Grit & Growth (Stanford Graduate School of Business)

Meet Denica Riadini-Flesch, a former economist turned entrepreneur, who was so saddened by the struggles of traditional artisans and farmers in rural Indonesia that she created a company to help change their lives. SukkhaCitta is a farm-to-closet fashion brand that puts power back in the hands of the women who make our clothes. Its mission: to end the exploitation of women and simultaneously regenerate the planet. 

Balancing purpose and profit while fighting society’s demand for fast fashion is a challenging endeavor. Inexpensive clothing produced by mass market retailers puts a strain on small artisans everywhere. But fast fashion’s impact on the planet is even more dramatic. The industry is responsible for as much as 10 percent of global carbon emissions. Producing a single cotton T-shirt can take 2,700 liters of water. And all the textiles that are thrown away pile up in landfills, adding 92 million tons of waste each year. Once Riadini-Flesch began really looking at how clothes are made, she knew she had to do something about it. “In the craft economy, you basically make something for up to six months, and only then they try to sell it. But at that moment, women don't have any bargaining power. She needs the cash for her family to survive. And that's how this sector is filled with so much exploitation,” she explains.

Riadini-Flesch took a holistic approach, expanding access to both education and markets, and her business focuses on a farming calendar, not a fashion calendar. “We're a social enterprise. What we do in the villages is being funded by our business. So in essence, with every <piece of clothing> that our customers buy, they start this cycle of regeneration in our villages. And our clothes, because we use only natural materials and natural dyes, it takes only about two to four weeks for it to completely biodegrade back to the soil,” she says.

Learning how to grow her business while maintaining her values means rethinking her definition of success. She says “Growth is not evil, as long as we know what is our ‘enough.’ And once we hit it, we maintain. We find ways to take care of everyone who's involved. We find ways to give back more than we take. And in that sense, businesses can actually become a force for good.”

Hear Riadini-Flesch’s inspiring story and how she’s creating a social enterprise that gives women in Indonesia true opportunities rather than aid.

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Meet Afolabi Abiodun, founder and CEO of SB Telecoms and Devices, a company creating HR solutions for small and medium businesses in Nigeria and across sub-Saharan Africa. From street hawker to debtor to entrepreneur, Afolabi is proof positive that a boy from the streets can find success.

No one ever doubted that Afolabi had the drive to succeed. But his lack of business knowledge often got him into hot water…and lots of debt. After incurring millions in debt, he actually ran away from home to avoid embarrassment and move on to a new life.

To make matters worse, Abiodun explains “it was actually my grandma's property that was used as collateral for my business. The banking office went straight to my grandmother and told her ‘your property will be sold’”.

A message from his brother changed his course. “He said: you can run fast as long as you want, but the problem that you've left behind will haunt you for the rest of your life.” Abiodun came back and the rest is history in the making.

The problems Abiodun faced running his own businesses — recruitment, payroll, and other HR tasks — led him to create SB Telecoms, an easy-to-use HR application that handles everything from recruitment to retirement and hire to fire.

“When people talk about problems. I say to people, yes. It's easy to say. We don't have infrastructure in Africa. Power is a problem, but I mean, for me, this is a way of life for me all my life, the road has always been bad. This is the world I know. I try not to complain about it. I try to solve it.”

Listen to his mini profile to hear how street smarts and business smarts can help propel entrepreneurs on their journey forward.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s final episode. After five years and 90 episodes, we’ve asked four Stanford GSB professors who teach in the Seed Transformation Program to tell us what they’ve learned — about the grit of intrepid entrepreneurs working in emerging economies and the growth they’ve experienced in their own teaching.

Jesper Sorensen, Baba Shiv, Jonathan Levav, and Sarah Soule are all Stanford Graduate School of Business professors who have also spent years with Seed teaching business leaders from nearly 30 countries to grow and scale their companies. Their reflections include key takeaways about the resilience, honesty, and heart required to overcome unique challenges and the joy in seeing them triumph. As teachers, these professors also know how to learn from their students. And they’ve incorporated many of those lessons in the MBA and Executive Education programs back at Stanford.

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Profile of Purpose: A Tough Nut to Crack

Meet Frank Omondi, wildlife biologist turned entrepreneur. As CEO, he took Ten Senses Africa, a Kenyan producer and distributor of macadamia nuts, from the brink of bankruptcy to a modern, sustainable, and successful venture that satisfies customers and supports farmers.

Frank Omondi approaches business differently than most entrepreneurs: “I look at business in a way that helps uplift more people. I think the future of Africa's food production lies in the hands of the small-holders.” This belief influences every decision that Omondi makes for Ten Senses.  

“Ten years ago, we set it up as a company that is going to be fair to farmers. We found small-holders were being taken advantage of,” Omondi explained. Instead, Ten Senses developed long-term relationships with farmers, committing to buy all their products and pay them a fair price. And they brought in technology to facilitate mobile payments and farm-to-shelf traceability.

“We're able to pay farmers directly on mobile phones,” Omondi said. “Instantly, each person can move nearly $2,000 to $3,000 on their phone. You don't get that anywhere else.”

Ten Senses is not only doing right by farmers. The company is also helping to combat climate change and deforestation. To date, Ten Senses has provided over one million seedlings to farmers. And it has doubled its sales in the past five years, too, proving that success and sustainability can go hand in hand. Omondi explained, “We are not only helping vulnerable farmers to get income, but also giving them climate change resiliency.”

Listen to Omondi’s mini profile to hear how his company is cracking the nut on sustainability, traceability, and profitability for small farmers in Kenya and soon Tanzania and Ethiopia. 

Bonus: Two of our future guests, Dr. Deborah Gruenfeld and Dr. Margaret Neale, are the faculty directors of Stanford’s executive program in women’s leadership. This intensive, one-week workshop will take place on campus from May 1–6, and it will transform the way you negotiate, manage teams, and lead. The deadline to apply to the program is March 18, so don’t wait. Learn more and apply here.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s retrospective on a topic that’s on every entrepreneur’s mind: money! Hear from startup and early stage investors in Africa and South Asia about what investors are really looking for, how to vet potential backers, pitching advice, and more. These experts provide practical guidance and strategies on how to secure funding for your venture.

Money, money, money. Entrepreneurs can’t stop thinking about it. Which explains why fundraising is such a critical — and ongoing — aspect of their job description.We turned to five experts for their wisdom on all things related to funding:

Andreata Muforo, partner at Nairobi-based venture capital firm TLCom Capital

Ido Sum, partner at TLCom Capital

Zach George, managing partner at Launch Africa Ventures

Sandeep Singhal, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners in India

Pranav Pai, founding partner of 3One4 Capital in India

Top Seven Masterclass Takeaways 

1. Fundraising should be active, not passive. Andreata Muforo says “It’s something an entrepreneur does, not something that happens to them—which means you can get better with practice.” 
2. Cast a wide net when looking for investors. Zach George has a great strategy for getting valuable facetime with busy VCs: “ask for advice and you may get some money, ask for money and you may get some advice.”
3. Early on, it’s less about the numbers, more about the people. According to Sandeep Singh, Seed and Series A funders invest just as much in founders as they do in ideas. “There are many people that want to solve problems, but these are people who are saying, I want to solve a problem at scale. I want to solve a problem with a group of people. I want to have people around me that are equally passionate about building things.”
4. Don’t get too attached to your ideas. Be willing to listen and adapt. Singh looks for founders who are passionate and flexible “if you don't listen, then you are stubborn. And the risk of being stubborn is you can hit your head on the wall and never be able to get across it.”
5. Scale can’t be achieved alone. Pranav Pai advocates for the importance of team. “If the human capital side doesn't keep up, you're almost always going to fail to meet expectations.”
6. Due diligence goes both ways. Ido Sum urges entrepreneurs to do their homework on potential investors. “If you know what we're, after what we're investing in, how could you be relevant to what we have already invested in or to spaces we have looked at, this is extremely beneficial for us to see that you spent this time.”
7. Know how you plan to grow. Be specific. Zach George wants the founder to have the details. “If you give me the, let me talk to my CFO, you've lost me. Like immediately, I've switched off, good founders will say, this is how I get to a hundred million dollars.”

Listen to these funding experts and gain valuable insights, advice, and strategies for how to navigate the fundraising journey and establish successful relationships along the way.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on spontaneous communication — those unplanned moments when you’re called on in a meeting, asked to give feedback, or introduced to a potential investor. Matt Abrahams, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in strategic communications, has tips and tricks to overcome anxiety, gain confidence, and make sure you’re ready to speak when you least expect it.

Matt Abrahams speaks a lot  in public, whether he’s teaching MBAs at Stanford or hosting his podcast “Think Fast, Talk Smart.” And yet, he still gets nervous. He calls it getting the “ABCs.” “There's the affect or emotional component, the behavioral or what happens to your body, and then the cognitive part, what happens in your mind,” Abrahams explains. Luckily, he believes there are tons of techniques to manage your nerves, like holding something cold in your hands to calm you down, saying positive affirmations to give you confidence, and even using tongue twisters to both distract your mind and warm up your voice. 

Abrahams’ latest book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, is filled with practical advice for how to prepare for your next spontaneous conversation. He says the biggest mistake people make in their communication is starting from the wrong place. “We start by saying, here's what I want to say, versus, what does the audience or person I'm speaking to need to hear. And that's a fundamental mind shift. If I don't understand from your perspective what's important for you, what knowledge you have now versus where I would like you to be, I can't tailor my message.” 

7 Masterclass Takeaways 

AMP it up. If speaking makes you nervous, develop an Anxiety Management Plan to help you overcome the nerves. 

Focus, focus, focus. Abrahams reminds us that sometimes people just want to know the time, not how to build the clock. 

Prioritize connection, not perfection. “There is no right way to communicate. There are better ways and worse ways, but there is no one right way. And when we put that pressure on ourselves to do it right, we actually reduce the likelihood that we'll do it well at all.”

Think about your audience, not yourself. “We really need to be other-focused. And the nice thing about being other-focused is not only is the message more likely to land, the other person is likely to feel more valued because you're tailoring the message to them,” says Abrahams.

Make it relevant. And connect the dots for people. “If you can make something relevant to people, it's been shown that they process it so much more thoroughly and invest a lot of effort. We assume that if I set up everything, that you'll connect all the dots, and that's not always true.”

Be clear when giving feedback.  Many leaders find giving feedback one of the hardest parts of their jobs. “When you give feedback, be very clear on what it is you're looking for. Many of us are just so frustrated, upset, at whatever's happening or not happening that we're not very clear,” Abrahams recommends.

Prepare to be spontaneous. Using common structures like “problem, solution, benefit” to tell your story can be practiced for your next spontaneous interaction. 

Listen to Matt Abrahams’ communication insights, advice, and strategies for how to think faster and talk smarter.

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Is AI part of your business strategy? Well, if it’s not, it probably should be. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Arun Jagannathan, two-time entrepreneur, enthusiastically agree on that. In this episode you’ll gain strategic insights and practical tools from an AI visionary and hear how one intrepid entrepreneur is pushing himself and his company to embrace AI.

Arun Jagannathan is the founder of not one, but two, startups in India. CrackVerbal helps students prepare for exams and make smarter career decisions, and Yzerly enhances corporate communication through innovative training programs. Jagannathan says, “Many employees today are asking: What is our AI strategy? Because nobody is in a bubble. Everybody is hearing this, right? And they know that if we are on a growth path, on a growth trajectory, then AI has to be a part of the strategy.” So, he’s experimenting and adapting across different facets of his business to reap the full benefits of AI.

Ethan Mollick is here to help. He’s a professor, blogger, and best-selling author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, a practical guide for thinking and working with AI. Mollick’s practical experience, deep research, and endless curiosity enable him to guide entrepreneurs on the AI journey so they can tackle it more practically, systematically, and creatively. He begins by asking entrepreneurs four questions in the face of AI: What special thing have you done that is no longer important? What impossible thing can you now do? What can you move down market or democratize? What can you have upmarket or personalized?

“I think if you think about those sets of ideas, you end up in pretty good shape,” Mollick says. He also places great importance on keeping “humans in the loop” and so does Jagannathan. “What AI does is, it makes good very easy, but great is still very hard,” Jagannathan explains.

Hear how Jagannathan answers those four important questions and learn how to ask them of yourself and your company while navigating the challenges that companies and employees face when integrating AI into their businesses.

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Creating a compelling strategy is step number one for every business. But almost no one gets it right on the first try. Aniket Doegar and “Guns” Ganapathy, co-founders of the Indian social enterprise Haqdarshak, pivoted multiple times while remaining focused on financial sustainability and their mission: eliminating generational poverty in India through access to social security.

India, with a population of 1.4 billion, has about a billion people dependent on some form of social security, according to Aniket Doegar. And India has over 20,000 government programs. But most families are accessing only a tiny percentage of the programs they’re eligible for. “An urban family living in cities like Delhi and Bombay is eligible for about 25 to 30 programs, and all these families at any given point of time are not accessing more than 10 percent of them,” explains Doegar. That’s the problem Haqdarshak wants to solve — how to enable people in need to access the life-changing benefits they deserve. 

From the very beginning, Haqdarshak’s strategy was focused on generating revenue so the company wouldn’t be dependent on handouts or grants in the traditional nonprofit model. “It was almost an article of faith for me that scale can be achieved and lots of social problems can be addressed by thinking through a revenue model, by having financial sustainability built into the DNA of the organization,” says Ganapathy, who is not only a co-founder of Haqdarshak, but also its first investor, and formerly Stanford Seed’s regional director for South Asia.

The two assumed that building a platform for end users to access benefits would be too expensive and that government contracts would be more financially reliable. Unfortunately they weren’t, and after not getting paid, they made their first pivot. And the pivots kept coming. But along the way, they  learned — and built upon —every setback. “I think this is an important lesson for social enterprises, that you've got to remain flexible sometimes and see the way in which the market responds to what you want to do,” advises Ganapathy.

Ganapathy also warns social enterprises of the tension between financial sustainability and risk of mission drift. “It’s a challenge that most social enterprises face at some point in their journey. I think we did face this two or three years in where there was this temptation that we had this network of field agents, and we could have gone the way of adding financial products, insurance sales, things like that to the basket of goods that an agent carried, and made the organization more financially viable, but it would have meant a significant mission drift away from our original focus,” Ganapathy recalls.

Having mission-driven investors can help you stay on track. Throughout the company’s journey, Doegar reminds himself of the big picture: “Do we want to be an organization which runs after capital and does everything, or do we want to be a specialized social security organization and really build an institution?

Hear how Doegar and Ganapathy adjusted their strategy on the fly and stayed true to their foundational values, and learn where the company is headed now.

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Meet Wyclife Omondi, co-founder of BuuPass, a company committed to tackling one of Africa’s biggest challenges: transportation inefficiency. The solution seemed simple enough – digital ticketing – but making it happen took persistence, adaptation, and plenty of strategic pivots. Learn about Omondi’s entrepreneurial journey as he scales to include other modes of transportation and expands across the African continent.

Born and raised in Kenya, Omondi studied in Singapore and the United States, and only returned to Africa after entering a student competition with his future BuuPass co-founder. Their winning business model to use digital ticketing to bring transparency and efficiency to Africa’s transportation system came with a $1 million grant!

Seamless movement across Africa is BuuPass’s mission, but the road to get there has been far from seamless. While the company is named after a Swahili slang term for bus, the business model was transferable to other modes of transportation, including trains and planes. Expanding across borders created even more opportunities, but with that came more regulatory and cultural obstacles. With a flexible mindset and willingness to pivot, Omondi keeps thinking bigger while raising venture capital, including from Silicon Valley investors, to achieve hypergrowth.

Omondi admits that entrepreneurship is hard. “It's your baby, and you don't want anyone to correct your baby, and you're so tied to it. That makes pivoting a bit difficult. If something doesn't work, we reiterate and go. But also in Africa, when you go alone, you go this far, but when we go together, we can go much further. So value partnership and collaboration to make your business more successful.”

Hear how Omondi is transforming transportation for operators, ticket sellers, and travelers – however and wherever they go.

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Franchises are taking over the world, from fast-food restaurants to furniture outlets. While they may seem like a simple, risk-free way to expand your footprint and revenue, franchising is tricky business. Vijay Kapoor learned firsthand how difficult it is to create a successful franchise in India for his fashion brand Derby Responsible Menswear. Hear his roller coaster of a success story and get strategic advice on if, when, and how to franchise your own business. 

Vijay Kapoor learned the importance of dressing for success early in his career when he was barred from a building because he wasn’t dressed right. Kapoor turned that experience into a business. He explains, ”I decided I'd get into clothing and help people dress well because if you're dressed well, you're confident, your inner strength and your talent comes out, and you can go out and succeed.”

After 14 years of building his fashion brand in Southern India with 30 company-owned stores, Kapoor wanted to go national. But expanding would be expensive. So, he turned to franchising in 2008 — and by 2012 he deemed it a complete failure. But Kapoor didn’t give up, learning from his mistakes, strengthening his brand, and switching to a franchise-first mindset where everyone wins.

Kapoor reflects on that time, “When we had these losses and when I had to sell away everything and bring everything back to the drawing board is when I realized the fundamental mistake or flaw in my whole thought process. The business model was successful in south India. But the way it was operated and expanded was absolutely flawed. Entrepreneurship is about sharing and growing together. Only when everybody wins in your value chain, will you succeed.”

Today, Derby Responsible is 95 percent franchise, and Kapoor has created over 1,000 successful entrepreneurs in the process by focusing on the brand, location, talent, training, data, and communication. 

Listen to Kapoor’s setbacks and winning strategies and hear how he’s setting a new standard for franchising across India.

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In Africa, as in the rest of the world, gay rights is a deeply divisive issue and queer people often face discrimination and violence. Wandia Gichuru, CEO of Vivo Fashion Group, and Chris Makena Muriithi, CEO of BOLD Network Africa, decided they wanted to do something about it using their collective strengths in business, fashion, advocacy, and storytelling. The Zoya X BOLD collection is about more than creating fashion for the queer community — it’s about starting a conversation about inclusivity and acceptance and welcoming everyone to the table.

Saying you’re a socially conscious business is a lot easier than actually being one. That’s what Wandia Gichuru learned from Chris Makena Muriithi, whose organization BOLD Network Africa advocates for LGBTQ rights. When the two met — online and, ultimately, in person — they talked and talked. And then they took action, creating an entirely new product line for the queer community.

“Fashion is a big thing for LGBTQ culture,” Muriithi explains, but clothing brands aren’t exactly serving the market. It was a perfect opportunity for Gichuru, whose Vivo Fashion Group had already built a business catering to the unique needs and preferences of African women. 

Educating and engaging Vivo employees was a key first step. “If we're going to do this, we don't want to do it just as a PR exercise so we can tick the box,” Gichuru says. “Can we figure out why we're doing it and why it matters, so that as an organization we learn from this and we become more accepting?” While Gichuru wanted to take a stand, she also wanted to respect her staff, many of whom were very religious. She told them, “I'm not going to force you to work on this but I want you to understand why we're doing it.” With pride, she recalls, “Literally everyone stayed on the project. No one, no one left.”

As a former journalist, Muriithi saw that queer stories were never told with the decency they deserve. So, storytelling is a key pillar of BOLD’s advocacy work, and also of the Vivo collaboration. “Most of the stories that were told were negative. Yet we have such powerful stories about queer people who are doing well, who have businesses, who have been able to tackle life in many different shapes and forms. So for me, that was very, very important, just to be able to shed a positive light on the queer community in Africa,” he explains.

While profit wasn’t the team’s first priority, the collaboration has been a success by many measures. “The sooner people see the importance of just leading from love, accepting everybody for who they are, the better we are going to be as a society, as an economy,” Muriithi says. Gichuru elaborates, “In the long run it is going to make business sense because what you'll see is, in a world of increasing choices and a lot more competition, people will start making choices based on what they believe a brand stands for.”

Listen to their inspiring journey — the risks, rewards, and reactions — and how their professional collaboration had a profoundly personal impact as well.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on corporate governance, featuring Alexey Volynets of International Finance Corporation. From what structures make sense to employ, and when in the life cycle of your business you should use them, Volynets provides advice and insights on how corporate governance can be a powerful tool for your business.

While many entrepreneurs fear corporate governance because they believe it means more legal constraints and less control, Volynets wants to change the way founders of small to medium-size enterprises think about governance. He has been researching and teaching companies about the ins and outs of corporate governance for years and understands why it’s  so challenging. “It's really hard to let go. It's hard to delegate. It's hard to allow people from outside the company to make huge strategic decisions on what it should do,” he acknowledges. But Volynets believes there comes a time in every company’s journey when leaders have to delegate and formalize systems and structures to support growth.

