Advisory

Experience earned by building.

I help founders, CEOs, investors and boards scale, institutionalize and build enduring companies in Africa and other emerging markets.

Selected Experience

Co-founder, Jumia Nigeria
Founder, Supermart.ng
Former CEO, Kyosk
Built across multiple African markets
200,000+ retailers served
$250M+ annualized revenue
FT #2 fastest-growing company in Africa

Perspective

Built from operating, not observing.

This work builds on decades of operating, and is informed by my writing and speaking.

My perspective comes from more than two decades of building businesses across Africa and other emerging markets — from co-founding Jumia Nigeria and building Supermart.ng, to founding and leading Kyosk across multiple markets.

I have experienced many of the challenges I now advise on: finding product-market fit, raising capital, scaling across countries, building leadership teams, redesigning organizations, navigating periods of rapid growth and difficult restructuring, and turning founder-led businesses into enduring institutions.

I work with founders and CEOs, boards and investors, private equity firms and their portfolio companies, and family businesses navigating a new stage of growth or generational transition. The engagements are focused on a small number of problems where my operating experience can be most useful.

Advisory Products

Five engagements designed around the transitions that matter most.

Scale Readiness & Replication Sprint

Is your business truly ready to scale?

Typical engagement

4–6 weeks

Growth can hide weak economics, fragile processes and excessive founder dependence. Before expanding into new markets, products or locations, companies need to understand whether what they have built is genuinely repeatable.

This engagement examines the underlying engine of the business and determines what must be true before significant capital and management attention are committed to further expansion.

Best suited for

Founder-led and growth-stage companies preparing for significant expansion, geographic replication or a new phase of investment.

Typical areas of focus

—Business model and unit economics
—Identification of the core replication unit
—Operational repeatability
—Organizational and leadership readiness
—Technology and systems readiness
—Capital requirements and constraints
—Key risks to successful scaling

Outcome

A clear assessment of whether the company is ready to scale, what is currently limiting replication, and a practical roadmap for the next phase of growth.

Founder to Institution

Build a company that can endure beyond the founder.

Typical engagement

8–12 weeks, with the option of ongoing CEO advisory

The skills required to start a company are not the same as those required to build an institution.

As companies grow, informal decision-making, founder dependency and organizational ambiguity begin to create bottlenecks. The founder must evolve. The leadership team must evolve. And the company must develop systems that allow it to operate effectively without depending on a few individuals.

This engagement helps founders and leadership teams navigate that transition deliberately.

Best suited for

Founder-led companies that have achieved meaningful scale but are struggling with organizational complexity, leadership transitions or excessive dependence on the founder.

Typical areas of focus

—The evolving role of the founder
—Leadership team design
—Organizational structure
—Decision rights and accountability
—Management systems and operating cadence
—Governance and board effectiveness
—Succession and institutional continuity

Outcome

A clearer leadership and organizational model designed for the company's next stage of development.

CEO Operating System

Turn strategy into consistent execution.

Typical engagement

6–8 weeks, followed where appropriate by periodic leadership reviews

Many companies do not fail because they lack strategy. They fail because priorities become unclear, accountability weakens and the organization loses its operating rhythm.

This engagement helps CEOs and leadership teams design a practical management system for translating strategy into execution.

Best suited for

CEOs and leadership teams dealing with rapid growth, organizational complexity, inconsistent execution or too many competing priorities.

Typical areas of focus

—Strategic priorities and company scorecards
—Planning and execution cadence
—Leadership meeting architecture
—Accountability and decision-making
—Performance management
—Organizational communication
—Connecting strategy to day-to-day execution

Outcome

A practical operating system that creates greater clarity, accountability and execution discipline across the organization.

Growth to Profitability & Business Model Transformation

Turn growth into durable profitability.

Typical engagement

6–10 weeks

Growth alone does not create enduring companies. Many businesses in emerging markets have achieved meaningful scale but now face pressure to demonstrate unit economics, sustainable margins and a credible path to profitability.

This engagement helps companies rework their business model, cost structure and operating discipline to convert growth into durable value — without breaking the growth engine that got them here.

Best suited for

Growth-stage companies under pressure to demonstrate profitability, boards and investors evaluating a portfolio company's path to sustainable returns, and leadership teams navigating the transition from growth-at-all-costs to disciplined value creation.

