won’t live through your twenties,’” he said. “I’m going to turn thirty in September.”

Olaghere saw himself as being too Americanized to stay in Nigeria, which still has power issues, and petitioned his parents to let him return. When they refused any sort of financial support, Olaghere saw his first opportunity in online marketing and he invested the only $200 to his name in Nike Dunks, which he sold on eBay to raise money for a plane ticket back to the

“This is where my entrepreneurial spirit really kicked in and I saw that, if I could do this, I could do anything,” he said.

The B2C pivot

Branching out into B2C, which is an entirely different enterprise and one in which the landscape can shift dramatically in little time.

“I do B2B, that’s not really e-commerce, so decided to learn myself and one of the things I learned fast was how to market,” Jimi Olaghere said. “And marketing B2C has changed from all the books I’ve been reading.”

But it’s not all bad: a new tactic in e-commerce calls for Olaghere to enlist the talents of those with a big web-presence.

“The big thing now is influence marketing,” he said. “You find all these big name guys on instagram with 10,000 followers, send them a couple of samples, set up an affiliate link for them and that’s what’s been doing it for us.”

All in the family

After leaving Nigeria, Jimi Olaghere and his father didn’t speak for two years as a result of their disagreement over whether Olaghere should return to the U.S. But Olaghere says that since he has been able to establish himself independently, his relationship with his father is stronger than ever.

“Once I was doing well, I felt like I could reach out to my dad and, since then, it’s been nothing but respect,” he said. “My mom once told me that since I did that, the amount of respect he had went up exponentially because they didn’t think I was going to go.”

Their relationship led to another area of the diversification that Olaghere underwent last winter: Investing in a 17-room hotel in Nigeria with his father. Though his health concerns have kept him from seeing the finished hotel with his own eyes, it’s had early success and is selling out its rooms.

And he’s been drumming up business for the hotel from his home office in Newark.

“I have this cool Twitter marketing tool where I put all these keywords in and find people that are actually going to Nigeria,” he said. “There are a lot of scams in Nigeria, so they’ll call me to talk about it, see this isn’t a scam and I’ll set up these great deals that are hard to say no to. I’ll even have them picked up at the airport.”