Top Six Masterclass Takeaways 

1. Corporate governance goes beyond boards. Volynets defines it quite simply: it’s about how companies are directed and controlled. And second, it’s when companies have created structured policies that “mean you can take a vacation for three weeks and not be afraid your business will fall apart while you’re away.”
2. The stage of your business makes a difference. You don’t have to have all your corporate governance structures done on day one. What makes sense for a mature, expanding business is far different than an early stage startup.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask for external advice. And the earlier you start thinking about it, the better. It can be formal or informal, but relying on others with expertise you don’t have in-house is essential.
4. Build a good management team, too. A good board of directors needs to have a partner in the company beyond the CEO. And realistically,  in the early days when resources are strapped, your management team can perform many of the functions you’ll later assign to a board. 
5. Don’t wait to create an organizational chart. While you’re focusing on growth, adding people and units, you need to start formalizing your organization’s key functions, and what those key functions actually do. And it might just come in handy for succession if one of your key people suddenly leaves. 
6. Ease into corporate governance with an advisory board. It can be a great stepping-stone as you formalize governance structures.

Listen to Volynets’ insights, advice, timing, and strategies for how you can ease into and ultimately formalize and manage a board when the time is right.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on power, featuring Dr. Deborah Gruenfeld, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor of organizational behavior. From the body language of power to the authority vs. authenticity debate, Gruenfeld provides insights on how and when to use your power to gain the trust and respect of others.

Professor Gruenfeld is a psychologist by training and she’s been researching and teaching about the psychology of power and powerlessness for decades. So, she has a deep understanding of why this invisible force can have such a profound social and business impact.

There are plenty of myths and misconceptions about power, starting with the fact that most people believe that only other people have power and that power corrupts. Gruenfeld says the research disproves this idea, explaining, “It’s having power while feeling powerless that leads people to behave badly.”

So, how do people in positions of power use it as a force for good? If you want to have a positive impact on others and on your organization, Gruenfeld suggests there’s no advantage career-wise to being a jerk. Instead, she recommends “behaving in a way that leads others to trust you more.”

Top Five Masterclass Takeaways 

• Your body language can communicate power … or powerlessness. Gruenfeld advises entrepreneurs to imagine putting on a headdress or crown before you walk in a room full of strangers. The stillness and physical expansiveness you convey will provide nonverbal cues that you’re comfortable and in charge.
• Sometimes it’s better to lead with deference than dominance. While dominance tends to look more authoritative, deferential behaviors are more approachable, show respect for others, and help build relationships.
• Effective leaders need to balance authority and approachability. You need to be equally capable of behaving in a way that commands respect and shows respect to others because people will need different things from you in different situations. 
• Leaders need to practice types of power that may not come naturally. More than likely, you’ll be more comfortable with either an authoritative or approachable style. Use this as an opportunity for growth so you can be the leader whom others need you to be.
• Often the best way to use your power is to empower others. While not intuitive for most leaders, showing vulnerability and asking for help can be highly motivating for teams.

Listen to Dr. Gruenfeld’s insights, advice, and strategies for how entrepreneurs can use power more effectively as you manage growing teams, pitch investors, and negotiate deals.

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How do you market your product? And who are you marketing to? Those two questions go hand in hand as Nick Musyoka of Sonar Imaging Center learned. Hear how he targeted his marketing messages and increased revenues by 500% in just six years. And, gain insights from Jonathan Levav, professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, on how customer segmentation can help you find and market more effectively to your customers.

Standing out is never easy, especially when the product you and your competitors provide is virtually the same. That was the situation for Nick Musyoka when he returned to Kenya to lead marketing for Sonar Imaging Center, a chain of radiology clinics in Kenya. 

According to Professor Levav, understanding who your customer is is harder than it seems. “For starters, you need to distinguish between the user and the decision-making unit” he explains. Using the toy company model as an example, the child is the ultimate user, but the parent is the decision-making unit. Who you prioritize and how you market to each matters.

That distinction between user and decision-making unit is essential to Sonar Imaging. Musyoka’s research revealed that patients were the users and doctors were the decision-making units, so the company’s marketing needed to focus on a group that would probably never set foot inside a clinic. 

Levav says the next step after identifying each of your customers, is figuring out how to solve their unique problems. “You want the user to understand that the solution you have is the best thing since sliced bread and it’s going to solve their problem. That’s positioning,” he explains. And finding your differentiation is key to that process. 

So, Musyoka asked himself “What is the key thing that we can talk about to differentiate ourselves?” Quality was too hard to prove. Unquestionable customer service was the answer for all of his customer segments. Even though his marketing campaigns have been incredibly successful, Sonar continues to evolve its customer segmentation and marketing. Levav couldn’t agree more. “You don't just go out there in the world, assess the needs, walk away and just go hibernate and do your product, and then hope to sell it,” he says. “This is something that has to be done on a regular basis because people's tastes change. Market realities change, competition changes, culture changes, macroeconomic conditions change, microeconomic conditions change.”

Listen to Musyoka’s first-hand marketing experiences and Levav’s insights on the importance of customer segmentation and positioning for every company that wants to stand out from the crowd.

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Meet Arun Iyer, CEO of Alpha Direct Insurance Company, and Zach George, general partner at Launch Africa Ventures, and learn what it takes to transition your funding from friends and family to angel investors and venture capital.

Like most entrepreneurs, Arun relied on friends and family to get his Botswana-based insurtech company off the ground. But bringing insurance to the masses — both within Botswana and across the region — required more substantial sums. And thinking small was preventing him from making it big.

“I believed that only these three people would finance my business. Today, I'm raising money from funds that are located across the world. You know, part of our pre-series A was a fund from Switzerland, Launch Africa Ventures is in. So, now the whole world has been opened up. And technically you can do that at any stage, there's nothing preventing you. The only thing that was preventing us from doing it was my mindset. And once I removed that self-doubt, now the world became my oyster.”

Arun learned that building relationships based on mutual trust is key to securing capital. And Zach George agrees … along with what he calls the ‘napkin test’. Zach looks for founders who can explain in just a few minutes how they plan to get to $100 million. “The majority of founders can never do that. They fail miserably at it, or they'll say, "hey, can I open up my spreadsheet or I'll talk to my CFO". If you give me the, 'let me talk to my CFO', you've lost me.”

Listen to Arun’s capital raising strategies and Zach’s investor insights to help fund and grow your own company.

Resources:

Alpha Direct, Botswana: https://www.alphadirect.co.bw/

Stanford Seed: http://stanfordseed.co/Grit

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on the complexities and opportunities of running a family business, featuring Peter Francis, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer. Peter provides practical strategies, tactics, and firsthand experiences of effective family business management.

Peter Francis’ expertise in family businesses goes far beyond the theoretical — he invests in them, teaches a class on them, and is also the former CEO of a sixth-generation family business. So he understands both the advantages and complexities that come with families working together and transitioning from one generation to the next.

Peter believes, and the statistics confirm, that family businesses have some significant advantages over their public counterparts, namely patient capital, speed of decision making, the ability to pursue unconventional strategies, and pride of ownership. But the complexities of family relationships and emotions can be challenging.

Creating a culture that encompasses both family and business is essential. “ It's not what you say with your mouth, it's what you do with your feet. And so early on family leadership needs to make it crystal clear that that's the way it's going to operate, and then they need to operate that way. And I will tell you, what you do will outweigh what you say.”

Top Six Masterclass Takeaways

• Make sure to understand your ownership model, clearly defining who are your active vs. passive owners (you want more of the former.)
• Education, transparency, and communication are the top three “universal” antidotes for handling many of the issues that show up in family businesses, especially during times of transition.
• Separating business and family is essential — don’t bring business problems home and try to solve them in the “family room”.
• Bringing in an outside voice/advisor can be a huge help in matters of transition, especially when things get emotional. Which they almost always do.
• Getting independent directors is key to growth and success. Actually listening to what they have to say is even more important.
• Thinking ahead, before you’re actually ready for a transition, will be a big help, especially in the event of an unintended consequence, such as the death of a founder.

Listen to Peter’s insights, advice, and strategies to help manage everything from success to succession in your family-run business.

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Meet Linda Ampah, founder of KAD Manufacturing and a fashion brand called Cadling Fashions based in Ghana. Linda’s entrepreneurial journey has had all the typical hurdles plus the extra challenges of being a female business owner in Africa. That’s why providing job opportunities for women is central to her mission.

Linda has always loved the sound of sewing machines. Now she gets to hear them all the time in her factories where she manufactures school uniforms and makes garments for U.S. brands like Anthropologie and Brooklyn Industries. 

“In Ghana, in the marketplaces there are women and girls who sleep on the streets. We went out asking them whether they'll be interested to come and train? And the response we got was just amazing. We invited them over and then we started training them. Now the challenge though was that because they didn't have a place to stay, they get raped. We decided we'll add housing to it. And usually after a year, they are able to rent their own place then they move from the hostel.”

Listen to Linda’s mini-profile to learn how employing women in need can have a ripple effect on an entire community.

Please take a few moments and provide us with your feedback on Grit & Growth. We would love to hear what you’re interested in learning about and how we can make the content we create relevant to your growth journey. 

Resources:

Pieces of the Portrait: An Autobiography by Linda Ampah

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Meet Kwami Williams, co-founder and CEO of MoringaConnect, and Brian Lowery, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, to learn how one Ghanaian entrepreneur overcame fires, floods, theft, and COVID to build a more resilient and successful company.

Kwami’s path to co-founding a social agriculture venture in Ghana based on the native Moringa tree was anything but straightforward. As a Ghanaian-American MIT graduate in aerospace engineering, his first love was flight. But on a trip back to Ghana, after 10 years in the U.S., he decided to focus his life on improving the lives of the people in his home country and continent.

Five years into running the business, they were helping smallholder farmers plant Moringa trees and then adding value to the raw materials with a flagship consumer brand. Everything started to unravel in 2019, starting with a wildfire that burned over 15,000 trees, then a factory fire, floods, and a robbery. 2020 only added fuel to the fire with COVID.

Kwami knew he needed help to tackle these back-to-back crises, and chose honesty over pride.

“If I could give one piece of advice to an early-stage entrepreneur, I would tell them to build an amazing team of people who they could go to war with because the hard days, the bad days, the battles will come.”

“I just acknowledged the fact that I have no idea how to bounce back from this. So I just committed to vulnerability from the get-go. And I committed to communicating as much as possible from the get-go.”

Brian Lowery agrees that vulnerability is vital to both personal and professional growth. As a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he is an expert on the psychology of leadership and training future leaders like Kwami. According to Brian:

“The leader is not the person with the answers. The leader is the person who brings people together to help figure out what the best answers are around a range of issues.”

Kwami and his team found ways to overcome adversity by taking one slow, intentional step at a time and asking themselves:

“Why is this happening? What can we learn from it? Let's also pause and ask ourselves. Okay. What can we start? What can we stop and what should continue? And once those ideas materialize, we just say, what is the smallest version of that we can commit to and be consistent with?”

And, despite facing a 90% reduction in revenue, the team stayed true to their mission of giving back to the community with give-back campaigns supporting COVID health workers and racial justice organizations. Today, the True Moringa brand has taken off and is poised to raise its first equity round in the second half of 2021. And most importantly to Kwami, they’ve planted over 2 million trees and are serving over 5,000 women and family farmers across Ghana.

Listen to Kwami’s inspiring story and Brian’s insights to learn how to build resiliency in yourself and your company so you can handle whatever life throws at you.

Resources:

• Know What You See with Brian Lowery Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Know What You See with Brian Lowery Podcast on Spotify
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

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Does your company have a culture where people are truly free to speak their minds … without fear of retribution? At the start of the pandemic, Elikem Tamaklo, managing director for Nyaho Healthcare in Ghana, realized that the answer was no. Hear how he changed his company’s culture and his own behavior to lead his team through COVID-19 and beyond. Also, gain strategic insights from Sarah Soule, professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, on the process and benefits of creating an environment of psychological safety in your organization.

Psychological safety wasn’t on Elikem Tamaklo’s mind when he joined his family’s private group medical practice. But in 2019 when the pandemic hit, uncertainty, fear, and challenging conversations were the norm. It didn’t take long to realize that if his team members weren’t willing to openly share what they were feeling and fearing, then decision-making would suffer. 

Psychological safety, according to Sarah Soule, professor of organizational behavior, is a climate where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns and speaking up when needed.  Most important, they must feel like they are not going to be judged or viewed negatively by the leaders when they do bring things up. Soule says the benefits to the organization are well-researched and impressive. “Morale is higher, burnout is lower, motivation is much, much higher. People are willing to participate in decision making and that leads to better decision-making. What we see is that team performance, creativity, and resilience increase, and we get higher levels of innovation,” Soule explains.

During COVID, everything was amplified, especially for those working in health care.  The situation was made even worse when Tamaklo contracted the virus. He chose to publicize his diagnosis. “I said I would bear the risk personally. People acknowledged the bravery in sharing my COVID status and the narrative was more about people seeing that getting COVID is not your fault. So get tested,” he remembers. After much discussion, Nyaho became the first private organization to perform COVID testing.

Expressing vulnerability is one of the ways Soule says leaders can model the behavior they seek in others. She explains “The hardest thing that leaders have to do is to both model the kind of behavior that they want on the team and be sure when they invite the truth, it's authentic and people believe it.” Soule also advises leaders and their frontline managers to speak less and last, engage in active listening, and construct norms for how teams interact.

Listen to Tamaklo’s personal and company journey toward psychological safety and the challenges and benefits they’ve experienced. And get practical advice from Soule on how leaders and teams can create an open culture where productivity and innovation thrive.

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The deadline to apply for our 2023 Seed Transformation Program is June 1st! To find out more, visit: stanfordseed.co/apply

Meet Tony Elumelu, a Nigerian businessman, billionaire, investor, philanthropist, champion of African entrepreneurs, and steadfast believer in luck. Hear how and why he’s committed to catalyzing entrepreneurship across the African continent.

Ask almost any entrepreneur about their secret to success and more than likely they’ll credit a combination of hard work and luck. Tony Elumelu is no exception. After an illustrious career running Africa’s largest bank, United Bank of Africa, and currently serving as its chairman, Elumelu says he decided “to commit the second phase of my life to helping, to impact humanity, to helping democratize the luck that I had growing up to help expand access to opportunities.” And he has done just that, funding thousands of early stage startups and empowering over 15,000 entrepreneurs across 54 African countries to solve the continent’s biggest problems.

Elumelu says “I've come to appreciate the significance and importance of entrepreneurship in transforming families, in transforming communities, in transforming countries, societies, and humanity.” He strongly believes that the private sector has a role to play in developing the continent and making that transformation possible. 

Listen as Stanford student Chisom Obi-Okoye interviews Tony Elumelu about his career path, philosophy of African capitalism, and vision for the future of the continent.

View From The Top is Stanford Graduate School of Business' premier speaker series. To hear more of their amazing line-up, subscribe to their podcast or visit their YouTube page.

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Meet Lerang Selolwane, co-founder of Lucient Engineering, a company that’s bringing water, power, roads, and rail to the people of Botswana. By constructing and maintaining the essential infrastructure his country and people need, Lerang is also creating pathways out of poverty.

Selolwane is not your typical 20-something entrepreneur. He began his career working for the largest diamond mining company in the world — a job that literally took him around the world. It was an exciting time, but he realized that his priorities were somewhere else … specifically, back in Botswana.

“These experiences I'm having are great, but what about my people? Who's going to build a London for my people? And after a while, it goes from being a great experience to not being so great because you realize that this isn't yours. Your people, people who look like you, don't get to have this,” he said.

So, he came back home to build a business that would make an impact on his country and people. He started by focusing on the basics — roads, water, power, and transportation.

Selolwane explains why:

“When you don't have access to clean, reliable water … when you don't have access to transportation that can get goods to market … when you don't have power that allows you to even dream about building a tech or an IT company … everything else just doesn't happen.”

While Selolwane has recently transitioned out of Lucient Engineering, the company’s work continues. And, in true entrepreneurial spirit, he’s involved in two new ventures designed to drive further economic development in Botswana.

Listen to his mini profile to hear how a strong purpose can drive both value and impact for mission-minded entrepreneurs.

To participate in Grit & Growth’s paid focus group, visit http://stanfordseed.co/podcastsurvey

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Negotiation is at the heart of almost every business transaction — whether working on terms with potential investors or communicating with colleagues. Listen to Ghanian educational entrepreneur Charles Yeboah as he shares his real-world negotiation challenges and get surprising tips and insights from Stanford professor Margaret Neale on how to turn your next negotiation into a win-win.

Charles Yeboah never imagined he’d be in the business of education. But after searching for a school for his daughter, necessity became the mother of invention. Today, International Community School is educating over 2000 students across Ghana with plans to expand to other countries. When it came time to expand, Yeboah needed to put his negotiation skills to the test with potential investors. He learned firsthand what Professor Neale researches and teaches: that walking away from a deal is sometimes the best outcome…even when a $20 million dollar investment is on the line.

Professor Neale believes that negotiators require a different mindset, moving from the idea of negotiation as a battle to an opportunity for collaborative problem-solving. She advises to never begin a negotiation without understanding what your alternatives are or what happens to you in the case of an impasse? “If I have a really good alternative, then you're going to have to pay a premium for me to stay and play in this interaction. Otherwise, I can just walk” says Neale.

Yeboah followed that advice in his own negotiations. “Whether it's talking to a banker or talking to a potential equity investor, you think about what you want to achieve with that investment and what they want to achieve with that investment. And then you want to make sure that you marry the two aspirations,” he says. 

Listen to Yeboah’s real-world experiences of sticking to his values when negotiating and get Professor Neale’s practical tips for preparing well and negotiating better.

To find out more, or apply for Professor Neale's Influence and Negotiation Strategies Program, visit: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exec-ed/programs/influence-negotiation-strategies-program

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on marketing, featuring Jonathan Levav, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor of, you guessed it, marketing. Levav provides insights and advice on the psychology of customer marketing so you can learn how to get into the heads and hearts of your customers, influence their decision-making, and get them to choose your brand over the competition.

Professor Levav has a PhD in marketing with a passion for exploring the brains and guts of decision-making — digging deep into why customers gravitate to one brand over another. Talking to customers is the best (and according to Levav, the only) place to find the answers.

“People think that their task is to make a product. Their task is to understand customer needs and to create a product that meets those needs. And I think that if you're the CEO of a company and you don't speak or interact with customers at least once a week, you're not doing your job,” advises Levav.

His research and teaching focus on the psychological dimension of marketing — or why we consume. As he says, “If we just consume things because of functionality, there's no way we would pay what we pay for Apple phones, for Nike shoes, for clothes, like nobody would do it.”

Top Six Masterclass Takeaways 

1. Entrepreneurship is personal. Levav encourages you to figure out what type of problems you like to solve. “Some people like construction, some people like rice, some people like technology, some people like chicken wire. There's plenty of needs you could potentially address — some more profitable, some less profitable. Ultimately, the decision is kind of: What do you like to do most?” he explains.
2. Don’t be so literal. Levav encourages marketers to go beyond describing simply what a product or service does. He says, “You can appeal to people in lots of different ways, and you can create competitive advantages along values that are way beyond the very literal thing the product does.”
3. Marketing is three-dimensional. The first is the functional dimension or what the product does. The second dimension is economic — how sensitive customers are to price. The third dimension is psychological. And according to Levav, this is the biggest opportunity: to explain how the product can make customers feel better.
4. Get out of the office. Levav believes that observing customers is critical to figuring out what customers want … and why. “You're never going to solve these problems staying in the office,” he says. “And by the way, you, the boss, need to get out of the office. Not just your underlings, not just your marketing person. You need to feel it on your flesh.”
5. Map your customer’s journey. It’s important to understand every interaction your customer has with your business — step by step and over time, what led them there and what actions they take next. This applies equally if you’re B2C or B2B. “As long as you're not selling to computers, you're selling to people, and people in this firm that are buying from you have a journey, too,” Levav says.
6. Don't undervalue simplicity. Nobody buys things that are ambiguous, says Levav. So, make sure your message is crystal clear to you and your customers. If you don’t get it, they won’t either. 

Listen to Levav’s insights, advice, and strategies for how to better understand your customer and create a cohesive story to meet their needs.

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Is it possible to be virtuous in a sea of corruption? Indian entrepreneur Rajah Koppala of Avis Vascular Centers is trying to do just that. Hear how he and his team are strategically and realistically fighting against the tide of corruption. And, gain insights from Saumitra Jha, an associate professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, on what it takes to understand and navigate challenging ecosystems. 

Rajah Koppala trained and practiced medicine in the United States before returning to India in 2013 to create a chain of vascular surgical centers which he calls “mini hospitals within hospitals.” As chairman and managing director of Avis Vascular Centers, he had to learn a lot about operating, quite literally, in a very different ecosystem. In the healthcare industry, much of the corruption is rooted in immense amounts of regulation and red tape. For every license that’s required, 23 in Koppala’s case, there’s an interaction with a public official, and therefore an opportunity for corruption. Koppala has decided that some things are negotiable and others aren’t. In this moral gray area, he has had to acknowledge what’s realistic for his business and has developed a set of consistent, intentional criteria to help him decide when he’ll pay and when he won’t. “You just have to understand corruption is not going to go away. This goes all the way up to the very top. Everybody has their own self-interest. And to a degree, when the legal system is a little weak, when the wages of a lot of these officers is very low to start with, headwinds make this happen,” Koppala explains.

