Grit & Growth

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 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.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.”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.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.”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.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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 JhaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 WambuguSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 NigeriaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 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!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.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.  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.” 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.”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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 SalvischianiDhanani 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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 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. 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.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.”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.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.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. 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 MacLeodFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4533-toccata-and-fugue-in-d-minorLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://incompetech.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.Share your anonymous story about how corruption or ethical challenges have affected your business for a future episode. Send a VOICE MEMO via WhatsApp to +1(650) 206-3055. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 CapitalIdo Sum, partner at TLCom CapitalZach George, managing partner at Launch Africa VenturesSandeep Singhal, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners in IndiaPranav Pai, founding partner of 3One4 Capital in IndiaTop Seven Masterclass Takeaways 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.” 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.”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.”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.”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.”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.”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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.