Typical areas of focus

—Unit economics deep dive
—Revenue quality and pricing
—Cost structure and operating leverage
—Working capital and cash discipline
—Portfolio and product rationalization
—Organizational and incentive alignment
—Path-to-profitability roadmap

Outcome

A clear plan for moving the business from growth-led to profit-led, with the operating discipline and organizational alignment to execute it.

AI & Operating Model Transformation

Redesign the company for the age of intelligence.

Typical engagement

4–8 weeks

Artificial intelligence is not simply another technology tool. As the cost of intelligence falls, companies will need to rethink how work is performed, how decisions are made and how organizations are structured.

The opportunity is not merely to add AI to existing processes, but to redesign the operating model around what has now become possible.

Best suited for

CEOs, boards and leadership teams seeking a practical approach to AI beyond experimentation and isolated tools.

Typical areas of focus

—Identifying high-value AI opportunities
—Redesigning workflows and processes
—AI-enabled decision-making
—Organizational implications
—Technology and data readiness
—Build, buy and partner decisions
—Prioritization and implementation roadmap

Outcome

A focused AI transformation agenda tied directly to business value and organizational change.

Ongoing CEO Advisory

A trusted counterpart, over time.

A defined engagement is often the right way to begin, but many of the decisions a CEO faces are continuous rather than one-off.

I work with a small number of CEOs on an ongoing basis as a private sounding board: reviewing strategy, working through leadership and organizational questions, preparing for board meetings and capital raises, and providing an experienced perspective on the decisions that matter most.

These relationships are typically structured as a modest monthly retainer and often begin as a natural extension of one of the advisory engagements above.

Case Studies

Lessons drawn directly from the work.

Each engagement is grounded in problems I have lived through as an operator. A few of the recurring themes:

Building Jumia Nigeria

Launching a category in a market that did not yet exist.

How to build the operational, logistics and payments infrastructure required to make e-commerce work in a frontier market — and the trade-offs between speed, capital and durability.

Scaling Kyosk

From a single-market idea to a multi-country B2B commerce platform.

What has to be true — in unit economics, technology, organization and leadership — before a business can be replicated credibly across countries.

Multi-country Expansion

Choosing where, when and how to enter new markets.

Why most cross-border expansion fails, and the sequencing decisions that separate ambitious expansion from disciplined value creation.

Growth to Profitability

Rewiring a fast-growing business for durable margins.

How to reset unit economics, cost structure and operating cadence without breaking the growth engine — and how to bring the organization along.

Building Leadership Teams

Moving from a founder-led company to an institution.

How the founder's role evolves, how to design and hire a leadership team for the next stage, and how governance has to change alongside it.

CTO and CEO in the Same Seat

Running Kyosk as both CTO and CEO through 2024–2025.

What it takes to lead technology and the business at the same time — resetting the engineering organization, cutting cost-to-serve, embedding AI and data into daily operations, and using the dual seat to move the company faster than a hand-off between two leaders ever could.

Detailed, named case studies are available on request under appropriate confidentiality.

Bespoke

Bespoke Strategic Advisory

Not every important problem fits neatly into a predefined engagement.

I also work selectively with founders, CEOs, boards, investors, PE portfolio companies and family businesses on complex strategic questions, including:

—Growth and market expansion
—Business model evolution
—Platform and ecosystem strategy
—Organizational transformation
—Capital allocation
—Leadership and founder transitions
—Turnarounds and periods of significant change

These engagements may take the form of CEO advisory, board and leadership sessions, strategic offsites or longer-term advisory relationships.

How I Work

A small number of engagements. Direct involvement.

I work with a limited number of organizations at any one time.

My role is not to produce large consulting teams or lengthy reports. It is to bring experienced judgment to important decisions, work directly with the people responsible for those decisions, and help translate strategy into action.

Where an engagement requires additional specialist expertise or local market knowledge, I may work with a carefully selected network of experienced operators and partners.

Start a Conversation

If your company is navigating a significant transition, I would be happy to explore whether I can help.

For founders, CEOs, boards, investors, PE portfolio companies and family businesses preparing for the next stage of growth, or confronting a strategic problem where experienced operating judgment would be useful.

Request an Advisory Conversation →