Saumitra Jha advises that there are certainly risks to giving bribes, even small ones, because once people become aware, he says, “They can ask for more and keep holding you up.” He advocates for strong, consistent leadership, making sure your employees are on board with “doing the right thing,” and finding partners in your industry to face obstacles together.

“Oftentimes in economics, companies might be competing with each other in an industry, but at the political level, they have a lot in common. And so thinking about how to do things at an industry level can often be much more beneficial,” Jha explains.

Rajah Koppala has also learned that relationships with public officials really matter. He encourages his team to have a cup of coffee and talk to the officials so they understand the gravity of the law that’s being broken, while still treating them with dignity. “Relationships equal money,” he says. “When you want to pay less, maintain a relationship.”

Listen to Koppala’s first-hand experiences navigating corruption in India and Jha’s strategies for surviving and thriving in these challenging and turbulent waters.

Resources:

Analyzing Political Risks in Developing Countries: A Practical Framework for Project Managers, by Saumitra Jha

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Meet Sumit Sinhal, founder and director of Kin’s Health, a growing healthcare company located in West Bengal, India, at the foot of the Himalayas. While most entrepreneurs would see obstacles in delivering care to this remote region, Sinhal’s passion, innovation, leadership, and strategic vision are creating opportunities — for both patients and doctors. 

India is infamously known as the diabetic capital of the world with over 80 million people suffering from the disease and an equal number who don’t even know they have it. In 2011, Sinhal’s company set out to change that statistic with early detection care and has since expanded to provide cutting-edge healthcare, including telemedicine and wearable devices, to underserved and hard-to-reach communities.

While working in remote regions has its advantages (less competition, for example), recruiting skilled staff can be a challenge. As a leader, Sunhal realizes the importance of creating a shared vision that extends beyond the founder.

“One of the most important stakeholders that you have is that of employees, especially in a service industry, that of healthcare. It is very important to have exceptionally trained employees to make sure that they understand the vision of the company. What is it that you intend to do? What is the passion behind doing everything that you do?” Sunhal says.

While Sunhal and his team are meeting the needs of underserved patients, they’re also empowering doctors to become entrepreneurs themselves. “We want to become the business partners for doctors, help them become docpreneurs , be a digitally savvy business, and provide the best of care that patients could possibly receive” he explains.

Hear how Sunahl is creating impact, embracing technology, and using innovative solutions to build his business and provide a model of care in other underserved regions.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on the investment landscape in India, featuring Sandeep Singhal, Managing Director of Nexus Venture Partners. A pioneer of venture capital in India, Sandeep shares practical tips for entrepreneurs seeking early-stage funding.

After working in Silicon Valley and at McKinsey, Sandeep cofounded one of India’s first incubators in the 1990s. Over the last several decades, he has witnessed the tremendous growth of entrepreneurship and investment in India. Today, he works at Nexus Venture Partners, one of the first India-US venture funds that invests in global technology products and technology-led businesses for India.

In this episode, Sandeep explores the evolving market trends in India, and shares how he evaluates investment opportunities. He also discusses the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make during early fundraising stages.

Top Six Takeaways:

• The Indian market is evolving from a value or discount based market towards one of convenience.
• Familiarize yourself with the investor ecosystem: identify potential investment partners and their areas of interest in advance.
• To attract early-stage investors, you need to demonstrate passion and a strong focus on product-market fit with a scalable go-to-market strategy.
• Don’t go-to-market stating a valuation expectation ― have the market tell you what it thinks is a fair valuation.
• It’s important to have clarity on the risks your business faces.
• To attract strong partners, you need to demonstrate real insight into the competitive landscape of their market.

Listen to Sandeep’s advice to help you raise capital and grow your business.

Resources:

• Nexus Venture Partners: https://nexusvp.com/
• Stanford Seed: http://stanfordseed.co/Grit

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Meet Sakshi Kapahi, head of Omam Consultants, an HR consultancy in India, and a mother on a mission to balance home and work life for herself and her employees. Hear about Kapahi’s journey — the hurdles and highlights — as she grew both her family and the business her father started over 40 years ago.

In India, a country where only 14 percent of entrepreneurs are women, Sakshi Kapahi has had to grapple with all the familiar obstacles that working mothers face … and then some. “You always get these questions, right? Oh, you must be working for your husband. Or you must be building this for your father or your husband. They assume there has to be a male member that will come through later,” she recounts. Having enough time for kids and business, what she calls “her two babies,” is a constant struggle. 

Kapahi says that building both a personal and professional support system is critical to juggling priorities and managing feelings of guilt. “One thing I'm still working on is you have to be kind to yourself as a woman, which is what we don't do. There's always guilt that I missed something for the team, in the office, at home. Everyone keeps saying ‘be kind to yourself,’ but nobody tells you how,” she says. Finding a female mentor with kids was incredibly helpful for Kapahi, and she strives to provide that kind of support for her employees as well, 70 percent of whom are women.

Hear how Kapahi is tackling motherhood and entrepreneurship while growing a company that does the same for other women.

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What are the unique challenges facing the African entrepreneurial ecosystem? How is the rapid growth of fintech startups impacting the Nigerian economy? And what does it take to become a modern business leader? Hakeem Belo-Osagie, accomplished businessman, philanthropist, and educator, has the experience and expertise to tackle all three.

Few business leaders understand the systemic challenges facing African finance as well as Hakeem Belo-Osagie. For three decades, he’s been a driving force in the Nigerian economy, working across the energy, finance, and telecom sectors. He left a decade-long career in the Nigerian government for the life of an entrepreneur — and he hasn’t looked back. But it didn’t start well, as Belo-Osagie explains:

“I think I mightily over-estimated my abilities, and my first entrepreneurial venture in finance was a complete failure, the bulk of which was entirely my own fault. It was a wonderful lesson. And I was able to pick myself up. The second venture of mine, which was a securities trading company, went very well. Subsequent to that, I staged the takeover of a large government-owned bank that I realized after buying was effectively bankrupt.”

Managing a hostile workforce at that bank, UBA, and working with seemingly hostile government regulators has taught Belo-Osagie about the importance of empathy, patience, and courage. Being aware of how much your employees and regulators really understand about the situation is key to success. As he explains about the bureaucratic mindset, when government officials don’t understand something, the instinctive reaction is to say no.

Ultimately, Belo-Osagie defines success, especially in Africa, this way:

“We have to measure how well we're doing, not by how many people are on the Forbes cover, or by how many billionaires Africa has, but basically what has happened to the bottom 40 percent. Business success has to enable people to make good sums of money, but it also has to be a system that lifts people out of poverty, large proportions of the overall population.”

Listen to Belo-Osagie’s turnaround story at UBA, his thoughts on the role of regulation in the future of fintech, and what it takes to be an effective leader … in Africa and beyond.

As we said at the beginning of the episode, the Seed Transformation Program will open applications for the 2023 class on April 1st, 2020. Founders and CEOs of companies based in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia with annual revenue of at least $300,000 are eligible to apply. To apply or find out more, visit: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/seed/transformation-program/admission

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on the ins & outs of mergers & acquisitions in Africa, featuring Victor Basta CEO of DAI Magister. From attracting potential buyers to navigating due diligence, Victor provides practical, tactical advice based on 30 years of experience shepherding M&A deals in Europe, the Middle East and across Africa.

Victor Basta has facilitated deals and strategic exits for founders of fast-growing, tech-enabled companies across Africa. And he truly considers it a privilege to be a part of these life-changing events for entrepreneurs, companies, and the continent as a whole.

“Everything we work on is more than an inflection point, more than a pivot point for a company. It sometimes is make or break whether they survive or not. ”

Investing in frontier markets like Africa has both increased perils and possibilities. Which is all the more reason why Victor advises founders to prepare from day one for that eventual life-changing deal. Because, as Victor says, you don’t really get to choose your moment, know when the exit window might open, or control the events.

So, what does success look like? According to Victor it's having to make only small compromises in the final stages of the deal because you’ve prepared and listened during due diligence to know what’s most important to the buyer. “When you have the least leverage possible, success is that you know it, and you live to fight another day. What I try to do is plan ahead for compromises that seem bigger than they really are.”

Top Seven Masterclass Takeaways

• Set your sights on being bought -- not sold.
• Develop strategic relationships with likely buyers years ahead of when they actually might buy.
• Get on the radar screen by proactively broadcasting your message and demonstrating your expertise and viability.
• Support your own team's growth so you can show buyers that you’ve got people who are ready to take the reins.
• Always behave as if you’re open to discussions with potential buyers, even if you’re not emotionally ready to sell.
• Before due diligence starts, make sure your entire senior team has rehearsed the message.
• Prepare to make compromises at the end stages of the deal -- the smaller the better.

Listen to Victor’s insights, advice, and strategies to help prepare for your own successful merger or acquisition.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on friction — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Robert Sutton, Stanford professor in the School of Engineering and best-selling author, has stories and strategies to help you identify the causes of friction, eliminate it, and even learn how to use friction intentionally to create more space for success. 

Friction, according to Bob Sutton, “ is simply putting obstacles in front of people that slow them down, that make their jobs more difficult and maybe a little bit more frustrating.” Sutton has written multiple New York Times bestsellers, including The No Asshole Rule, and Scaling Up Excellence with coauthor and Stanford colleague Huggy Rao. His upcoming book with Rao is all about the friction that typically arises after companies scale, and it is appropriately titled The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.

Sutton’s research shows that friction often starts at the top. Luckily, he has lots of advice for how to become more aware of the power and influence leaders wield and tips for eliminating unwanted friction in your organization.

Seven Masterclass Takeaways

Adopt a trustee mindset. 

According to Sutton, “Leaders should be trustees of other people’s time.” This means not just trying to find ways of saving people's time, but also being aware of how you’re imposing on their time. 

Don’t be oblivious. 

“Leaders need to be aware of the power and influence they have,” says Sutton, because an offhand comment can send employees on a wild goose chase that costs time, energy, and money. “That’s what happens when people in positions of power…are unaware of their cone of friction.” Leaders also need to acknowledge their blind spots. Many assume that because of their success, they know everything that matters about their organization; what Sutton calls the “fallacy of centrality.” Either way, what you don’t know can certainly hurt you.

Avoid power poisoning. 

“When people feel powerful or more powerful than others they tend to focus on their own needs over others and then they act like the rules don’t apply to them,” Sutton says. Friction is almost always the result.

Embrace inconvenience. 

Leaders often get the VIP treatment. They don’t have to stand in line or wait on hold. But Sutton says that this “absence of inconvenience…is protecting you from the experience that your customers are facing.” If you don’t feel the friction yourself, how can you address it?

Play the subtraction game.

Sutton suggests approaching problems with a subtraction mindset as an antidote to what he calls addition sickness. He says, “First, make a list of stuff that's getting in the way and driving you crazy. Okay, so now what are you going to do to get rid of it?”

Fight friction as a team.

“Friction is often an orphan problem that we point at other people, and we tell them it's their job to fix it,” Sutton says. Given the high-friction nature of friction fixing, he suggests a team effort.

Remember that not all friction is bad.

Sutton acknowledges that some things should be hard, like cheating, stealing, and making stupid decisions quickly. He says “Sometimes, being fast — all that does is get you killed off more quickly. The goal of getting rid of mindless, unwanted friction is to clear the way for the things in life that are hard and should be hard.”

Listen to Bob Sutton’s anecdotes and advice on how to recognize and remove friction in the workplace. 

The Friction Project will be released on January 30, and you can pre-order copies of the book now. (https://www.amazon.com/Friction-Project-Leaders-Things-Easier/dp/1250284414)

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Meet Ankit Agarwal, Founder of Phool, a flower recycling business based in Kanpur, India. By collecting waste flowers from temples and converting them into eco-friendly products, the company is making an impact on both the women they employ who live near the sacred yet polluted Ganges River and the river itself. 

Ankit’s entrepreneurial journey began with a question from a friend who was visiting the Ganges:  “If this river is so sacred, why is it so polluted? And why don't you do something about it?” Ankit did just that.

“Every year, we, Indians, put in about eight million tons of waste flowers in the waters. All the pesticides that are used to grow these flowers mixes with the river water, making it highly toxic. That is the leading cause of diarrhea, hepatitis and severe cholera across India and Bangladesh, where the water flows. Finally, I decided to form a company where we can collect waste flowers and do some products.”

Ankit believes real change will not happen in this generation...but he is hopeful. ”It will happen in the next generation, when the kids of the women that we're able to employ start going to school: their next generation will be liberated from scavenging.” 

Listen to Ankit’s mini profile to learn how a great business idea can change lives for generations.

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What are the obstacles and opportunities of franchising in Africa? While this business model is still in its infancy there, entrepreneurs like Grace Munyirwa of Vine Pharmaceuticals in Uganda are embracing it to grow and scale, while experiencing significant challenges along the way. Hear a story of struggle and success and gain insights from Chiagozie Nwizu, a franchise expert in Africa who has dedicated his career to educating entrepreneurs and investors on the power and pitfalls of the franchise model.

Grace Munyirwa is a self-educated entrepreneur without any formal business training. But that didn’t stop him from growing his pharmacy business to 36 shops across the African continent. Unfortunately, overexpansion, credit mismanagement, and success got the best of him. “We were walking on water and everything we were touching was turning to gold; pride got ahead of us. And so we opened locations that were not sustainable. We opened locations that were not supposed to open at all,” Munyirwa recounts.

As a last-ditch effort to save Vine Pharmaceuticals, Munyira turned to franchising. While franchising is hugely popular around the world, in Africa it’s still very early days, with little to no formal legal structures, franchise associations, training, or local history to build from. Chiagozie Nwizu is trying to close that knowledge gap.

“For us to make progress with the franchise model in Nigeria, we will need to begin to have the smart franchiser and the smart investor — and being smart is being franchise-literate,” Nwizu explains.

Munyira had to build his franchise model from scratch in Uganda, adapting it to meet his specific needs. One way he did that was by taking on more of the financial burden than is usual for a franchiser. Instead of asking his franchisees to pay rent on their stores, he kept that responsibility. And he had to carefully choose the type of franchisees he wanted to work with — people who already knew and cared about the culture vs. investors.

“Sometimes people with money don't understand that you take a long time to make good money. They want to simply invest the money and maybe leave a son or the wife there and then expect this to grow. That couldn't work. So I chose not to go that route,” he explains.

Nwizu calls Munyira’s approach a micro franchising model which allows franchisees to slowly build their equity in the business. Supporting franchisees is another key element to success, according to Munyira. “The team at headquarters is really a support team. Their role is not just to drink pina coladas. Their role is to look out and see what can really help the shops perform better. When these shops win, we win,” he explains.

Nwizu believes franchising is an important tool for the future of African business, where a high percentage of family-run businesses fail after the first generation. Franchising can change that. Munyira agrees. “What really, really hurts me, and that may be peculiar to this part of the world, is that many businesses die after the founder dies. I want to have a story that can really help the company survive way beyond its founder, that Vine is still existing way beyond my lifetime.”

Listen to Munyira’s first-hand experience with franchising and Nwizu’s insights on what it takes to build a franchise model that works for your business.

Resources:

• Tackling Access to Finance: The Potential of Franchising in Nigeria

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Meet Likitha Maddukuri, CEO and co-founder of Terra Greens, and Baba Shiv, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor of Marketing, and hear how unprecedented adversity can create incredible opportunity … when you have the right mindset.

Running an organic produce business in India could be seen by many as challenging enough, but the pandemic of 2020 had other plans. With a national lockdown, supply chain disruptions, and a limited labor force, Likitha had to quickly figure out how to create a culture that would motivate and inspire her employees to not just survive, but to thrive.

Creating a culture of gratitude, constant communication, and showing up for each other were her keys to success. “For the first time I had to sell the business and the vision to my people and make them believe that we will emerge stronger.”

Professor Shiv, an expert in neuroeconomics and decision making, discusses how Likitha’s innovative mindset made all the difference — approaching challenges with a desire for opportunity rather than a fear of failure. Listen to Likitha’s story and Professor Shiv’s guidance and get inspired.

Resources:

Stanford Seed: http://stanfordseed.co/Grit

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After a year of Grit & Growth podcasts, Darius Teter, our host and executive director of Stanford Seed, looks back on his conversations with intrepid entrepreneurs from Africa and India. He not only shares powerful moments but also some of the lessons he’s learned along the way about the struggles and opportunities of entrepreneurship in emerging markets. 

It’s hard to pick favorites, but some stories held special resonance and, in retrospect, revealed key themes about the long, often lonely, yet rewarding journey of entrepreneurship. No surprise, grit is one of the qualities that stood out in the entrepreneurs Teter spoke with, especially in the face of unprecedented adversity. Kwami Williams, whose company suffered from two fires, the pandemic lockdown, and personal tragedy, talked about the importance of taking one step at a time to stay resilient and recover.

Working to solve important problems is a red thread throughout many of the conversations. 

“It got me thinking that much of what we take for granted are really fundamental human rights — access to food, water, basic health care, and information,” Teter explains. “The phrase ‘purpose and profit’ may be overused, but these remarkable people are solving important problems as a business, not a charity.”

Teter points to Dr. Shuchin Bajaj, who built a network of affordable yet sophisticated hospitals across India and staffed a 1,000-bed hospital in weeks during the darkest days of the pandemic, and Samuel Appenteng, whose company brings drinking water to seven countries in Africa. Often, just doing business in some of these markets is a problem worth solving, from providing access to markets or using machine learning to providing short term financing.

From creating dignified work and highlighting the importance of mission to considering the role of governance and securing financing to scale their businesses, these entrepreneurs showed true grit and growth.

As Teter looks back and to the future of entrepreneurship in the region, he says, “What I have learned through my association with these incredible people is that the locus of innovation is rapidly shifting to these emerging markets, where a combination of necessity, untapped consumer demand, network penetration, and new technologies is leading to an explosion of business activity. And I learned that being an entrepreneur in these markets can be a lonely journey, and they value the opportunity to network and learn from each other.”

Listen to highlights and observations from our first season, tune in to the full stories of these amazing entrepreneurs, and get ready for Season Two.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on talent — finding it and keeping it — featuring Claudia Salvischiani, an expert on all things HR. From workforce trends and interview techniques to structuring incentives and performance evaluations, Salvischiani gives candid advice and insights on how to attract and retain the best people to help your business thrive.

It takes people to run a business, and the better they are, the better your business. So what can you do to not just get, but also keep, the very best? Claudia Salvischiani has a lot of strong opinions on how to do just that, grounded in real-world experience helping companies across India and Africa for over 25 years. 

Salvischiani believes that leaders play an essential role in keeping people happy. “When people leave, they are actually leaving their boss, not their organization,” she explains. “Your task as a leader is to develop people. Leaders are the ones who give meaning to your work. They explain to you why things happen.”

Top Seven Masterclass Takeaways 

1. Create a sense of community, especially with remote workers. Salvischiani believes that having a sense of belonging is especially important for remote workers. Organizations need to change and she recommends communicating a lot and not just one-on-one. 
2. To find the best candidate, you need to prepare. “Be very systematic about what you're looking for in all aspects,” she advises. It’s extremely important to have the right profile for the position before you start sorting through resumes or else you’ll waste everyone’s time.
3. When interviewing, don't let the candidate speak too much. “At the beginning, you speak, you set the tone, you set the structure, you explain how it's gonna be,” Salvischiani recommends. “You steer the interview, so you're not steered by the candidates.”
4. Be honest when hiring. Salvischiani suggests being extremely honest about the context the person is going to be working in. Recruiting is a selling process, but you still have to be very clear about the challenges ahead.
5. Higher salaries don’t earn you higher loyalty. While compensation is key, “you are not keeping people with the money. You're just postponing their leaving,” Salvischiani says. And she believes creating a salary structure is “absolutely necessary” for transparency, equity, and morale.
6. Don’t incentivize individual performance. Incentivizing organizational performance over individual performance gets the entire department or organization to collaborate and intervene if others don’t perform. 
7. Give feedback honestly and frequently. Even though it’s one of the hardest things for managers and leaders to do, giving frequent feedback, even if it’s bad news, is essential. People actually feel valued when you give them feedback. According to Salvischiani, quick quarterly check-ins help with retention. 

Listen to Salvischiani’s recommendations and strategies for acquiring and retaining talent. It’s a delicate balance of understanding what you need as an employer and what your employee needs to develop and grow.

The following music was used for this media project:

Music: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Kevin MacLeod

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Meet Faraz Ramji, founder of Norda Industries and Mindfulness Coach, and Dr. Leah Weiss, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer, to hear why mindfulness and emotional intelligence should be part of every entrepreneur’s skillset.

