My story
Different hats. One question.
I wasn't trying to build a career with many titles. I was trying to understand how the whole business works.
My career has taken me through business development, marketing, communications, research, strategy, products, financial services and executive leadership.
At first, these looked like different jobs.
Over time, I realised each one was teaching me something different about the same question:
What makes a business grow?
- Business development
- Marketing
- Research
- Strategy
- Product
- Communications
- Financial services
- Executive leadership
The chapters
Each role was a different lesson about the same system.
- 01
Business Development
What customers taught me.
The first vantage point was proximity to customers — finding the people who need what a business sells and giving them a reason to believe it.
It taught me that no strategy survives without someone doing the work of building relationships, telling the story clearly and following through. Customers are not a target audience; they are the first judge of whether something is actually useful.
- 02
Marketing & Brand
What attention and trust taught me.
Marketing and communications taught me that attention is earned and trust is built slowly and lost quickly.
A clear message, told consistently, changes how people see a business. But attention on its own is not growth — it only becomes growth when the rest of the business is ready to convert it into something that lasts.
- 03
Research & Strategy
What markets and evidence taught me.
Research and strategy shifted the question from how do we sell to where should we play — studying customers, competitors, categories and market structure.
Work across multiple African markets showed how differently growth behaves from one place to the next. Evidence makes strategy honest. It turns instinct into decisions you can defend.
- 04
Product
What building for real customer needs taught me.
Responsibility widened from message to proposition — product development, customer acquisition, partnerships and launches.
This is where the thesis started forming. A product only creates value when the proposition, the channel, the economics and the execution all hold together. Building for a real need is harder and more rewarding than building for an assumption.
- 05
Financial Services
What capital, risk and commercial discipline taught me.
Moving deeper into financial services and banking brought a different discipline — product, digital banking, lending, deposits, customer growth and institutional strategy.
It is an industry where strategy meets regulation, technology and trust, and where risk is not a constraint on growth but part of its architecture. Capital and discipline change how you think about every decision.
- 06
Leadership
What happens when you become responsible for the whole outcome.
Leadership changed the unit of accountability. Not a campaign or a launch, but organisational performance: strategy, people, products, customers, risk and commercial results held together at the same time.
Transformation work made the system visible — where an institution creates value, where it leaks it, and what it takes to change either. You stop owning tasks and start owning outcomes.
- 07
Building
Why I increasingly want to create businesses, platforms and ideas of my own.
The latest chapter is about building in my own right — ventures, platforms, ideas and advisory work alongside executive practice.
The Growth Pain sits at the centre of it: a media and conversation platform about the realities behind business, careers, ambition and growth. After years of working inside institutions, I find myself drawn to creating things that didn't exist before.
Where the lessons were learned
- Assets Microfinance BankManaging DirectorWhat it takes to make a whole institution grow, not one department.
- LipalaterChief Marketing OfficerDemand is only real when the product, credit and operations can serve it.
- Canary Point HoldingsGroup Head, StrategyStrategy only matters once it becomes an operating decision.
Beyond the job title
I am naturally curious about how things work.
- Why customers choose one business over another.
- Why good strategies sometimes fail.
- Why some organisations grow and others stall.
- Why talented teams underperform.
- Why some ideas become businesses while others remain ideas.
- That curiosity has probably shaped my career more than any job title.
Where the idea came from
Growth is a business system.
Nobody handed me that conclusion. Each role showed me one part of the machine — and how often the part I was holding was blamed for a problem that lived somewhere else.
Today I try to hold all of those views at once — leading an organisation, building a product, working through a strategy or starting something new.