Most growing Kenyan product businesses do not fail because demand turned. They fail at the moment of their biggest win, the new distributor deal, the retail listing, the enterprise contract twice their usual size, because the operation underneath was still built for the smaller version of itself. I help founders find out which one they are running, before the buyer does.
Drawn from how growing Kenyan product and distribution businesses actually operate. If more than two of these read like your week, keep scrolling.
Stock movements, dispatch approvals, and client orders are coordinated across ten groups. Instructions are buried in chat histories nobody can search. You hear "I didn't see that message" three times a week.
Every payment waits for your M-Pesa. A driver sits at the depot waiting for a dispatch code only you can send, while you sit in the meeting that wins the next distribution deal.
Your P&L says profitable. Payroll on the 30th says otherwise. Working capital that should be in your account is sitting in a warehouse, or waiting on a distributor's 90-day payment terms.
Till numbers, paybills, bank transfers, cash, and stock counts. Reconciliation is manual, so you steer a growing product business by looking in the rear-view mirror.
You hired them to carry the load: sourcing, stock, dispatch. They forward every problem to you on WhatsApp instead. Same mental load as before, heavier payroll.
Your longest-serving staff carry supplier relationships, sourcing contacts, and stock knowledge from memory, and they are burning out. One resignation letter removes capability, and contacts, you cannot replace.
You read it for price and volume. Not for penalty clauses, exclusivity terms, minimum order quantities, or what happens when one distributor becomes 60 percent of your revenue. This sign has a signature date.
This is the first step of every engagement I run. Answer for the business you actually run, not the one you describe to clients or investors.
Your answers never leave this page. Nothing is stored, tracked, or sent anywhere. This is for your eyes only.
Does your business coordinate stock movements, dispatch approvals, and client instructions mainly through WhatsApp groups?
If a client disputed a delivery or a stock count today, would it take more than an hour to reconstruct what happened?
Have you heard "I didn't see that message" from your team in the last two weeks?
Do your critical processes exist only in people's heads, with nothing written down that a new hire could follow?
Do your managers forward most problems to you instead of resolving them?
Is there someone on your team you know has hit their ceiling, and you have not acted?
If your longest-serving employee resigned tomorrow, would critical knowledge walk out with them?
Do new hires constantly pull your senior people away to ask basic questions?
Does your P&L show profit while your bank account struggles to make payroll?
Do your largest distributors or retail clients take 60 days or longer to pay?
Are you the only person who can approve payments beyond pocket change?
Would fulfilling an order twice your current size require emergency borrowing?
Do you learn your true financial position more than a week after the month ends?
Is matching payments to deliveries across M-Pesa, bank, and cash still a manual job?
If asked right now, would you struggle to state your real margin per client?
Are your growth decisions made on gut feel rather than current numbers?
Does the business visibly slow down when you travel or go quiet?
Do you start most days with a plan and lose it to firefighting by 9 AM?
Are you both the face of the business and its only real decision-maker?
Has strategic work sat untouched for more than a month because operations consume you?
Want to walk through this together? We will schedule 30 minutes to walk through your results together. No charge, no obligation.
Every engagement is delivered inside your business, on your ground, at your pace. No junior teams. No recycled decks.
The flagship engagement. A structured diagnostic across the five dimensions of your business, ending in one direct verdict: proceed, proceed with conditions, or not yet.
For founders who have their roadmap and want a steady, independent hand while it is executed. Structure gets built. Guardrails get set. Nothing drifts.
I work inside your business, not from an office you indirectly pay for. The assessment happens where your operation actually happens: your floor, your depot, your back office, your books. A business cannot be read from a boardroom across town.
Engagements begin on your ground and stay there. What you get in return is an analyst who has seen how your business actually runs, not how it was described in a discovery call.
I bring an auditor's discipline, trained across large institutions and public systems, applied to founder-led businesses. Independent. No software to sell you. No retainer to protect. Just an honest read of what is true, delivered directly.
If your question is not here, that is what the WhatsApp button is for.
The Transition Readiness Assessment is typically priced between KES 150,000 and KES 250,000, depending on the size and complexity of your business. Message me with a short description of what you run and I will give you a straight number before we start.
The Assessment runs about three weeks from kickoff to your written report and prioritized roadmap. Implementation Advisory is project-based and scoped to what your roadmap actually needs.
Yes. What I see in your books and operations stays between us. Nothing leaves the engagement, and nothing gets shared, without your sign-off.
Then you find out now, on your terms, instead of mid-negotiation on someone else's. A "not yet" verdict comes with the specific sequence to fix it, not just the bad news.
No. The pattern I look for, sales outrunning the systems behind them, shows up across product businesses of every kind: manufacturing, retail, agro-processing, imports. If you hold stock, sell through distributors or retailers, or manage supplier contracts, this applies to you.
Most engagements run in and around Nairobi. If you are further out, message me and we can usually work out the logistics.
It means the business runs on written processes and clear decision rights instead of your memory and your approval for everything. Concretely: runbooks for your critical processes, tiered approval limits so you are not the only signature, and a manager layer that resolves problems instead of forwarding them to you. That is what Implementation Advisory builds, once the Assessment has told you what to build first.
Start with what is actually happening: reconcile what your records say against what is physically on the shelf or in the warehouse, in one sitting. The gap you find there usually tells you whether the problem is the process, nobody owns stock counts, or the tool, a notebook or WhatsApp group cannot hold what a proper system can. Most businesses need the process fixed before they need software.
Send one sentence: what the opportunity is, and the single thing that worries you most about your business's ability to deliver it. That is enough for an honest answer.
You will get an honest answer on whether this is right for you. Even if the answer is no. I typically reply within a few hours on WhatsApp during business days.