In 2017 a factory fire changed everything for Faraz and his team at Norda, a snack food company based in Nairobi, Kenya. Rebuilding the business required more than Faraz ever imagined, most importantly bringing his personal mindfulness practice to work.

“I don't want to make it sound like mindfulness is a panacea for everything. I just think it helped me personally, as a leader to be more grounded, to be more objective, to genuinely acknowledge the emotion which was coming up and not suppress or deny it, but genuinely feel it and then be able to use some of that data to drive my decision-making.”

Dr. Weiss spends a lot of her time thinking about mindfulness as a researcher, lecturer, consultant, entrepreneur, and author. She teaches “Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion” at Stanford Graduate School of Business and is founding faculty at Stanford’s Compassion Institute. But Dr. Weiss advises that mindfulness isn’t’ simply about meditation, it’s about the intentional use of attention which is essential for leaders. Listen to Faraz’s story and Dr. Weiss’s guidance so you can breathe easier.

Resources:

Faraz Ramji: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faraz-ramji-01700a25

Stanford Seed: http://stanfordseed.co/Grit

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Is it time to consider an advisory board? And if so, why? What skills do you need? And how do you find the right people who are willing to help? Aashish Agarwaal, founder and chairman of the Enerji Group, and Alexey Volynets of the International Finance Corporation share entrepreneurial perspectives and corporate governance advice to help you figure out what’s right for your company.

Rare is the entrepreneur who is an expert at everything. Turning to others outside your company for advice can be essential for success. Formalizing that process with an advisory board is helping Aashish Agarwaal strategically transform Enerji Group, the digital publishing enterprise he founded in India. But it took awhile to figure out exactly what he needed, who could help, and how to run the board effectively.

Alexey Volynets understands what Agarwaal had to go through to create the ideal advisory board. As an expert in corporate governance at the International Finance Corporation, he has been teaching companies about corporate governance  for years.

The most common manifestation of corporate governance is a board — fiduciary or advisory. Whereas fiduciary boards have financial liabilities, advisory boards are simply there to provide expertise that you may be lacking. 

“As you are growing, and when you are on the top of the world, it's important to have a check,” Volynets explains. “External advisors, especially very independent voices will ask you the right questions and will challenge your assumptions.”

Agarwaal figured out who he needed by first identifying the skill gaps in his company and what strategic initiatives he needed help with and how often. He suggests “I would say first what are the gaps, and second, do you need that help on a consistent basis or intermittent basis? Because again, you have to decide how much investment you're going to make in it.” 

Finding the right people isn’t easy, either. Volynets suggests the best place to look is your own networks to find the business people you trust with the criteria you need. But Volynets cautions entrepreneurs to avoid adding friends, suppliers, contractors, etc. to an advisory board, even if they have the requisite skills. He says “The most important characteristic is emotional independence.” 

 Listen to Aashish’s first hand experience on creating an advisory board and Alexey’s insights on how to do it strategically and successfully when it’s time to tap into the experience and expertise of other business leaders.

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Meet Acha Leke, senior partner and chairman of McKinsey Africa and co-founder of the African Leadership Academy. Leke has been analyzing the economic prospects of the continent for decades, so he’s the perfect person to share insights on its future, from productivity and digital transformation to the impact of Africa’s youth boom and how to plan proactively for job growth. 

The economic landscape in Africa has shifted dramatically in recent years. In 2010, McKinsey's "Lions on the Move" report, co-authored by Leke, showcased the continent's incredible growth potential. But now in 2024, the story has changed, and the outlook is a bit more pessimistic. Still, Leke notes that there is no “one Africa” or one “sub-Saharan Africa,” so economic growth trajectories can vary widely between countries.

“The reality is the last 10 years have been tougher. There's some bright spots, but growth has slowed down considerably from 5.1 percent in the 2000s to more like 3.4 percent in the last 10 years, in a continent that, on average, population grows at 2. 7 percent. So net-net, we're not seeing much per capita growth,” Leke says.

Leke believes digital technology is the single most important lever to transform productivity in Africa across public, private, and social sectors. But he advises that more needs to be done to achieve widespread impact, emphasizing the role of political leadership and regulations.

Key Insights:

• Africa's productivity lags behind other regions across sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, and services. Boosting productivity is critical. 
• Large African corporate champions play a vital role in driving growth and innovation and in supporting SMEs in their supply chains.
• SMEs are critical as they provide 80-90 percent of jobs. Enabling them to thrive is paramount.  
• With the world's largest and youngest workforce, Africa has a chance to be a leading exporter of digital services talent globally. But it will take proactive efforts to develop skills at scale.

With the right focus on productivity, skills development, infrastructure, and leadership, Africa stands on the cusp of rewriting its economic story for 2024 and beyond. Listen to Leke’s honest assessment of Africa’s economic challenges as well as an optimistic take on the path forward.

Additional Resources:

• “The path to greater productivity and prosperity in Africa,” McKinsey & Company, August 2023
• Reimagining economic growth in Africa: Turning diversity into opportunity, McKinsey & Company, June 2023.

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How can small businesses gain access to the working capital they need? Zach Bijesse of Payhippo and Tunde Kehinde of Lidya are trying to figure it out. Hear how new technologies are changing the future of lending for small businesses in Nigeria, Africa, and the world.

With over 200 million people and 40 million small businesses, Nigeria is the perfect spot to launch a fintech company that’s trying to push the boundaries of how businesses get capital. Both Zach Bijesse and Tunde Kehinde saw a huge market opportunity in Nigeria with its sheer size and strong startup culture. Their companies, Payhippo and Lidya, respectively, are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make lending faster and more accessible for entrepreneurs, and in turn, more successful for this new breed of lender.

Zach makes the problem clear: “Businesses can’t get money in Nigeria when they need it. It’s that simple.” 

Tunde believes that artificial — and human — intelligence are key to filling the small business lending gap. “Humans are involved in setting the rules. I think on average per loan, we have close to a thousand data points we look at. And so humans are looking to say, based on our assessment criteria, is it working or not working? And if it's not working, how do we tweak the rules to make sure the recollection is done properly?” 

Likewise Zach’s Payhippo endorses ongoing experimentation and the importance of training their algorithms to get better over time. “People forget that you can only train your machine learning algorithm based on your data set. So, you know, we have a few defaults in our loan portfolio. That's not a bad thing. You just have to give loans and figure out what works.”

Unlike most entrepreneurs, these two aren’t intimidated by competition, even from banks themselves. Instead, they’re always looking for opportunities to collaborate and partner. As Zach explains, “there's a $46 billion opportunity for small business lending in Nigeria. Why would Payhippo need to take one hundred percent of the market? Let's keep growing and do what we do. And then once we get a little bit of bandwidth, it'd be great to empower the other guys and collaborate with them. That's really exciting to us because then the whole financial infrastructure develops and it's better for everyone.”

Listen to Zach and Tunde’s story to learn how technology and new ways of thinking can impact how you approach and solve your specific business and market challenges.

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What’s the greatest resource for a fast-growing company? If you answered human resources, you’ve got a great head start on scaling for success. Sachin Dhanani, co-founder of Kenyan-based Danco Capital, learned firsthand the importance of having a strategic HR plan. Hear his story and get essential guidance from HR expert Claudia Salvischiani as you grow and scale your own company.

Sachin Dhanani paid little attention to org charts as he took his manufacturing company in just seven years from four to 240 employees and zero to 30 million dollars in revenue. Dhanani describes Danco Capital as a classic startup with everyone doing everything: “We had no org chart. We had no real job descriptions. So, when it came to things that were sort of in-between, it would be like, who's got the time, or who's done it in the past, and let's just do it.”

By the time Dhanani realized he needed help from Claudia Salvischiani, they had over 160 employees. Too late, according to Salvischiani. She advises, “If you have 50 people, you must have HR. When I say you need HR, you need strategic HR. You need somebody who understands the business strategy and helps you translate that business strategy into organization, people, and culture.”

Dhanani began by structuring the organization and creating formal job descriptions. And that, as Salvischiani describes, creates changes for the CEO as well. She says, “When companies scale, they need to rethink the role of the CEO. And the CEO or the founder needs to think about: How is my role going to change? Because typically the CEO is doing everything. And when you scale, you have to let go. This is a big jump for a lot of CEOs.”

Listen to Dhanani’s real-world struggles and successes creating and executing an HR strategy and get practical advice from Claudia Salvischiani on why and how to make HR a priority as you grow and scale.

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Meet Wandia Gichuru, CEO and co-founder of Vivo Activewear, a Kenya-based fashion brand made for the modern African woman. In an industry dominated by imports, Wandia is creating clothing that instills confidence and makes a difference in the lives of both her customers and her employees.

Wandia didn’t dream of being a designer all her life. But she has always been passionate about making an  impact. Now she’s doing that one dress at a time —creating clothes made in Africa, for African women that “takes into account our different body shapes, sizes, skin tones, lifestyles, and style preferences. Women haven't known what it feels like to wear something that was made with you in mind. It’s more than just clothing and style. It's about what makes you feel more confident, appreciated, or accepted.”

Empowering women extends to her company as well. She strives to create work- life balance for her employees, 70% of whom are women. Vivo provides meals everyday, health insurance, training, and no one works more than five days a week, which is uncommon in Kenya. While it hasn’t been easy, the struggles are turning into successes — Vivo is increasing its revenue, employing more women, raised capital, launched an e-commerce fashion platform, and expanded to Rwanda.

Wandia does it all for the women. “What drives me for sure, and hopefully the business as a whole, is the opportunity that we have to inspire women and change the way we see ourselves.”

Listen to Wandia’s mini profile to learn how one entrepreneur’s passion can make a world of difference.

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How do you convince Africans — both buyers and sellers — to move from informal outdoor markets to e-commerce? Juliet Anammah of Jumia Group is up for the challenge. Listen to her interview for the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series to learn how Jumia is breaking down traditional barriers with technology.

Jumia operates in 11 countries. It’s the largest e-commerce platform on the African continent and the first African tech startup to be listed on the NYSE. But e-commerce still represents less than 5% of total retail, which means there is tremendous upside if the company can overcome all the obstacles. Jumia is seeking to do just that by creating a marketplace that connects buyers with sellers, integrating with third-party providers, building trust with buyers, providing training and data analytics to sellers, and engaging with regulators. The ultimate goal: to improve lives on the continent using the power of the internet.

As former CEO and now chairwoman of Jumia Nigeria and chief sustainability officer of Jumia Group, Anammah has her hands in all of it, as she explained at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series event.

Jumia’s strategy is to integrate with existing third-party solutions to handle everything from logistics to delivery to payments, creating a full digital ecosystem. “It's an asset-light model. You have people who have tricycles and vans and so on, but what was lacking was always the technology to integrate that together and to use the data to make quality decisions.” Anammah continues, “The real value you bring to consumers is not limiting them to your own solution — it is actually giving them a platform through which they could use whatever payment method methodology that they have.”

Jumia is breaking down more than just trade barriers, but gender ones as well. ​​“At least in Nigeria and Kenya, which are key markets, about 51% of our sellers are actually women. It’s a gender agnostic environment. You could be a fashion seller, you could be an electronic seller, and you know you don't have a lot of physical markets where someone can make those kinds of gender-related decisions that could be forbidden.”

Anammah believes that the power of the platform extends far beyond commerce, driving development and creating jobs across the continent. “In the end, reducing inequality is so critical and is a big part of how we create value. And how we create sustainable improvement in quality of lives on the continent is by asking ourselves: What more can we do?”

Listen to Anammah’s entrepreneurial journey as a guide for your own. Hear about the challenges of building a marketplace business, competition, expansion plans, sustainability efforts, and more.

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Starting a business is hard enough. But growing it can be exponentially harder — especially when crossing borders and continents and in a business as fickle as fashion. Wandia Gichuru is experiencing it all as founder and CEO of Vivo Fashion Group, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Gichuru thinks about her business beyond simply selling clothes. We can be “warriors for economic growth,” she explains. Hear her story of lucky breaks and quick pivots, strategic growth and purposeful passion.

Wandia Gichuru began her career in international development. Today, she sees her business in a similar light, and with even more passion. She believes the fashion industry has the potential to transform economies on the African continent because, as she explains, “They haven’t found a way for robots to stitch clothing. You need to hire people.” And, she continues, “It's not just the people behind the machines, it's also the designers, the cutters, the bundlers. It's the models, the makeup artists, the photographers. There's just an entire industry that I believe could contribute a significant percentage to our GDP.”

When Gichuru started her business, it was focused on selling dance and fitness clothing online to meet her own needs. Ultimately — by default, not design — she chanced upon a huge gap in the market: good-looking, comfortable, well-fitting clothes for African women’s body shapes and sizes. Luckily, she had a built-in focus group to identify customer needs. “When ladies spend an hour in your store trying on 20, 30 different things, they talk a lot. That's where we got our market research,” she says.

She began by importing clothes from Asia, but quickly pivoted to designing and producing locally. “The local fashion industry had become almost nonexistent. We got flooded by all the secondhand stuff. And so the local textile mills that existed in the ’70s and ’80s, one by one, they all shut down,” she explains. The production move was a big decision that not only differentiated her brand, but also improved her bottom line and impacted her community. 

After seven years, Gichuru had six stores and 70-plus employees. But, she admits that she didn’t have a proper strategy, an effective board, or the right systems and processes to truly scale. She admits, “I was completely overwhelmed.” Gichuru got help from the Stanford Seed Transformation Program, a 10-month program for CEOs and founders of established businesses in Africa and South Asia to help them grow and scale their companies. “One of the first things we did was the business model canvas, which asks you to articulate your value proposition and answer key questions like who are your customers? Who are your suppliers? What is your marketing? What are your channels?,” she reflects. This exercise gave Gichuru the start she needed to build a foundation for expansion. Today, Vivo has 20-plus stores, has expanded to Rwanda, and has plans to grow across East Africa — and one day, hopefully, across the Atlantic.

“I would love Vivo to get to that level. I think for so long, you know, people see Africa as a place you get your raw materials from and then you do your value add somewhere else, and then you either sell it back to us or wait till you use it and send it back here as a used thing. I just think we need to prove to ourselves and to the rest of the world that we're just as capable, and actually we can come up with solutions, products, and services that people outside of Africa will benefit from and need as much as we do,” she says with passion.

Listen to Gichuru’s entrepreneurial story from startup to scaling and hear how she’s growing both her impact and her bottom line. 

Learn more about the business model canvas used in the Seed Transformation Program.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on strategic HR with Rokhaya Ndiaye, CEO and founder of Ro&Partners, a human capital consulting firm. Gain valuable insights and strategies for shaping your organization’s long-term goals and aligning your people strategies to meet future challenges.

When it comes to dealing with humans, whether growing a talent base in a global marketplace or downsizing to meet long-term goals, Rokhaya Ndiaye  (who goes by Ro) recommends employing empathy, using cultural sensitivity, and making a break from post-colonial mindsets. Ndiaye, whose company is headquartered in Senegal but conducts business internationally, understands firsthand the existing bias that talent only comes from the West. Her mission: to unlock the potential of Africa through its people. And she believes every company – private or nonprofit – should be strategically investing in its people.

Key Takeaways:

Think strategically

“Strategic HR is HR that is supporting the organization for the future. This is everything you do in terms of creating the stage for the organization to have the change management framework to be able to adapt to the changing ecosystem environment, as well as projecting themselves in the future.”

Rethink one-size-fits-all compensation 

“The smart companies are adjusting to this global market we are in, they're running away from these international versus local packages. It’s about how you are  paying a job, not how you are paying a local versus a national, an international person.”

Consider the impact of downsizing on those who stay

“At some point we have to downsize. But when it comes to people, we need to understand that downsizing has a very negative impact on people, but not only the people that are leaving the organization, the people that are staying as well. So we need to just make sure that we are very transparent and have a strong communication plan.”

Let people go with care

“The better you plan it, the easier for you to get through it as a company because that's not where you want your energy to go. You have to have a level of empathy, especially at a leadership level, to show people that you care.”

 Listen to Ro Ndiaye’s advice to entrepreneurs and HR leaders for building strategic HR frameworks that align with your company’s values and adapt to regional and cultural realities.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on communicating with confidence, featuring Matt Abrahams, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in strategic communications. Whether pitching to investors, reporting to your board, or motivating employees, Abrahams has tips and tricks for managing anxiety and making an impact with both what you say and how you say it.

Abrahams knows a thing or two about communicating. Whether he’s teaching MBAs at Stanford GSB or hosting his podcast “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” he advises entrepreneurs on the value of “Speaking Up Without Freaking Out” — which is also the title of his best-selling book.

Abrahams believes confidence and mindset can be developed to alleviate anxiety and improve almost any pitch or meeting. He’s also on a personal mission to stop entrepreneurs from beginning their presentations with “Hi, my name is _______, and today we're going to talk about_________.”

“That is boring. It's silly because you're showing a slide that has your name and your topic on it. I like to joke that every good pitch should start like a James Bond movie. No, not with sex and violence, but with action, get people participating and focused … and that's what will help people get interested in what you're saying.”

Top Seven Masterclass Takeaways 

• Some anxiety is a good thing. It can give you energy and focus. Abrahams suggests using cognitive reframing to use your excitement about your business and vision to manage your fear of pitching.
• Use nonverbal cues to convey confidence … even if you’re not feeling it. Gesture more slowly, make direct eye contact, take deep breaths to slow your speech rate down. These nonverbal cues will make people think you’re confident, which will actually make you feel more confident.
• Record yourself and watch it. Rather than judge and evaluate based upon your own internal dialogue, try to see what others will see in the pitch or presentation.
• Mindfulness can help you manage anxiety. Give yourself permission to be nervous — it’s only human. And forgive yourself if you’re nervous or make a mistake. That’s human, too.
• Create a compelling hook. Make sure it grabs people’s attention and is relevant. Abrahams explains, “If you do something different, you automatically stand out. You've got my attention just because you did something different.”
• Learn to tell your story fast and slow. Have a two-minute, 10-minute, and 30-minute version to deliver depending upon the situation.
• Consider cultural differences and pay attention to social status. Low context and high context cultures require different approaches. And hierarchy and social status should impact how you communicate.

Listen to Abrahams’ insights, advice, and strategies for how entrepreneurs can communicate with greater confidence and learn how you can improve your next pitch, board meeting, or presentation.

Please take a few moments and provide us with your feedback on Grit & Growth. We would love to hear what you’re interested in learning about and how we can make the content we create relevant to your growth journey. 

Resources

Podcast Survey

Think Fast Talk Smart podcast

No Freaking Speaking

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Meet Divya Yachamaneni, CEO of Naandi Community Water Services, a for-profit social enterprise bringing safe drinking water to rural communities across India. Hear how this mission-led company made a strategic pivot to get the “urban rich” to help subsidize and ultimately scale its impact.

Coming from an urban environment, Yachamaneni had no idea how widespread and severe the problem of contaminated water really is. Visiting rural communities made the issue crystal clear. In one village, she recalls, “They were drawing water from almost a sewage canal, putting it in the sun for odor, filtering it with a cloth for dust, and once the odor was gone, they started to drink it.”

Today, Naandi Water sets up water purification systems in such communities and sells the purified water back to families for a nominal charge, about $2.50 per month. The model relies on community ownership from day one so the villagers can ultimately run the water center themselves.

Even with the company’s success, scaling on a national level proved difficult without increasing costs. That’s when Yachamaneni explored a new strategy: selling bottled water to urban consumers to subsidize their work. While she was met with intense resistance by those who thought the plan veered from the NCWS mission, she ultimately prevailed. And the tagline on each bottle reinforces the strategy: “One hundred percent of the profits will go to supporting those people in rural India who don’t have water to drink.”

Listen to how Yachamaneni’s entrepreneurial persistence and Naandi’s strategic pivot have paid off, creating more opportunities for safe drinking water in rural communities.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on downsizing with Esi Ansah, executive director of the Center for Leadership at Ashesi University and founder of Axis Human Capital, an organizational development consulting firm. From managing team morale to ensuring your downsizing plan is data driven, Ansah provides a clear blueprint for leaders facing tough HR decisions.

Without a doubt, downsizing is one of the most dreaded tasks – for CEOs and employees alike. Which is why Esi Ansah tries to prepare leaders to handle it with clarity, effective communication, and compassion. And she also reminds small to medium-size businesses that, regardless of size, every company needs to have policies and plans to deal with downsizing.

Key Takeaways 

Gather data – before you even think about downsizing

“The most common mistake is the lack of data documentation. It always comes back to bite you. When you need to downsize, you need to justify every decision that you make.”

Honesty can be the hardest part of downsizing

“Sometimes it shocks people because they didn't see it coming, and they didn't see it coming because perhaps the leader in that organization did not articulate it clearly enough or, in the bid to avoid causing fear and panic, they actually avoid telling people the full truth.” 

Communicating bad news requires data, transparency, empathy, and support

“One of the best things you can do, especially for SMEs, is: don't wait till all the decisions have been made and then, bam, you just release the information. Once you get a sense of whatever change in your circumstances is driving the need for downsizing, start with just sending out a couple of feelers and, you know, soft communication.”

