After a 10-year run with Magic City, Yafeu cultivated a relationship and chance opportunity with the late welterweight and super welterweight champion Vernon Forest. The boxing veteran who was known for his business acumen as much as his brawn, helped Yafeu develop an endorsement deal for a marketing DVD he’d previously created for two-time former welterweight champ Andre Berto.
“Vernon Forest was for my first boxing mentor from the business side,” he recalls. “He took it and went and got [a deal] and he kinda like helped launch me into the sport. He got me looked at.
“The boxing world is a cold, cold world. It’s been the same five people running the sport forever.”
With his feet firmly planted in boxing’s volatile landscape, Yafeu has now extended his marketing expertise to the music industry by landing a recent distribution deal with Human Resources and a production deal with Atlanta based Good Energy for soulful crooner Domenic Haynes. He’s also flirting with the budding business of legal cannabis, having helped establish an unprecedented tool titled The Library of Tips (a book filled with 1,200 marijuana rolling tips).
Call him a Swiss army knife or jack-of-all-trades, Heru Akil Yafeu has mastered the art of marketing and is an unadulterated magnet for success.
