Ask Oliver El-Khatib—the mastermind behind Drake’s catchall branding entity, October’s Very Own—what he does for a living and he’ll tell you simply, “I manage Drake’s career with my partner, Future [the Prince]. I’m a worker.”
El-Khatib’s career is proof that in today’s noisy and fractured business landscape, humility, work ethic, and, most of all, authenticity are what will break you through. Early on, Drake and El-Khatib realized that in order to change music, Drake had to offer music a change. “I remember guys walking around Caribana”—that’s Toronto’s Caribbean carnival—“talking like they’re from New York, to impress girls,” El-Khatib says. So they went the other way: Instead of downplaying the pinched Canadian accents, the snow boots and down parkas, and the local West Indian influences, they doubled down on them. “We took the flaws and flipped it,” El-Khatib says. “We Eminem’d it.”
Cut to 2016, and Drake and OVO have single-handedly put Toronto on the map. They’ve given the city a cool new handle—The 6—and been given the keys. They’ve partnered with the insurgent Toronto Raptors. They’ve launched a music festival called OVO Fest, with everyone from Stevie Wonder to OutKast performing alongside the hometown hero turned mogul.
Under El-Khatib’s guidance, Drake and OVO have come to dominate American culture from their satellite city to the north by continuing to zig when everyone else zags. The OVO clothing line zigged to branded sweats when everyone was zagging to high-fashion collaborations. They zigged to Apple Music when TIDAL was assembling the Avengers of pop—and El-Khatib now hosts the crew’s weekly show on Apple’s Beats 1 radio. When entertainers flocked to Adidas to launch sneaker collabs, Drake went to Jordan Brand. Under the OVO umbrella, Drake continues to create camp-out-or-get-left-out moments in culture while steering unscathed through high-risk, high-reward SNL-hosting duties and smashing the hell out of the Billboard charts.
So how can the rest of us apply that OVO magic to our own lives? Easy: Know yourself, be yourself, and believe in yourself. “No one is going to tell you that you’re making the right move,” El-Khatib says. “But you have to have blind faith. I just had a sickness—a sick belief that it’s all going to work out.”