Always follow your local labor laws

“If you skip any of those loops and an unhappy employee wakes up to the reality that, hey, I don't think I'm being treated fairly, and then off they go – sometimes without coming back to you to say, look, I realize that you've skipped some steps here. They go straight to the labor commission. And then once they call you in, that's not pleasant.”

CEOs shouldn’t offload everything to HR

“Visibility of leaders is extremely important in a time like this. The last thing you want is HR feeling already overburdened and probably handling all the pressure that comes from the team. But when you have a CEO who would go around, you know, walk the floor, talk to people, and where there's anything that he can do, you know, he does it and he makes it very visible.”

Communicate your vision for AFTER the downsizing

“If you focus on the reason why you're downsizing and you don't focus on what you are evolving to do differently, you will have people who see the doom and gloom and there's really nothing that inspires them about the future. That's dangerous. You lose more people that way.”

Listen to Esi Ansah’s advice on how to identify –— and, more critically, avoid – the most common pitfalls of downsizing. Learn how clear policies and transparent communication can help minimize messy post-layoff negotiations and allow leaders to focus on supporting laid-off employees through the transition, as well as those who stay.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on leadership with Collins Dobbs, a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in leadership and a seasoned executive coach. According to Dobbs, becoming a truly phenomenal leader requires a deeper understanding of both yourself and your team, enabling you to navigate tough conversations, develop real connections, and create a culture where people feel safe to offer real feedback.

As an executive coach, Collins Dobbs has worked with senior leaders across industries to help them navigate complex team dynamics and enhance their emotional intelligence. As an instructor for the popular Interpersonal Dynamics course (affectionately known as "Touchy Feely"), he also helps young leaders in the Stanford GSB classroom to foster self-awareness, communicate more authentically, and develop the building blocks for effective leadership in their personal and professional worlds.

Key Takeaways 

Be a signal generator

“People are looking for leaders to communicate how they navigate in the good times, but also in the challenging times. Are they open to innovation? Are they open to ideas? Are they open to creating opportunities for success and failure? That's a big job of leaders to generate those signals to say, it's okay. We welcome mistakes and risks as long as we learn from them and fix them going forward.” 

Be open to giving and receiving feedback

“We come in and we have thoughts. And often underneath those thoughts are feelings. And so while the thoughts sometimes say what's important to us, oftentimes the feelings signal how important they are. We try to help the students understand both their thoughts and their feelings. And then as they interact with each other, understand their intentions, the impact of the behavior, and what comes up for them and what comes up for others as well.”

Embrace the unknowing

“A piece of leadership is about: What do I do in the not knowing? I don't know exactly what I need to know when markets change, when staffs change, when skills change. That's part of leadership. And part of it is, is a willingness to stand in the unknowing and a trust in oneself and others that we can figure it out.”

Make sure you have the right support system

“I think peer groups are tremendously important. If it's a CEO roundtable, or a group of alumni, do you have a circle of people where you can really be authentic? Because you're not alone.”

Lead with space, pace, and grace

“Can we pause? Can we create an understanding? Can we see where we're missing expectations from each other? Can we state what those expectations are? And then can we make a plan in terms of how we're willing to work together to meet that?”

Listen to Collins Dobbs’ advice to aspiring and experienced leaders on how to become not just a good leader, but a phenomenal one.

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Meet Adam Abate and Tayo Oviosu from Paga, and Victor Basta, CEO of DAI Magister, and hear about the hurdles and high points of an East-meets-West African fintech acquisition.

Adam’s entrepreneurial journey began when he and two fellow Ethiopians started Apposit, a consulting firm building technology that would work in African contexts — low bandwidth, low human capital, and affordable. Turns out that was exactly what Tayo needed to create Paga, now the leading payments platform in Nigeria. What started as a simple consulting agreement turned into a long-term, strategic relationship and ultimately paved the way for Paga’s acquisition of Apposit in 2020.

Victor Basta says while this isn’t the norm for acquisitions, it’s a wise strategy to develop relationships with the people you might acquire or be acquired by. Victor helps fast-growing, tech-enabled businesses like Paga do everything from raising capital to acquisitions. He says one of the keys to getting bought, not sold, is “developing relationships with companies that are likely buyers years ahead of when they actually might buy. You can always go search for companies, but people buy people they know or people they've heard of, and there's a degree of comfort and confidence with that.”

The two entrepreneurs learned a lot in the process about the importance of trust, talent, and having a shared vision that will make both sides of the acquisition feel right about the decision.

According to Adam “A lot of it came down to gut and how you really felt about it inside. Did all the pieces fit together? Did you wake up every day thinking, yes, this is the right decision despite the difficulties in negotiation? Even now, almost two years down the line with all the little problems we faced along the way I often asked myself, "was it the right decision?" and overwhelmingly it comes back to yes because the fundamental principles of why we got into discussion in the first place...are still there. They haven't changed.”

Listen to Adam and Tayo’s story and Victor’s insights to learn how to set your own business up for buying or selling to the right partner.

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Almost every entrepreneur dreams of becoming a market leader. But a business's greatest potential for success happens with market creation. Andela, led by co-founder and CEO Jeremy Johnson, did just that by unlocking access to a global labor market — for both job seekers and companies in need of great talent. Hear Andela’s market-making journey and gain insights on this kind of disruptive innovation from Efosa Ojomo, director of Global Prosperity at the Christensen Institute and co-author of The Prosperity Paradox.

Andela is a Nigerian company that began with a tightly focused mission to train software engineers to compete on a world stage. “The original problem statement,” Johnson explains, “is that brilliance is evenly distributed. Opportunity isn't. How do we move towards a world where those things are a little bit more uniform, where someone's potential in life has less to do with who their parents were and where they were born, and more to do with the impact they're able to create?” Andela quickly realized that the most valuable part of the business wasn’t training the talent, but making it accessible. So, to connect all that brilliance with opportunities, Andela created a global talent marketplace to help companies simplify the process of hiring and working with talent from all over the world. 

This “market-making innovation” — creating an ecosystem for “non-consumers” — is what Efosa Ojomo believes made all the difference to Andela’s success. In the case of Andela, he explains, “The brilliant talents in Nigeria are non-consumers of opportunity. They just happen to be born in a country that could not leverage what they would give to the world. Andela is creating an infrastructure that connects them to that opportunity so that they can add value to the world.” And they’re doing the same for companies that face barriers to recruiting the best talent. According to Ojomo, “Unlocking this double-sided non-consumption unlocks so much value and the world becomes a better place as a result.”

While many companies suffered due to the pandemic, it actually helped Andela by reinforcing the power of remote work. In just four years the company expanded from seven to 120 countries, and its leaders realized that the tricky part of global talent was the infrastructure, or lack thereof. So, they spent time and energy building a supply chain to make it easy for people to work together between countries, covering issues from payroll to compliance to taxes. “The primary driver of the business was companies coming to us and saying, ‘We want to be able to work with great talent. Can you help us? And can you make that easy? And because you trained them, we would like to work with you,’” Johnson explains.

Listen to Johnson and Ojomo discuss Andela’s meteoric growth, regulatory hurdles, the role of data, and how looking at your product through the lens of market creation can unlock a business’s true potential.

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Meet Santhoshi Sushma Buddhiraju, CEO and cofounder of Autocracy Machinery, a heavy machinery manufacturing company located in southern India. The idea for her company began with a simple question: Why is India, the world’s largest consumer, so reliant on imported machinery? Answering that question entailed bold risks, fearless leadership, and personal sacrifice.

Santhoshi had a strong foundation to start a business, even one that was extremely male-dominated. She got a world class education at IIT Madras, created a food delivery start-up on the side, received a prestigious internship at Georgia Tech in the United States, and ultimately built her corporate career at HSBC. But solving local problems in her home country of India captured her imagination and fueled her resolve.

While most entrepreneurs were shutting down their businesses during COVID, Santhoshi was launching her start-up with a vision to transform India’s infrastructure and economy through local manufacturing expertise. According to Santhoshi, India imported $43 billion in machinery in the last financial year alone. “That’s huge,” she says, “and imagine being the biggest population of the world, the biggest consumer of goods. And then we realized why are we not manufacturing our stuff and very basic stuff? You have more manpower than anybody can imagine and imagine what magic you can do,” she declares.

Santhoshi identified and capitalized on an enormous opportunity. She explains: “Our cities are developing, our ecosystem is developing, and our population is rising. What India is trying to do is build a better utility network – water pipelines, gas, electricity, digital networks, cable, optical fiber networks, all of this to every household. And it all requires machinery. There's a need. There's an opportunity. Why don't we manufacture the machines, machines which we are importing at $150K?” And so she did, manufacturing machinery that was cheaper, faster, and responsive to local needs, first in the utility industry and now in many others.

Hear how Santhoshi is breaking down barriers, listening to her customers, relying on her team, and encouraging entrepreneurs to do the same.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on raising capital, featuring Zach George, general partner at Launch Africa Ventures and co-founder of Startup Bootcamp Africa. Zach provides honest, practical advice on what founders really need to focus on to attract and secure the right investors.

Zach George has been investing on the African continent for over 10 years, but his advice to entrepreneurs at any stage of the funding journey — from pre-seed to Series C — is universal.

After earning a master's at Stanford University, a short holiday to see the World Cup in 2010 led Zach to make Capetown, South Africa his home. Today, he is a general partner at one of the largest Pan-African specialist seed venture capital funds with $15 million in funding and investments in 50 - 60 of the largest or most prominent tech founders in the continent. So, he understands what investors are looking for and what makes founders stand out from the crowd.

Top Six Masterclass Takeaways

1. Ask for advice early, while you’re building the business. As the old adage goes: if you ask for advice you may get some money; if you ask for money, you may get some advice.

2. Know your market and your competition really, really well.

3. Articulate your value proposition. Before you even think about asking for money.

4. Perform due diligence on potential investors. Know their mandate, strategy, portfolio performance, and how you can add value.

5. Look for investors who add significantly more than just capital, including help with customer acquisition, recruitment, and talent sourcing. “Smart founders have learned to say no to investors that don't add any of that value.”

6. Spend more time on operations than raising funds. Especially in the early rounds.

Listen to Zach’s investor insights, founder advice, and capital-raising strategies to help grow and fund your own company.

Resources:

Launch Africa Ventures: https://www.launchafrica.vc/

Zach George: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachariahgeorge/?originalSubdomain=za

Crossing the Chasm (book): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

Stanford Seed: http://stanfordseed.co/Grit

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on strategy, featuring Jesper Sørensen’s insights on how to build a strategy for success and accept the inherent uncertainty of it all. This Stanford Graduate School of Business professor tells you what you need to know: from defining what a strategy is — and is not — to deciding who to involve and how to debate constructively. 

Every entrepreneur understands that their business needs a well-thought-out strategy to succeed. But the gap between knowing and doing can be daunting. Professor Sørensen, coauthor of Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage, advocates for “starting at the end” by asking what it is you want to accomplish and what success looks like. “Then,” he explains, “you can start to say, okay, now here's all these things that we think might connect to what we want to accomplish.” 

While creating a strategy is a process that requires ongoing refinement, Sørensen reminds leaders to put their strategy into practice and learn along the way. What’s more, he cautions that successful execution depends on how well you communicate your strategy. He believes that everyone in your organization needs to understand the strategy and see themselves in it, because their work contributes directly to its success.

If you want to hear more on strategy from Jesper, check out our episode Strategy: It's the Big Bets that Matter.

8 Masterclass Takeaways 

A strategy is not a list of things you want to accomplish. “Essentially a strategy expresses the logic of success for the organization. How are we going to get the resources that we need in order to accomplish what it is we want to accomplish? You need to be able to articulate some sort of theory of how causes lead to consequences, how inputs lead to outputs, how actions lead to desired outcomes,” Sørensen explains.

Strategy is about managing uncertainty. “That's why you have to think about strategy as an argument, built on assumptions about how the uncertainty is going to resolve itself so you can accomplish your goals,” he says.

Your strategic argument needs to be logically valid. Sørensen says, “Look at whether the conclusion follows from the assumptions that have been stated. And what that requires you to do is to not say to yourself, that is a dumb assumption. For the sake of assessing validity, you just have to accept it to be true.”

Make sure all the right people are in the room. “Everybody at the organization who makes decisions and allocates resources needs to understand the strategy, so that their own actions can support it.”

How you debate matters. “The first thing you need to do is to create an environment where there is what we call psychological safety, where people feel free to dissent from the dominant opinion, and don't fear retribution,” he advises. He goes on, “Be careful about both verbal and nonverbal communication that shapes people's perception. No eye rolling. No shrugging.”

Avoid arguing blue. Sørensen explains, “It basically means yelling at each other and sticking to your position and trying to win. Instead, you want people to be focused on whether the argument itself is logically coherent. Even if you don't believe in the assumptions, if you did accept the assumptions, the conclusion would follow.”

Don't worry about it being perfect when you start. Sørensen encourages leaders to “go ahead and do the best you can and then take action. You're going to learn something. The data that's generated will shed light on your theory and then say, well, wait a second, I see that what we were assuming was that customers really cared about this, and that turns out to be wrong. So now how do I have to then adjust my behavior?”

Your strategy problems are not unique. “What's always striking to me is how everybody thinks that their problems are totally unique to them. I like to encourage people to see that there's comfort in knowing that actually, no, those problems are the same problems that everybody else has,” he says.

Listen to Sørensen’s insights, advice, and strategies for how to build your own strategy.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on sales, featuring Celine Duros, a woman who started her career in sales at 16 and is now both an experienced sales director in emerging markets and consultant to entrepreneurs seeking the secrets to successful sales – whether you’re pitching yourself, managing teams, or selling a specific product.

Celine Duros sold earrings at a holiday market in France, transitioned to men’s fashion, and only realized after business school that sales was her true calling. She moved to Ghana a decade ago and has honed her craft by working across 25 African markets, building relationships first and selling second. With so much experience selling and consulting across the African continent, she has stories to tell and lessons to share with entrepreneurs everywhere. 

Top Six Masterclass Takeaways 

Actions speak louder than words

“If I had been in touch with the actual decision maker, I would have seen that there was some skepticism and the value was not as clear. You can trust the word, but really, if you want to forecast, look at the actions, cause that's where you're going to be able to actually see through.”

Stay involved in sales

“One common mistake that I've seen is that CEOs or cofounders that are not comfortable with sales, they delegate to team members. And there's so much at stake ‘cause you know, sales keeps the lights on, but it's also what gets the company to grow.”

Document your sales process

“There's usually no documentation, and that's usually what I see in a lot of organizations that I work with. Not transferring, not having an actual way of selling, not providing the tools and just like, ‘Oh, you come to meetings with me and then you learn from that.’”

Review every rejection

“Frame it from a research perspective. Actually have a discussion with the client straightaway and say our goal is to make sure that we improve our solution to make our customers happy, so I'd love to get your feedback and it's just no pressure. It's just, I'm doing research. I'm not here to sell you again after you already said no.”

Tell stories, and have a library to draw from

“Telling a story of who I am as an individual and why I work for this company, telling a founder story, a vision story, who-my-customers-are story, this is going to be building the trust, whatever topic, I have a story library of about 32 stories that you can use at every stage of the sales process.”

Listen to know what stories to tell

“I always tell my team, don't be a product pusher, be a solution finder. You can abuse storytelling if you just throw stories all the time and you don't throw the right story at the right time.”

Listen to Duros’ sales advice spanning topics like delegation, emotional intelligence, compensation, bullshit radars, and more.

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Meet Mir Shahrukh Islam, cofounder and CEO of Bondstein Technologies Ltd. in Bangladesh. He created his IoT, or internet of things, company at a time when very few in Bangladesh even knew the term. Today, that future-focused, risk-taking spirit still defines and inspires his entrepreneurial journey.

Taking bold risks is part of almost every entrepreneur’s DNA. Shahrukh demonstrated that trait from the get-go when he chose his company name, Bondstein, a mashup of James Bond and Einstein. “Daring and smart” is how he strives to approach business challenges. The company he created generates actionable intelligence by connecting assets to the internet for SMBs and enterprises, including tracking vehicles, solving customers’ operational efficiencies, and reducing costs.

While risk taking conveys confidence to many, Shahrukh admits that doubts always remain. “Whenever I am taking a big decision, doubts always come. Will it work? Will it not work? Will I be able to convince my partners? Will I be able to convince my customers? Will I be able to convince my suppliers? But you never know until you take that decision, until you take that leap of faith. So it's always important to just trust the process, take that leap of faith,” he advises

Getting feedback — positive and negative — is essential for Shahrukh’s growth as a leader. “I constantly challenge myself with people who are more capable than me to deliver. I always meet with individuals who have achieved something that I aspire to achieve someday,” he says.

According to Shahrukh, taking a break to recharge is how he stays motivated through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. He says, “Whenever I am very much cluttered or very much tired, I always take a break, go on a drive, talk with random people on the roadside, and try to understand different philosophies.”

Hear how Shahrukh is navigating the entrepreneurial journey and finding success and happiness along the way.

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Meet Caroline Wanjiku, cofounder of Daproim Africa, and Victor Basta, CEO of DAI Magister, and learn how one intrepid Kenyan entrepreneur overcame adversity to transform her bootstrapped social enterprise into a strategic acquisition.

Caroline’s entrepreneurial journey began like most other ambitious founders. She and her business partner (and eventual husband) created Daproim in 2006 with a vision to make Kenya a destination for IT outsourcing. A chance encounter with the Rockefeller Foundation in 2011 led to a grant and a realization that the business they were building was also a social enterprise. Caroline explains:

“We were employing friends, women, mainly people who were from underprivileged backgrounds. So, when we bumped into Rockefeller Foundation they were quick to tell us that what you are doing is actually called social impact. You know, we didn't have a word for it until then.”

A few years and 500 employees later, a tragic turn of events changed everything. On the day she was giving birth to her first child, her husband and co-founder also entered the hospital with a life-threatening disease. Caroline had no choice but to take on the role of CEO.

“My first reaction was like, I can't do this. And one of my mentors came and visited me and told me, "You know what? You need to do it for your child. Find a way to gather yourself, take as much time as you need, but the goal is to make sure that this business continues."

Victor Basta also believes in the power of mentorship, especially in an ecosystem like Africa where “hardly anybody’s done an exit...the playbook hasn’t been written.” Victor helps fast-growing, tech-enabled businesses like Daiprom do everything from raising capital to acquisitions. And when Caroline was approached by StepWise, an American outsourcing company, she sought out mentors again to help her understand the deal on the table and keep her emotions in check.

Victor advises “don't talk to very many people about it because you are going to be in sell mode because of the lack of experience. It would be useful to be able to find somebody in your broader orbit that has actually gone through it. You know, they may help you at least avoid going what I would call guardrail to guardrail with your emotions.”

In February 2020, the day before the lockdown, StepWise acquired Daproim. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing and Caroline admits to mistakes and misunderstandings, namely assuming that she would remain as CEO after the acquisition.

“So in my mind, I thought automatically I'd remain as CEO. So, I didn't have any doubts. I didn't think I needed to bring it up until later. I'd advise anyone to just make sure you talk about everything and not to assume.”

When Caroline eventually decided to move on from Daproim, it was not without the advice of her trusted mentors. Listen to Caroline’s amazing story and Victor’s insights to learn how to prepare for the unexpected and avoid potential pitfalls—before, during and after an acquisition.

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Meet Samuel Appenteng, managing director of Joissam Ghana, a company working to make clean water more accessible to rural communities in West Africa. By collaborating with the communities his firm serves, Appenteng is pumping hope and health into the people who need it most.

Unfortunately, the scale of the problem is immense. Appenteng explained, “In sub-Saharan Africa, over 320 million people have no access to potable water. As we went more and more into the rural communities and saw the kind of deprivation and denials of a decent living, I began to realize that we need to bring relief to people.”

From groundwater exploration and research drilling to water quality analysis and water treatment, Joissam is changing lives with clean water. Joissam began its work in Ghana, but the company has already expanded to seven more countries: Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Togo, and Gabon in Central Africa. Its approach is unique: to involve the community in the clean water effort from the very beginning. 

“They will all come around and help you as you go and pass the lines to be able to start sending electrical charges into the earth,” Appenteng said. And once drilling starts, he continued, “You will have everybody in, down there observing, and there's a lot of tension. And then the technical team was saying, we are getting there. We're getting there. You start getting a lot of excitement. Believe you me, as soon as you hit water, and it starts gushing out, women and children start jubilating like it's a football game with a lot of goals.”

Listen to Appenteng’s mini profile to hear how his company is increasing its impact across Africa and providing health and economic benefits to millions.

And for more information on the Executive Program in Women’s Leadership mentioned at the top of the episode, visit https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exec-ed/programs/executive-program-womens-leadership

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on the effectiveness of small business interventions in emerging markets — with hard data to back it up. Thanks to researcher Stephen J. Anderson’s studies with African entrepreneurs, you’ll hear why having a coach, getting classroom training, and learning how to delegate can drive growth and impact your bottom line.

Stephen J. Anderson has spent his entire career trying to bring rigorous research to international development efforts, whether at the World Bank, Stanford Graduate School of Business, or his current post at McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

Anderson makes his case for research on the effectiveness of growth interventions. He explains, “In the development sector someone says, “I have this great program,” and then they show you the best cases. But did this program or intervention really lead to that increase in firm sales and profits? I can't just cherry-pick or look at it anecdotally.”

Top Six Masterclass Research-Based Takeaways 

1. Remote coaching works. The study of 930 Ugandan businesses proved that those companies that received coaching over six months  increased sales, profits, and employment — by up to 50 percent!
2. Coaching on your value proposition had the biggest effect. Anderson advises entrepreneurs to ask themselves, “What am I offering? Who am I offering it to? And why should they buy from me?” Think about your business model, think about the strategic shifts that you might have to make in the value proposition. Coaching or access to coaching can help you do that.
3. In-person classroom training increases profits. The study of small firms in South Africa showed that those who received training — whether finance & accounting or marketing — increased profits by about 25 to 30 percent.  
4. Networking with other entrepreneurs enhances learning. “We’re social beings,” explains Anderson, “and we still want to network. I learn a concept, I take it out to my business. I come back a week later and share what worked and what didn't work. I'm also going to hear from 10 or 15 other entrepreneurs. And so I'm going to learn the theory from whatever the instructor's telling me, but I'm also going to  learn practically from others.” 
5. Entrepreneurs need to delegate to scale. Anderson’s study of hundreds of businesses in Nigeria proved that to scale up, you need to let go. Anderson says, “Providing entrepreneurs with access to the expertise they need, that they can insource or outsource, grows the team, the managing team, and eventually grows the sales and profits of those firms.”
6. Try not to hire family or friends. Anderson urges entrepreneurs to think hard before they hire and to look for ways to professionalize their workforce with the specific skills they really need to grow the business.

Hear more about how Anderson’s research can be the basis for more effective entrepreneurship programs across the world and apply his findings to your own entrepreneurial journey.

Research Links:

• Pathways to Profits: the Impact of Marketing vs Finance Skills on Business Performance, by Stephen J. Anderson, Rajesh Chandy, Bilal Zia.
• Do Marketers Matter for Entrepreneurs? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Uganda, by Stephen J Anderson, Pradeep Chintagunta, Frank Germann, and Naufel Vilcassim. 2021. Journal of Marketing 85(3), 78-96.
• Improving Business Practices and the Boundary of the Entrepreneur: A Randomized Experiment Comparing Training, Consulting, Insourcing and Outsourcing, by Stephen J. Anderson and David McKenzie. Journal of Political Economy.

Additional research support was provided by Stephen Kagera, Janine Titley, and Christy Lazicky.

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Meet Martin Stimela, CEO of Botswana-based Brastorne Enterprises, and Matt Abrahams, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer and communications expert. As Martin prepares to pitch his business expansion plan, hear Matt’s tips on how to grab attention, harness emotions, and create a lasting connection with your audience. Then listen in on Martin’s actual pitch...and Matt’s feedback. 

Almost every entrepreneur eventually needs to make a pitch to capture attention...and dollars. Martin Stimela is no exception. As CEO of Brastorne Enterprises, he’s looking to raise capital to scale his growing technology company to 19 more countries, starting with Cameroon, Ethiopia, Guinea, and Mali. His vision: to connect the unconnected by enabling Internet access without the need for expensive data plans or smartphones. Matt Abrahams shares some tips and then listens in on Martin’s pitch. 

Matt Abrahams is a Stanford lecturer and host of the podcast "Think Fast, Talk Smart," and he has plenty of strategic communications advice and techniques for both Martin and fellow entrepreneurs. Before you even write the first word of your pitch, Matt suggests you need to think first about who your audience is and what they need from you.

“A fundamental mistake people make is they start by saying, here are the things I want to say. Rather, you need to focus on What do I want them to know? How do I want them to feel? And what do I want them to do?”

Here are a few pitch-worthy pieces of advice:

Create a good hook to capture people’s attention

“You know, 99% of people start with: Hi, my name is_______. Today, I'm going to talk about______. If you do something different, you automatically stand out as different.”

Introduce a character

“Think about leveraging testimonials, examples of how people are benefiting from your particular set of offerings. If we become familiar with a particular person and their situation, it makes it much more real for us than simply talking in generality.”

Be conversational

“Avoid reading word for word from a script or slides. Instead, focus on the structure of your message and the key ideas you want to get across.”

Practice by teaching

Like most things in business and life, practice makes perfect. And Matt encourages practicing by teaching.

“Something that I find very useful for entrepreneurs to do is when they're working on pitches, I invite them to actually think about how would they teach somebody else to pitch their business. So bringing on a co-founder or a colleague, how would you teach them to pitch the business by putting themselves in the role of teacher, it helps them see things that we don't typically see.”

Listen to Matt’s advice and Martin’s pitch to learn new strategies and techniques to improve your own pitch.

Think Fast Talk Smart podcast

No Freaking Speaking 

Stanford Seed

Stanford Graduate School of Business

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on the do’s and don’ts of pitching VCs, featuring Zach George, general partner at Launch Africa Ventures, one of the leading early-stage venture capital funds on the continent. Sitting in the investor seat gives George valuable insights on what entrepreneurs should and shouldn’t do to attract the right kind of investment for their company.

After earning a master’s degree at Stanford University and spending over a decade on Wall Street, Zach George turned a vacation to South Africa into a lifelong career … and, ultimately his home. He instantly saw Africa’s potential as a hub for innovation, but felt that funding for start-ups was very old school. What’s more, he recognized that African entrepreneurs required more than just capital, they needed mentorship, connections, and intellectual capital. So he created a unique venture capital firm to provide it all. 

To date, Launch Africa Ventures has raised $36.2 million, making it the largest early-stage fund in Africa. After meeting with so many founders seeking funding, George has plenty of advice to share.

Top Six Masterclass Takeaways 

Due diligence is your responsibility, too.

“It is almost impossible to find founders that can put themselves in your shoes as the investor. They've done thorough diligence on us as a fund and our portfolio companies and they can convince us how our portfolio companies can be better off because of what they do. That, for me, is a no-brainer.”

Be open to advice.

“I always say founders should get VCs as coaches, not captains. We don't run the ship, but we coach you, right? Now, if as a founder, you're not coachable, then that is an immediate red flag.”

 Understand your customers.

“Retaining customers is a lot easier than getting new customers. So if that simple equation makes sense, why aren't you incentivizing your existing customers to refer you to other customers, right? Understanding unit economics is super, super, super important. You know, the tech is almost irrelevant, if you don't understand your customers.”

Don’t overstate interest in your company.

“In Africa, there are about 35 to 40 credible VCs on the continent and we know most of them. So if someone walks into a room and says, ‘Oh, I've got a term sheet from this VC or this investor is very interested in me, and our rounds are almost closed,’ the reality is I'm going to WhatsApp the GPs of those funds almost immediately.”

Don’t underestimate how difficult it is to scale.

“If you're in South Africa or Nigeria, you can get away with just being in those markets up to your series A. But if you're in Uganda or Rwanda or Senegal, you really have to be thinking about cross-border expansion prior to series A. And not having a roadmap for that is a yellow flag. The wrong answer is always ‘it's not relevant, I'm not there yet.’ If you're the CEO you better have a plan for how you're gonna expand to multiple markets.”

Make sure your IP is in an investor-friendly jurisdiction. 

“You've got to be clean from a legal and tech perspective. So the most common structure is you have a holding company in Delaware and you have multiple local operating subsidiaries. And the Delaware holdco owns 100 percent of all the African subsidiaries. And the investors only invest at the holdco. You've got to have that set up before you talk to a VC.”

Listen to George’s advice to founders, plus his insights on the changing demographic and economic landscape in Africa, his thoughts on AI, and his desire to create a value chain of funding with blended capital that goes beyond just equity.

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Meet Jon Levin, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, economics professor, and eternal optimist. Hear his thoughts on the business world, innovation in emerging economies, the role of big tech, and how the GSB is preparing students to meet the challenges of the global economy — from climate change to inequality.

Jon Levin grew up in an academic family, but he never imagined he’d be leading one of the most prestigious business schools in the country. An economics professor by training with degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and MIT, he became dean of the Graduate School of Business in 2016. From this unique vantage point and with his researcher mindset, he believes that businesses have both a significant opportunity to develop and deploy technology to improve people's lives as well as a responsibility to mitigate its potential harm.

“If you look at the history of the last 150 years, it's the most extraordinary period in human history with standards of living doubling every 30 years, every generation,” Levin explains. “Today you look at the pace of change in innovation and it's happening everywhere in the world. The opportunity for businesses, for business leaders, to help use that technology in ways that will continue to double and increase people's standards of living is extraordinary.”

Levin also believes that emerging economies with digital infrastructures in place have opportunities to leapfrog the developed world by going straight to the consumers and their cell phones without having to overcome existing institutions and infrastructure. Levin says, “If you think about areas like finance or education, you don't have all of the legacy businesses in emerging markets, and so there’s an opportunity to go in and provide services to people that just go straight to digital.”

It's no surprise that Dean Levin is a huge proponent of getting an MBA based on his fundamental belief that business can be a force for good in the world and the school’s mission to instill students with a broader sense of responsibility to society beyond just doing well in their careers. “An MBA program is just the most amazing thing to do because you get all these different skills that enable you to be successful in many things,” says Levin says. “It's like having 20 jobs in two years, you get to see what it would be like to be an operator, an entrepreneur, an investor, to work in a nonprofit, to go into a social venture, to work on energy, real estate, every industry you see all of that.”

Listen to Dean Levin’s perspectives on the future of business and business education, both on the Stanford campus and around the world with programs like Stanford Seed.

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Meet Aditi Shrivastava, Cofounder and CEO of digital entertainment company Pocket Aces, and learn how the company identified investors to support them on their journey to entertain hundreds of millions of Indians in a rapidly shifting media landscape. 

Early on in 2013, Pocket Aces identified a huge gap in the market: content specifically designed for India’s youth, where they wanted to consume it—on a smartphone. Fast forward to 2021, and the company is now one of the country’s largest mobile content producers and distributors, with popular media brands FilterCopy and Dice Media, shows like Operation MBBS, and partnerships with the likes of Netflix and Facebook. How did Aditi and her cofounders build such a successful digital entertainment company, so quickly?

It wasn’t easy—Pocket Aces was raising capital where capital hadn't been raised before, and some investors either didn't understand the opportunity or were not confident that the supporting ecosystem would get there. 

In this episode, learn how Aditi and her cofounders found the right partners to grow the company, from their first angel investor to seed, Series A, bridge financing and Series B rounds. You’ll also hear from a few investors about how they assessed this opportunity, including Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Venture Partners, and Pranav Pai of 3one4 Capital.

Resources:

Pocket Aces: https://pocketaces.in/ 

3one4capital: https://3one4capital.com/

Nexus Venture Partners: https://nexusvp.com/

Stanford Seed: https://seed.stanford.edu

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on coaching, featuring Laurie Fuller, a certified executive coach, who believes entrepreneurs can benefit from having a collaborator, connector, and cheerleader by their side. Fuller provides practical tips on what to look for in a coach plus tried-and-true techniques she uses to help her clients transform themselves, their teams, and their companies.

Entrepreneurs are almost always on a quest to improve. But improvement can be ridiculously hard to accomplish on your own. That’s when an experienced coach can step in to help you focus on what’s most important, strengthen your teams, and transform as a leader. Laurie Fuller does all that … and more, sharing her insights and tried-and-true techniques to help entrepreneurs tackle their most difficult challenges. 

After a successful career in the private sector, Laurie Fuller channeled all her experience, passion, and curiosity into coaching. Today she’s a certified executive coach with Stanford Seed based in Nairobi, Kenya, a venture investor, and mentor to founders and CEOs across multiple continents. 

Fuller believes that being a sounding board is a critical part of coaching, whether her clients are talking about strategy, people, management issues, strategic HR, or just being lonely at the top. “This time that I have with my client is a way to reflect, remove ourselves from the business, and try to see the forest from the trees. Often as a leader, we get pulled into the urgent and we don't have time for the important,” she says.

Questions to Ask When Considering a Coach

1. Do they have the right credentials? “It’s easy to write ‘coach’ on a plaque, put it on the door, and open for business,” Fuller warns.
2. Is it the right fit? Fuller recommends having a trial period and trusting your gut. “If it’s not working, you should politely move on,” she advises.
3. Is the timing right? “If there's a lot going on in your life, personally or professionally, it just may not be a good time. Coaching takes a lot of mental energy and you want to be present,” she says.
4. Are you willing to do what it takes? Fuller says that coaching also requires a lot of the “coachee,” so before you commit, make sure you’re willing to commit.

More Masterclass Takeaways 

Beware of the evil letter I.  Fuller often stops clients when they say “I” and asks: “Do you really mean ‘I’ or do you mean ‘we’? Remember, it’s not just about you, it’s about your business.”

Coaches and therapists are very different. There are limits to what a coach can accomplish. “I'm not trained as a therapist. I'm trained as a coach. I'm really focused on work, work behaviors, and how you present yourselves to others at work, in a work situation,” Fuller explains.

Teams need coaching. If you want high-performing teams, you need to give them coaching, too.

Delegate the things that drain you. Fuller uses the term “emotional runway” to get entrepreneurs to think about what parts of the business excite them so they can focus and add more value.

Learn to say no. You’ve earned the right. Fuller says, “We need more entrepreneurs to really have that confidence to say, ‘This doesn't serve me anymore.’”

It always takes longer than you think. Fuller encourages her clients to reflect on the progress they’ve made, not the end goal. “It always takes longer than you think to make change,” she says.

Listen to Fuller’s insights, advice, and strategies for how to find a coach and make the most of the coaching experience.

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To submit a story for our episode on corruption, send a voice memo to Stanford Seed via WhatsApp at +1(650) 206-3055.

Women represent about 50% of the global population yet own only ⅓ of the world’s businesses and still get paid 37% less than men. Georgette Barnes, a Ghanian entrepreneur, and Stanford professors Dr. Deborah Gruenfeld and Margaret Neale share experiences, advice, and strategies for navigating the workforce as a woman — from power dynamics and negotiations to gender expectations and harassment.

The challenges women face working in a man’s world keep stacking up, even as female entrepreneurs like Georgette Barnes learn how to overcome them. As a supplier of mining support services in West Africa, Barnes faced resistance from her very first interview, “I said nobody wants to give me opportunities. Nobody wants to give me the experience that you are asking for.”

Dr. Deborah Gruenfeld is not surprised. She has been researching women and power at Stanford Graduate School of Business and says Barnes’ experience reflects a broader trend of who gets opportunities and why. Gruenfeld says “We tend to think a leader looks like a man. And so it's very easy to see leadership potential in a man because a man looks like what we expect to see. But a woman doesn't actually look to us like what we think a leader is supposed to look like. So, that's a way in which women are sometimes held back and not chosen first for leadership roles.”

Gender expectations also impact the way women negotiate, according to Professor Margaret Neale. Her research shows that women negotiating face more challenges than their male counterparts because there is a societal expectation about how women should be in society. And to make matters worse, Neale says “women have systematically lower expectations for what they can achieve in negotiations than their male counterparts.”

Barnes experienced this self-doubt when she explored the idea of starting her own business. “I knew I wanted to set up my own company,” Barnes reflected, “but I didn't think I could do it. And I didn't think that a young African Ghanaian woman should have that dream.”

Barnes prevailed but Dr. Gruenfeld suggests women need to develop their personal power to “deal with the narrative in your head…to make sure that you take charge of how you interpret the situation that you’re in.”

Listen to Barnes’ firsthand experience on the stereotypes and obstacles she contends with every day and hear Gruenfeld’s and Neale’s advice on how women — and men — can shift the paradigm for themselves and future generations.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on going global – a guide for expanding your business beyond borders. Steve Ciesinski, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in entrepreneurship, walks you through the pitfalls and possibilities of making the move from local venture to global enterprise.

It goes without saying that having an outstanding product or service is key to business success. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when you want to expand your business – regionally and/or globally. According to Steve Ciesinski, scaling introduces additional challenges, including cultural and regulatory differences, economic and political risks, language barriers, supply chain struggles, and more. However, he believes that entrepreneurs who plan carefully and execute flawlessly can create value on a global scale.

Steve Ciesinski has had plenty of experience advising entrepreneurs on global expansion. He’s a Stanford GSB lecturer in entrepreneurship, past president of SRI International and other Silicon Valley firms, and an investor and board member of growth-oriented tech companies and mission-based organizations. 

Three Key Takeaways for Going Global:

Your product market fit might not fit in a different market

“Things are very, very different and very subtle sometimes as you get into a marketplace. You have to be very agile. You have to be super flexible.”

Find the right person for the right place

“If you're going to go to another country and you're not going to be there personally as the founder, then who's going to run that country for you? You have to have somebody there that you completely, 100 percent trust, because things will go wrong.”

Regulatory compliance is a tricky business

You have to be very, very careful. You have a choice. When you have a new thing, do you try to cooperate with the government? How long will that government be in place? You have some choices early on as to what you do in whatever country. You may be successful in Nigeria, but in Kenya, or if you were trying to go across the pond to Mexico, you may not be so successful with your product.”

Listen to Steve Ciesinski’s advice on what to keep in mind when entering new markets so you can scale with less friction and more success.

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Welcome back to Grit & Growth from Stanford Graduate School of Business. In Season 4, you’ll hear tales of entrepreneurial trials and triumphs, obstacles and opportunities, and, of course, plenty of grit and growth. Plus, we share insights from Stanford faculty and global experts on how to avoid the pitfalls of growth and achieve success.

We’ll talk to entrepreneurs from Africa and South Asia and hear their impressive stories of business growth despite a host of challenges, including poor infrastructure, unpredictable regulations, and limited access to finance. This season, we explore what it takes to expand your business across multiple countries, revisit the 4 Ps of marketing, and tackle the difficulties of both scaling and downsizing your workforce.

Season 4 is coming soon. Tune in!

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on crisis management and mindset, featuring Baba Shiv, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor of Marketing. From mental to physical preparation, Baba provides insights on cultivating an innovative mindset to help you survive and thrive in challenging times.

Professor Shiv is an expert in neuroeconomics and decision making. He works with entrepreneurs—from Silicon Valley to emerging markets—on the practice of innovation and how to build a risk-tolerant mindset. Which he believes is especially important in times of crisis.

Baba explains that there are two types of mindsets. Type one is a fear of failure or risk-averse mindset. Type two is a fear of missing out on opportunities or risk-tolerant mindset. In times of crisis or stress, it’s harder to switch between the two if you haven’t prepared.

“What the rational brain is good at is simply rational...listing what the emotional brain has already decided to do, which means if you're stuck in a risk-averse mindset, the rational brain will come in and say, these are the reasons why you have to be risk-averse. These are the reasons why you should not innovate, etc. Whereas if you're in a type two mindset, the rational brain will come in and say, here are the reasons why you should take some chances.”

And Baba believes that taking chances, especially in times of crisis when your competitors aren’t, is how leaders and companies can succeed. Baba has seen firsthand that entrepreneurs from emerging economies are particularly innovative, “they’re facing constraints all the time and as a result are more resourceful, not in spite of their situations, but because of them.”

Top Six Masterclass Takeaways

1. Sleep. Without it, you’re more likely to wake up feeling risk-averse...the antithesis to innovation.

2. Calm your mind and the rest will follow -- develop a meditation, yoga, or tai chi practice to make your breath and brain more resilient to stress.

3. Pay attention to your heart—actually your heart rate variability—so you know if it’s a good time to make an important decision.

4. Innovation = creativity multiplied by execution divided by constraints. Don’t forget to think about your constraints in the design process.

5. Focus on building your collaborative advantage (not just competitive advantage) by developing meaningful connections with suppliers, customers, partners, even competitors. You’ll make more progress with relationships based on trust than just transactions.

6. Instill an innovative mindset throughout your company — survival is going to come from teamwork.

Listen to Baba’s insights, advice, and strategies for developing an innovative, risk-tolerant mindset and how working together can help leaders and their teams handle and overcome crises.

Resources

• Learn more about Professor Baba Shiv
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
• Stanford Seed

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Meet Grace Macharia, a speech and language therapist and founder of SLT Support in Nairobi, Kenya. She created a social enterprise with a mission to support not only her patients, but also the profession of speech therapy in Kenya as a whole. 

“In 2011 there were about five speech therapists in Kenya, and all of them were trained out of the country. Can you imagine only five speech therapists for a population of 21 million?!” she recounts. When Macharia eventually found her true career calling in speech therapy, she realized that she couldn’t deliver the kind of impact she wanted without the help of others. So, she created a business, got the training she needed to formalize her business structure and organization, and began lobbying policy makers to give the profession the recognition and support it deserved.

Not everyone is born an entrepreneur. Grace Macharia certainly didn’t think of herself that way. But she had the persistence of an entrepreneur and a deep concern for her patients, many of whom needed more than just speech therapy services. Today her company treats patients, trains new therapists, and offers a multidisciplinary, holistic approach to care that is yielding better outcomes. And she’s created an association of speech and language therapists in Kenya to support each other and lobby for reform.

Of course, Macharia is still pushing for more. Speech therapy, she says, “is a profession that still needs a lot of attention. A lot of the people who need our services actually don't get it. When we have access to all this in every county, not just in Nairobi, not in just the cities in Kenya, but in every county, and not just in Kenya, East Africa, that would be a success and a dream come true.”

Hear how Macharia got the entrepreneurial training she needed to run a business and promote her profession so that other therapists and patients succeed.

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Meet Elo Umeh, Managing Director and CEO of Terragon Group, a Nigerian digital marketing and data insights company, and Andreata Muforo and Ido Sum from TLcom Capital, and learn how to make the most of your fundraising efforts to successfully grow your business in Africa.

Elo never intended to formally raise money—he initially relied on friends and family to launch Terragon. But as the business grew, so did his vision, and he needed to find an investor that understood the enormous opportunity in a rapidly growing sector. Since 2016, he’s led Terragon through two funding rounds: a $5 million series A round and a bridge round of $4 million. Now a leader in Africa’s data and marketing technology space, Terragon is currently raising another $16 million for its Series B. 

Elo shares his fundraising journey, explaining that it’s not just about the money, but who provides the capital is also key. He ended up working with Andreata Muforo and Ido Sum from TLcom, a venture capital firm with experience investing in tech-enabled businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa. Their relationship demonstrates how the right investors can help your business grow and actually enhance—not dampen—the quality of your decisions as a CEO.

Andreata and Ido of TLcom also share what they look for in a company and provide tips for how you can approach your next fundraising round.

Listen to Elo’s journey and Andreata and Ido’s insights to learn how to maximize the value of your firm’s next fundraising round.

Resources:

Terragon Group: https://terragongroup.com/ 

TLcom Capital: https://tlcomcapital.com/ 

Stanford Seed: http://stanfordseed.co/Grit

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Meet Nita Bhagat, a hotelier turned owner of Village Imaging, a radiology practice in Botswana. Hear how her father’s struggle with cancer led her business in yet another new direction, one that now helps everyone in her country to get better, closer, faster health care.

Nita Bhagat and her cardiologist husband came to Botswana from Zimbabwe in 2003 as economic refugees. With her life and career uprooted, she worked as a receptionist in her husband’s medical clinic. Bhagat got an immediate education in Botswana’s health care system, which uniquely provides free care to all citizens. She learned that since there were no MRI machines in the country, the government was forced to send (and pay for) patients to go to South Africa to get the care they needed. Bhagat seized the opportunity and opened the first MRI scanning facility in her new home.

Entrepreneurs often create new business opportunities when faced with a personal need or crisis. For Bhagat it was her father’s cancer diagnosis. Although Bhagat’s father could afford the best treatment in Botswana, it wasn't necessarily available with only one radiation oncology center in the entire country. “Every time he was having treatment, he kept saying to me, ‘Why aren’t you doing this?’” she remembers. Bhagat eventually took her father’s advice to open a radiation oncology center based in the community, not a hospital, so patients can get back home sooner and feel better psychologically. 

Hear how Bhagat’s caring heart and business mind are driving her business in new directions to meet the needs of Botswanans and her vision to bring life-saving treatments to neighboring countries in Africa.

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Do you have a strategy? Or do you just have a plan? Understanding the difference and how to define and execute on both is essential to transforming your business. Abhishek Rungta, founder and CEO of INT, realized he had been running his business without a strategy for far too long. Hear his journey and gain strategic insights from Jesper Sorensen, professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, on why strategy is all about managing uncertainty.

Abhishek Rungta started his IT business in 1997 while he was still in college. But 10 years in, he faced a familiar predicament for founders. “We didn’t have any focus. Anyone who sent us an email was a customer,” he recalls. He admits that most of his business decisions lacked real strategy and were instead led “by gut feeling, not by real research or discussion within the organization.” By 2008, he was losing customers and employees because there was nothing that truly differentiated his company from the competition.

To grow his business he needed to be more than a low-cost provider — he needed a strategy to truly differentiate his business. “The way I look at it now is, what can I do which my competition will find extremely difficult to replicate?” Rungta explains.

According to Professor Sorensen, most organizations associate strategy with planning and tend to focus more on logistics (the planning) than on the logic of the underlying theory or strategy.  “Strategy is mostly about the things that you can't control. So it's about what customers are going to want. What are your competitors going to do? Those are all things that you don't have any control over, so strategy is about managing all this uncertainty,” he says.

Sorensen explains that strategy is fundamentally about making an argument and then coming up with assumptions that support it. And you need to include assumptions about how uncertainty is going to resolve itself so you can accomplish your goals.

While it certainly didn’t happen overnight, Rungta eventually constructed a more complete strategic argument based on clear assumptions, namely the fact that clients valued speed over price and that regulated industries were ripe for targeting. And then he let those assumptions drive action.

Sorensen reminds entrepreneurs that there’s no real way to future-proof your strategy. “I don't think there's any kind of pill you can take that will guarantee your success against all the changes that might happen in the future,” he says. “But what you can do is you can say, okay, when a change comes in, I can then think about, well, does this impact the logic of my strategy or not?”

Listen to Rungta’s strategic pivot and leadership journey for what he calls his “25-year-old startup.” And get advice from Professor Sorensen on how to construct your own strategy and examine the assumptions that matter most.

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Starting a business and growing it are challenging enough. But expanding globally, across the entire African continent with 54 very different countries,  increases the difficulty exponentially. That’s what Taha Jiwaji, CEO and founder of Beem, is experiencing first hand. Hear what it takes to create a Pan-African business and gain strategic insights on going global from Steve Ciesinski, who teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

After attending college in the United States and working as a consultant in Los Angeles, Taha Jiwaji left his safe corporate job and moved back to his home of Tanzania to become an entrepreneur. He had no idea what he was in for. But 20-plus years later, he’s built Beem, a Pan-African cloud computing platform that helps businesses create lasting relationships with their customers through their mobile phones. Beem is currently in 30-plus countries … and growing. On a continent where only 36 percent of the population has broadband internet, reaching customers on their phones through SMS is a huge win. And as connectivity across Africa increases, the opportunities for Beem and their customers expand, too.

“You know, there's 54 different countries on the continent. Each one is different in terms of language, policies, etc. So you need to spend time in them, on the ground, to really learn about them,” Jiwaji explains.

Steve Ciesinski is both a Stanford GSB lecturer in entrepreneurship and past president of SRI International and other Silicon Valley firms. As an investor and board member of growth-oriented tech companies and mission-based organizations, he’s had plenty of experience advising entrepreneurs on global expansion.

What's the country like? What's the culture in the country? How do they do business? These are the very first questions you need to ask, according to Ciesinski. Then you need the right people. “You need to have somebody very, very close who's been with your company, understands your culture  — and is going to move there. And then find somebody there who eventually can become the general manager of that business because you're expecting that business to grow,” he advises.

Jiwaji did just that, focusing on building relationships, on the ground, in person, getting customers and partners to sign up. When it comes to giving advice to other entrepreneurs, Jiwaji suggests “grit and persistence. Things take a long time, government regulation, people move very slowly across these markets. And sometimes it takes years for a relationship to finally come to fruition.”

Get more insights and advice on going global from Jiwaji and Ciesinski, including how to create differentiation, establish your value proposition, handle regulations, and, most important, find and retain global talent to help you expand.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on cross-cultural dynamics with Michele Gelfand, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor in organizational behavior. Gain new insights and strategies for understanding your company’s culture – from tight to loose – and how you can use that knowledge to build cultural intelligence in your organization, navigate interactions, enhance company-wide innovation, and drive business growth. 

Companies and countries can be a lot like people. Some are tight. Others are loose. Neither is inherently good or bad, according to Michele Gelfand, a leading expert on the impact of organizational culture and the best-selling author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. 

Gelfand says this important and often invisible force can drive behavior and ultimately performance – which is why she finds the subject so fascinating and why she believes entrepreneurs should pay attention to culture as they build their leadership and business.

Key Takeaways 

Culture matters

“If we don't understand culture, we're putting ourselves and our businesses at risk. All cultures have rules, and they're really one of our best inventions because they help us predict each other's behavior and coordinate. They're the glue that keeps us together.”

Tight vs. Loose

“Tight cultures have strict rules and very reliable punishments for when you deviate from rules. They restrict the range of behavior that's permissible in any context. Loose cultures have weaker rules, their wider range of behavior that's permissible.”

Strive for flexible tightness

“Loose cultures are more creative, but they don't necessarily scale up. Tighter cultures are better able to implement and scale up, but they're not as good at coming up with these really novel ideas. And so the big trick here is: How do you bring together both of these elements?”

Watch out for resistance to cultural change

“Try to balance accountability and empowerment, but pay close attention to pushback. Extreme change can be very threatening for people's sense of control, predictability, and order that's really needed in these contexts. And what we know is that we need to manage these sources of resistance.”

 Listen to Michele Gelfand’s advice to entrepreneurs for creating culturally ambidextrous organizations and learn more about her future research. Don’t forget to take Gelfand’s quiz for determining where you and your team fall on the tight/loose spectrum.

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Meet Delia Stirling, commercial director of Brown’s Food Co. in Nairobi. She and her team are on a mission to spark consumer demand for foods made from indigenous Kenyan crops. Hear how their efforts are also helping small family farms and educating consumers about the environmental, economic, and taste benefits of eating locally grown food.

Delia Stirling has always been a foodie and entrepreneur. As a little girl, she sold ice cream at craft fairs, using a sleeping bag for insulation. And her family was the same, taking two cows and a little extra milk to make cheese, and then growing that company to become the largest cheese processor in the region. When Stirling returned from studying and selling real estate in the United States, she took over her parents' company and was hungry to make a difference. 

Creativity has been key to the company’s growth, and Stirling says, “It’s my superpower, and believing in the weird things I’m doing.” That creativity impacts everything from identifying ingredients and creating delicious, nutritious foods to solving challenges all along the value chain — from farmers to consumers. One of her key learning points was seeing her company as part of that value chain, rather than separate from it. This resulted in new ways of thinking. She explains, “As a food processor, we've started to look at ourselves differently, as a catalyst to not only be able to influence what the consumer's eating, and then be able to influence what the farmers are growing.”

Stirling encourages entrepreneurs to believe in themselves and their ideas. “Sometimes you'll self-doubt that you think you're a little crazy. But those gut instincts and those ideas are really important. It's always good to get advice, but it's also getting it and putting it in context of what you know in your background,” she advises. 

Hear how Stirling is making an impact on farmers, consumers, and climate change — one crop and bite at a time.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on growth mindset and psychological safety and how they can empower employees to speak up, fail fast, and fail smart — with accountability but not retribution. Sarah Soule, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor in organizational behavior, has tips and tricks for leaders to help build a culture that encourages healthy debate and out-of-the-box thinking.

Failure happens … whether you like it or not.  Yet, almost every entrepreneur would agree that learning the right way to fail is what enables businesses to succeed. But how do you create an environment where people aren’t afraid to fail? According to Professor Soule, it all starts with building an environment of psychological safety: a climate where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns and speaking up when needed without being judged or viewed negatively by the leaders when they do.

Soule encourages leaders to remember that all humans make mistakes. And in some types of work, failure is actually part of the process. However, failure is not a luxury every organization has — especially in health care — so she recommends simulating failure instead. The key, she explains, is that when we make mistakes, we learn from them and don’t hide them. Otherwise,  they’re likely to snowball into bigger mistakes. “One of the elements of psychological safety is that people on a team don't hide their mistakes. They also feel comfortable and safe to challenge their superiors, to challenge their colleagues, when they see something is about to go amiss,” she says.

5 Masterclass Takeaways 

Not all mistakes are the same.

Soule encourages everyone to “distinguish between mistakes that are made that should have been preventable — because somebody has been inattentive or has been sloppy or has just been going rogue — versus smart failure.”

Try to learn from failure. 

“When and if we do fail or fall short of what we hoped, we can learn from it. That can only happen if the team feels like it is okay to bring forward these possibilities without you judging them or firing them because they're challenging you. It’s not who failed. No blaming. But why did we fail? And what can we learn from that?” she says.

Walk the walk. Talk the talk.

Soule advises leaders to align their actions and values. “I think one of the things that's very important, particularly for a new leader in an established organization, is to come in right away and express what the values and expectations of the culture are going to be, and then to continually repeat them, and demonstrate that it’s what the leader believes.”

Strike a balance between acceptance and accountability. 

Soule says, “Leaders actually really need to distinguish between those two and not just celebrate all failure. There's got to be some accountability, right? When we have made mistakes that should have been preventable, we do need to hold people accountable for that.”

Pre-mortems can be a safe way to simulate failure.

“Pre-mortems are a structured but simple way to bring the whole team together to pretend that something has failed massively,” Soule explains. “Think very hard about what were the reasons for this failure and then brainstorm ways that those reasons could be averted as a way to prevent the failure from happening.”

Listen to Sarah Soule’s evidence, advice, and strategies for how to leverage psychological safety to increase team performance, productivity, and innovation by failing in the right way.

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Meet Sriram Gopal, founder and CEO of Future Farms, a hydroponics company on a mission to deliver clean, healthy food to all Indians. With a trillion dollar market potential and a vision to make clean food a fundamental right, not a privilege, Sriram is growing his company for a greater good.

Sriram always wanted to be an entrepreneur because his father was one, too. Motivated by his role model, Sriram set out to build a business that would also create an impact. Hydroponic farming seemed to be a perfect solution, saving 90% more water than traditional farming and protecting people from pesticides, bio toxicity, and heavy metal contaminants. 

“The main reason why we do this is because in India there are no mechanisms to check where the food comes from and it can be very, very, contaminated. People can choose organic food, but they're paying like three times more. What it actually means is only people who can afford to pay three times more, can actually have access to clean food. And to me that just feels wrong because I think clean food is not a privilege. If anything, it should be a fundamental right.”

Future Farms didn’t become the largest hydroponic and controlled-environment agriculture technology company in India overnight. Like most startups, it happened one small step at a time — from building small hobby kits with his father to creating rooftop farms and quarter acre commercial farms. Sriram has set his sights beyond India, expanding his greenhouses and technology to Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, and Singapore…so far.

 “I want to grow a company that is global and that creates a lot of good. And if our technology works in India, I'm pretty sure it will work in all the other parts of the world where people are still struggling.”

Listen to Sriram’s mini profile to learn how doing the right thing for people can be the right thing for your  business, too.

To participate in Grit & Growth’s paid focus group, visit http://stanfordseed.co/podcastsurvey

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Corruption is an unfortunate fact of business life. How can you remain ethical and still survive when it seems that everyone else is playing the game? Soji Apampa is one entrepreneur who believes there are ways to strategically navigate a corrupt system. Hear how his NGO in Nigeria is helping entrepreneurs to keep their hands clean. And listen to true stories from business owners across Africa and South Asia about the real cost of corruption on lives and livelihoods.

When it comes to dealing with corruption, you are definitely not alone. Which is a key reason why Soji Apampa created an NGO dedicated to the issue. In 1995 the Integrity Organization was born and later the Convention on Business Integrity for the sole purpose of dealing with the issue of corruption in Nigeria. The organization’s early goal was simple according to Apampa: “We would like to be that matchstick that starts the bush fire. And even if the matchstick gets extinguished, so long as the fire spreads, we will have achieved something.” 

Twenty-five years later, they’ve achieved far more, studying corruption and explaining how it actually operates to help others avoid it — in Nigeria and beyond. “The reasons why people fall prey is, number one, they don't know the rules. So, you don't know the rules, you do the wrong thing, they just charge you. If you do the right thing in the first place, you can avoid those petty charges to start with,” Apampa suggests.

Apampa encourages people to do the right thing from the start to avoid the “slippery slope” of corruption. “For many wise organizations, they just bite the bullet from the start and do the right thing, and they can avoid the bulk of it. But if you pay once, they keep coming. And imagine you do that with four or five agencies, then you're totally at their mercy,” he says.

Unfortunately, the only way many small businesses can avoid corruption is to stay small and under the radar, but this ends up hampering their growth. So, one of Apampa’s goals is to help educate people on how to be ethical within an unethical environment. Leadership, he believes, is the best place to start.

“If you're trying to be ethical as a small business, it starts from the posture of the leader,” Apampa explains. “Everyone takes a cue from there. It's not enough for you as the chief executive to be a moral person or an ethical person if you cannot put in the systems for compliance to ensure that even those who want to act immorally or unethically cannot.”

Apampa believes there can be upsides to operating ethically within a corrupt system. “The whole anti-corruption thing is not always all bad, because if you are trying to survive by doing it ethically, you have to be more innovative than those who are willing to do the bad things.”

Listen to Apampa’s advice on how to develop strategies and structures for avoiding or navigating corruption in your business environment.

This episode is based on research and materials developed by Ken Shotts and Neil Malhotra. To learn more about regulation, corruption, and leading with values, check out these resources, featuring the two of them:

• Are You an Ethical Leader? | Stanford GSB (Article)
• Leading with Values - Class Takeaways | Stanford GSB (Video)
• Leadership and Ethics: How to Communicate Your Core Values | Think Fast Talk Smart (Podcast)
• Psaltry International Ltd: Challenges Refining Cassava Starch in Rural Nigeria | Ken Shotts, Geoffrey Otieno (Case Study)

Thank you to the voice actors who brought this episode to life: Sirish Dhurjety, Malick Diallo, Kassahun Yimer Kebede, Wangui Wambugu

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What kind of people and culture do you want in your company? How will you engage with employees and lead effectively? And how do you figure all that out while growing revenues? Human resources are rarely the first priority of leaders, but they should be. Just ask Sachin Dhanani, co-founder of Kenyan-based Danco Capital, and his HR adviser Claudia Salvischiani.

Leadership styles are as varied as entrepreneurs. And they certainly change over time as companies grow. But the very best leaders put their people first, create meaningful ways to engage, get out of the way so others can step in, and establish a culture where values are reinforced—day in and day out. That’s what Sachin Dhanani learned firsthand (sometimes with difficulty), thanks to expert HR help from Claudia Salvischiani

Dhanani clearly had a lot on his plate, growing his manufacturing company from four to 240 employees in seven years. And HR issues always moved to the back burner as a startup. Salvischiani helped Dhanani evolve as a leader, developing different qualities to meet the “grown-up” company he was running.

Salvischiani explains that lack of employee engagement is often at the top of a leader’s concerns. But she goes on, “People behave in the way they're being managed. I'm absolutely convinced about this.” She believes communication is essential for engagement, explaining your strategy, your goals, and how people can contribute. Creating effective meeting structures, she says, “can have a really transformative impact on how people feel within an organization.”

Dhanani put this advice into practice and saw immediate benefits. “So every year we'll have a strategy meeting with about 15 key people within the organization. Although as a leader, you know where you want to go, I think it's important for them to feel as if they contributed to that strategy. And when they do that, then the buy-in is so much greater,” he explains. 

For companies experiencing hyper growth, culture is often neglected, according to Salvischiani. She continues, “There is basically no link between day-to-day operations and values. So, they have these values, but they haven't thought about how to implement those values.”

Salvischiani understands how hard it is for CEOs to shift their roles and move into unknown territory. Implementing objectives and key results (OKRs) as part of a management feedback process can help. As she explains, “CEOs don't let go because they're comfortable in the operational work.” Dhanani now recognizes that “delegation is an artwork. It's a form of leadership. It’s a muscle that we really need to exercise and we need to learn. And what's important is that the person that we're delegating to is not going to do it in the same way that we are, but if we can measure how they do it, then it enables us to build confidence. And I think that's key.”

Hear how Dhanani altered his leadership as his company grew and get practical advice from Claudia Salvischiani on the value of implementing key HR practices and strategies to create the culture you want and the performance you need. 

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Entrepreneurs aren’t meant to solve all their business problems alone, but all too often they try. Kunaal Rach, CEO of Healthy U, was no exception … until he met Laurie Fuller, a certified business coach, who transformed his leadership—and his business. Hear from both coach and coachee on how coaching can help provide the strategic, moral, and emotional support every entrepreneur needs.

Kunaal Rach left Kenya at the age of 13 to attend boarding school in England and says he really had no intention of returning. But one emotional call from his mother—the founder of Healthy U—changed everything. He quit his job in finance the next day and returned to Kenya in 2014 to help her run the family business, a retail and distribution chain for health and wellness. 

Fast forward to 2019 when Rach became the CEO, with big new plans to grow and scale the business. Looking for a quick fix, he turned to a coach to provide the structure he felt was lacking in the organization. “I always thought that a coach would be there just to help me with my business and that was it. I thought that they would come in and, with their expertise, they would tell me this is what's wrong with your business and let's implement and let's execute and let's move on,” he remembers.

Laurie Fuller dispels myths like this from the get-go. As a certified executive coach with Stanford Seed based in Nairobi, Kenya, and a mentor to founders and CEOs across multiple continents from all kinds of industries, she immediately tells her clients that she’s a coach, not a consultant who is going to do the work for them. “A coach is really a collaborator, a connector, a cheerleader, and really focused on being able to support you. But we're not actually producing those deliverables that a consultant would,” she explains.

According to Fuller, entrepreneurs often blame their teams for their business problems instead of looking inward. But she advises them to “hold the mirror up to yourself first. Let’s understand what we can do differently. Then we can go to others and ask them to do the same.” When Rach held up that mirror, he didn’t like what he saw. And that became the starting point for his coaching journey.

Trying to fill his mom’s very large shoes led to self-doubt. But having Fuller in his corner gave Rach the confidence to keep going. “She kept me honest, she kept me on the path, and she kept telling me to keep persevering and that change is tough at the beginning, messy in the middle, but beautiful at the end. You just have to keep going, but you'll get there eventually,” Rach recalls.

Fuller explains that coaching isn’t a solo endeavor or a quick fix. It’s a long-term journey that gains strength with the involvement of the entire team. She says, “Many of my clients, when they go through this journey, they understand that being a leader isn't how much they've accomplished, but it's who they have become as a person. And that's the change in mindset that moves things.”

Listen to Rach and Fuller describe how coaching can be transformative for both the entrepreneurs and the coaches who help them succeed.

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Meet Naomi Kipkorir and Annette Kimitei, the mother-daughter team leading Senaca East Africa, and Peter Francis, lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and hear about finding success and navigating succession in a family run business.

Family dynamics can be challenging, not to mention, emotional. But when you add in a business, things can get even more complicated. Especially when the entire family is involved. That’s the story behind Senaca EA, a private security company headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. Founded by Naomi’s husband, an ex-policeman, the business started in 2002 as a side hustle and now it’s a full-time, all-in-the-family-of five affair.

After a failed merger with a European company, the family literally came together to pull their company back from the brink. Thinking about family succession came next. And as Annette learned, “succession is not one event, it’s a process.” Formalizing corporate governance is key to that process, which for Senaca begins with introducing advisory board members that have skill sets the business is missing, and eventually independent directors.

Peter Francis fully supports that plan. And he knows from experience; his family run business has been going for six generations. Peter uses that firsthand knowledge to teach a class called The Yin and Yang of Family Business Transition at Stanford. Because issues that arise in a family business can often turn emotional, Peter advises seeking outside expertise, and relying on education, transparency, and communication to handle tough issues.

“If you're having a conversation about the business at home you might say, "you know what, we're home, we should be wearing our family hat, not our business hat". And then communication... I don't mean just communicating, but also learning how to communicate. That is a muscle that we can strengthen in the family.”

Listen to Naomi and Annette’s family story and Peter’s business insights to help think about your own company’s succession and governance plans.

Links:

Senaca East Africa: https://senacaworld.com

Annette Kimitei: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annette-kimitei-70594249/?originalSubdomain=ke

Peter Francis: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/peter-t-francis

Stanford Seed: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/seed

Resources:

Poza, E. & Daugherty, M. (2014). Family Business, 4th Edition. Mason, OH: South-Western Centage Learning,

Gersick, K., Davis, J., Hampton, M. & Lansberg, I. (1999). Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press

Ward, J. L. (2004), Perpetuating the Family Business: 50 Lessons Learned from Long-Lasting Successful Families in Business, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan

Montemerlo, D. & Ward, J. (2011). The Family Constitution: Agreements to Secure and Perpetuate Your Family and Your Business. Family Business Leadership Series, No. 20, Marietta, GA: Family Enterprise Publishers

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Creating a startup is challenging enough. So, when you want that startup to also address social problems, the pressure on entrepreneurs to succeed and scale can be even more intense. Meet Sadaf Rehman of codeschool.pk in Pakistan and Sarika Kulkarni Pathak of Cresa GreenTech in India, and hear how these two women entrepreneurs are struggling and striving to make the world a better place.

Many of the challenges faced by social entrepreneurs are no different than those of for-profit startups. Understanding who your customers are, the problems they face, and how you’re going to solve them — known as your value proposition — remain the same. But when you set out to improve children’s literacy and women’s health, the stakes are higher.

For Sadaf Rehman, the failing education system in Pakistan drove her to create a coding school to prepare kids for the modern job force. Rehman believes that “the education system has to prepare children to think. We have to retool how and what we are teaching our kids and who is teaching our kids as well. And so what code school is trying to do is introduce a programming curriculum for young children at primary and secondary school.”

Rehman reflects on the tensions of scaling to create impact vs. revenue: “I don't think that as an entrepreneur or as a person, I would feel like I was successful if all I wanted to do is make money. If you want to scale really fast, an easy way to do that is to lower your revenue. But there are always these forces and tensions pulling you in different directions as an organization.”

Sarika Pathak’s master’s study and work with Johnson & Johnson led her to make a 100 percent chemical-free and biodegradable sanitary napkin which dissolves immediately in hot water. Pathak explains why she’s so passionate about her business: “According to a survey, around 23 percent of girls drop out of school just after starting their period, just because of unavailability of menstrual hygiene products. And 56 percent of girls face urinary tract infections due to unhygienic conditions in the washrooms and toilets. And because of the social and cultural taboo, people are not ready to talk about it. If they don't talk about it, how are these problems getting solved?” 

Her business idea has an environmental impact as well. “India has 12 billion sanitary napkins to take care of every year,” she explains “and it's very difficult to biodegrade any single sanitary napkin that takes 800 years to decompose. So, imagine the kind of waste that has been generated over the years.”

Listen to some of the obstacles Rehman and Pathak are facing — from targeting customers to managing supply chains — as they seek to build and scale their social enterprises.

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Meet Gaurav Khemani, CEO of Prestige Ice Creams based in Kolkata. Faced with COVID-19 shutdowns, a cyclone, supply chain pains, and more, Khemani believes personal and professional discipline will help make his entrepreneurial dreams come true. Hear about his  journey from a career at big retail companies to leading a small business that he hopes will soon become a billion-dollar company. 

Gaurav Khemani begins each day at 4 a.m., reading, writing, working out, and generally taking care of himself before heading into the office at 7 a.m. Those three hours are a strict routine and one of the keys to Khemani’s success as an entrepreneur. That discipline and commitment also extend to how he runs his business.

After studying and working outside of India for 14 years, Khemani got the entrepreneurial itch at 35. So, he returned home, bought his father-in-law’s ice cream company, and quickly learned the differences and difficulties of running a small to medium-size business. “In a lot of cases it's about day-to-day survival as well as cash flow management, whereas in larger businesses, a lot of these things you take for granted,” he says. “And typically, with an MBA you specialize in either finance or marketing, etc. Whereas when you're running a medium-size business, you're managing the entire business. And that's a different mindset altogether.”

On top of all the typical difficulties of running a business, Khemani also had to deal with the COVID-19 shutdown and one of the biggest cyclones in West Bengal that left him with a massive inventory of ice cream on the brink of melting. Khemani calls that time “a blessing in disguise,” giving him time to slow down, step back, and reassess his strategy. 

Khemani believes the secret to transforming his million-dollar ice cream company into a billion-dollar one comes down to discipline and execution. “We all talk about strategy, marketing, and the sexiness that comes with that,” he explains. But what’s most important to succeed, he says, is “the day-to-day operations, making sure the machines are running properly, the deliveries are getting done on time, good customer service, and product innovation.”  

Hear how Khemani plans to get Indians to eat more ice cream and his strategies for achieving sweet success.

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Meet Raj Prakash, cofounder of Zifo, a science informatics company in India. While growing revenues is on almost every entrepreneur’s mind, Prakash believes building a thriving culture should be too. Hear how creating a great place to work is helping his company achieve great results.

Zifo is one of the largest global pure play science informatics companies, with over 1,800 employees. And it counts many of the largest global bio-pharma companies among its customers. The company focuses on technology for collecting and analyzing data that has been instrumental in the development of medications and vaccines for global viruses and illnesses. But that’s more of the quantitative story. For Raj Prakash, thinking about the qualitative experience of his employees is essential to success. “We are a science-first, people-first company,” he explains.

Prakash has a broader definition of what it means to grow. “It's just not revenue,” he says. “ It is about opportunity to people, opportunity to explore self. It's doing something impactful. It's a people-driven mechanism that encourages persistence and tenacity to get results."

“There is a culture of playing to win. Every action is measured in terms of intent and intensity of action, not just on result. It's fun, it is tough, but winning it together, or playing it together, even losing it together, it's fun. We want to be a place which is highly valued as a great place to work.”

And it seems to be working. Zifo has been listed as one of the great places to work for seven consecutive years. 

Hear how Prakash is building a thriving culture while growing a company that leads to scientific breakthroughs.

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Every entrepreneur understands the critical importance of sales to business success. But often, in the early stages of growth, teams tend to focus on marketing without having a strategic plan or process for how to turn leads into sales. Yann Le Beux, co-founder of a research and design firm in Senegal, and Zia Yusuf, a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group and Stanford Seed consultant, share their experiences and strategies for building and strengthening your sales strategy.

Yann Le Beux’s company, YUX Design, focuses on creating user-centered designs that address the unique needs of African markets, helping their clients to bridge the gap between global tech and local context. But Le had his own gap to bridge — between marketing efforts and sales conversions. Zia Yusuf, who has taught at Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner School of Design, lent his expertise in innovation and design thinking to help Le Beux and his team realize that their marketing and sales strategies must be aligned with the needs of specific customer segments. “You don't sell to companies, you sell to human beings,” Yusuf advises. “You're selling to very large organizations, but they're not your client and it's not even the business unit that's your client. It's not even the head of that business unit. There could be actually two, three different roles – and understanding how to sell to those people and individuals was kind of a little bit of a breakthrough as well.”

Le Beux admits that his small company didn’t grow quickly because it was  constrained by talent issues. “But as soon as you start growing, you realize you have to feed all these people ready to work and you need to be much more consistent in your approach to business development and stop behaving like a spoiled child where clients come to you naturally,” he says.

Le Beux’s process started with creating a strong product-market fit for each of his business units, honestly assessing the competition, and transitioning from targeting companies to connecting with key decision makers. Yusuf also advises entrepreneurs to think about the true cost of sales and the effort required to get something. “When you're at an early stage as a company, you feel that every dollar that comes in is fantastic, but it may have taken 60 percent of the company working for three weeks to respond to an RFP which leads to a small dollar amount of revenue. You want it. So you're excited, but should you have spent those three weeks and 60 percent of your team pursuing a different opportunity in a different way?”

Hear how Le Beux and Yusuf worked together to balance marketing and sales while trying to scale, plus stories of partnering with Google and meeting the demands of a tech giant, along with strategic pricing during a global recession.

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We're excited to announce that Stanford Seed has a new advisory board member: Andreata Muforo. We are thrilled to have Andreata on our team! To celebrate, we're bringing back one of our favorite episodes from Season 1, "Raising Capital in Africa: It's Not Just About the Money", which featured Andreata as a guest. Enjoy!

Original Show Notes:

Meet Elo Umeh, Managing Director and CEO of Terragon Group, a Nigerian digital marketing and data insights company, and Andreata Muforo and Ido Sum from TLcom Capital, and learn how to make the most of your fundraising efforts to successfully grow your business in Africa.

Elo never intended to formally raise money—he initially relied on friends and family to launch Terragon. But as the business grew, so did his vision, and he needed to find an investor that understood the enormous opportunity in a rapidly growing sector. Since 2016, he’s led Terragon through two funding rounds: a $5 million series A round and a bridge round of $4 million. Now a leader in Africa’s data and marketing technology space, Terragon is currently raising another $16 million for its Series B. 

Elo shares his fundraising journey, explaining that it’s not just about the money, but who provides the capital is also key. He ended up working with Andreata Muforo and Ido Sum from TLcom, a venture capital firm with experience investing in tech-enabled businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa. Their relationship demonstrates how the right investors can help your business grow and actually enhance—not dampen—the quality of your decisions as a CEO.

Andreata and Ido of TLcom also share what they look for in a company and provide tips for how you can approach your next fundraising round.

Listen to Elo’s journey and Andreata and Ido’s insights to learn how to maximize the value of your firm’s next fundraising round.

Resources:

Terragon Group: https://terragongroup.com/ 

TLcom Capital: https://tlcomcapital.com/ 

Stanford Seed: http://stanfordseed.co/Grit

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Welcome back to Grit & Growth from Stanford Graduate School of Business. We’re tackling the complex issues facing entrepreneurs who are building businesses in Africa and South Asia. These emerging markets are exploding with opportunity and obstacles. And you’ll hear firsthand from entrepreneurs about their trials and triumphs, along with insights from Stanford faculty and global experts on how to overcome challenges and achieve success. We dig deep on product innovation, negotiation, corporate governance, regulation, and retention. We hear stories about corruption, women in business, and the role of power. Listen in and learn from entrepreneurs and experts on Grit & Growth Season 2.

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Introducing: Grit & Growth with Stanford Graduate School of Business

In this new podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business, travel across Africa and South Asia to meet some of the region’s most intrepid and inspiring entrepreneurs as they share stories of trial and triumph.

Host Darius Teter also interviews Stanford University faculty and global business experts who provide insights, guidance, and practical tips to help you succeed on your own entrepreneurial journey.

Learn more at: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/seed

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If/Then is a new podcast from the Stanford Graduate School of Business that we think will be of great interest to Grit & Growth listeners. This episode features Stanford GSB Professor Jonathan Levav analyzing the premise, “If we want to generate better ideas, then we need to get people back to the office.”

To Zoom or not to Zoom? That is the question on many leaders’ minds, nearly four years after the COVID-19 pandemic emptied offices around the world. While remote work has become the new normal, Jonathan Levav, Professor of Marketing at Stanford GSB, believes video conferencing is no substitute for face-to-face communication — especially where creativity is concerned. When it comes to the spontaneous and collaborative nature of coming up with new ideas, Levav says, “Screens are just too constraining.”

Levav’s insights come from a research study where pairs were asked to devise alternative uses for everyday items. “Pairs that worked face-to-face generated 15 to 20 percent more ideas than pairs that worked on Zoom,” he notes. What’s more, in-person brainstorming helped people consider a wider and more diverse range of possibilities. “Working on Zoom was a double penalty,” Levav says. “Fewer ideas — and a narrower set of ideas.”

Hear about Levav’s insights and research on remote work and how to keep your creative edge in our post-pandemic world.

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Hear the story of Dr. Shuchin Bajaj, a doctor, and entrepreneur who set out to provide affordable, quality health care in rural India and found himself on the front lines of the pandemic through his network of 15 hospitals. From encountering multiple supply chain disruptions to motivating his team and building a 1,000-bed, no-cost, Covid treatment center in a matter of weeks, Dr. Bajaj has moved mountains to save lives. Leaders across India and in emerging markets globally will find his reflections valuable, both now, and when/if they find themselves at the center of a second or third wave.  

Resources:

Volunteer for Project StepOne: https://projectstepone.org/join-us/

Donate to Project StepOne: https://projectstepone.org/donate/#

Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health: https://globalhealth.stanford.edu/covid-19/resources-for-the-covid-19-crisis-in-india.html/

Stanford Seed: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/seed

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Perkenalkan Denica Riadini-Flesch, seorang mantan ekonom yang menjadi pengusaha. Ia sedih melihat perjuangan para pengrajin dan petani tradisional di pedesaan Indonesia sehingga ia mendirikan perusahaan untuk membantu mengubah hidup mereka. SukkhaCitta adalah merek mode dari petani-ke-lemari, yang mengembalikan daya kepada para perempuan yang membuat pakaian kita. Misinya: mengakhiri eksploitasi terhadap perempuan dan sekaligus meregenerasi planet ini.

Menyeimbangkan tujuan dan keuntungan, sekaligus melawan permintaan masyarakat akan fast fashion adalah upaya yang cukup berat. Pakaian murah yang diproduksi oleh peretail pasar massal membebani para perajin kecil di mana-mana. Namun, dampak fast fashion terhadap planet kita bahkan lebih dramatis. Industri ini bertanggung jawab atas 10 persen emisi karbon global. Memproduksi satu kaos katun saja bisa menghabiskan 2.700 liter air. Dan semua tekstil yang dibuang menumpuk di tempat pembuangan sampah, menambah 92 juta ton sampah setiap tahun. Begitu Riadini-Flesch mulai memperhatikan cara pembuatan pakaian, ia tahu bahwa ia harus melakukan sesuatu. “Dalam ekonomi kerajinan, pada dasarnya mereka membuat sesuatu selama enam bulan, dan baru setelah itu mereka mencoba menjualnya. Namun pada saat itu, perempuan tidak memiliki daya tawar. Mereka membutuhkan uang tunai agar keluarga mereka bisa bertahan hidup. Dan itulah mengapa sektor ini juga dipenuhi dengan begitu banyak eksploitasi,” jelasnya.

Riadini-Flesch mengambil pendekatan holistik, memperluas akses ke pendidikan dan pasar, dan bisnisnya berfokus pada kalender pertanian, bukan kalender mode. “Kami adalah perusahaan sosial. Apa yang kami lakukan di desa-desa didanai oleh bisnis kami. Jadi pada dasarnya, untuk setiap <pakaian> yang dibeli, pelanggan kami memulai siklus regenerasi di desa-desa kami. Dan karena hanya menggunakan bahan alami dan pewarna alami, pakaian kami hanya butuh sekitar dua hingga empat minggu agar terurai sepenuhnya kembali ke tanah,” katanya.

Mempelajari cara mengembangkan bisnis sambil mempertahankan nilai-nilai yang dipegangnya membuat Denica memikirkan kembali definisi kesuksesannya. Ia mengatakan, “Pertumbuhan bukan hal buruk, selama kita tahu apa yang ‘cukup’ bagi kita. Dan begitu kita mencapainya, kita mempertahankannya. Kita mencari cara untuk menjaga semua orang yang terlibat. Kita mencari cara untuk memberi lebih banyak daripada yang kita terima. Dan ketika itu, bisnis bisa benar-benar menjadi kekuatan untuk kebaikan.”

Dengarkan kisah inspiratif Riadini-Flesch dan bagaimana ia menciptakan perusahaan sosial yang memberi kesempatan nyata bagi perempuan di Indonesia, bukan hanya bantuan.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on AI — a practical guide for experimenting and engaging with artificial intelligence. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, AI visionary, and best-selling author walks us through the hype, fears, and potential of this transformative and complex technology. 

AI is reshaping business, society, and education with unprecedented speed. Ethan Mollick urges business leaders and educators to get in there and figure it out for themselves — to experiment and discover, rather than sitting on the sidelines waiting for AI to come to them. His latest book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, is a practical guide for thinking and working with AI so you can determine how and where it can be utilized most effectively.

Mollick believes that AI can help entrepreneurs at every stage of business, including coming up with the very idea for the business itself. “AI out-innovates people in most cases,” he says, “so you should probably be using it to help you generate ideas.” In fact, he encourages us to think about AI as a co-founder to bounce ideas off. Mollick also acknowledges that people need to push through those initial couple hours of resistance when exploring AI. “There's a lot of reasons people stop using AI. It's weird. It freaks them out. It gives them bad answers — initially. You need to push through, like there is a point of expertise with this, where you start to get what it does and what it doesn't. Ten hours is my loose rule of thumb for how much time you have to spend using these systems to kind of get it.”

Mollick’s Four Essential Rules for Integrating AI into Work and Life

1. Always invite AI to the table. 

“You don't know what AI is good for or bad for inside your job or your industry. Nobody knows. The only way to figure it out is disciplined experimentation. Just use it a lot for everything you possibly can.”

2. Be the human in the loop.

“The AI is better than a lot of people in a lot of jobs, but not at their whole job, right? And so, whatever you’re best at, you're almost certainly better than the AI is.”

3. Treat AI like a human 

AI models are “trained on human language and they're refined on human language. And it just turns out that they respond best to human speech. Telling it and giving tasks like a person often gets you where you need to go.” 

… (but tell it what kind of human to be)

“AI models often need context to operate. Otherwise they produce very generic results. So a persona is an easy way to give context. ‘You are an expert marketing manager in India, focusing on technology ventures that work with the US’ will put it in a different headspace than if you say you're a marketer or if you don't give it any instructions at all.”

4. Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.

“We're early, early days still. I mean, there's a lot of stuff still being built.”

Listen to Ethan Mollick’s insights on how AI can level the playing field for startups and how entrepreneurs and teams can use it to enhance creativity, efficiency, and innovation. Also, be sure to subscribe to Mollick's Substack blog/newsletter One Useful Thing, a research-based view on the implications of AI, where Mollick offers free resources and prompts.

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