Podcasts about startup businesses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.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 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 businessYou 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.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 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 Life1. 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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 2023Reimagining economic growth in Africa: Turning diversity into opportunity, McKinsey & Company, June 2023.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 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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's not easy starting a business in Alaska. The distance from lower 48 supply chains, customers, and investors can create barriers to growth that stop prospective companies from fully realizing their vision, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Alaska has been the birthplace of several successful startups, and experts say the state offers unique opportunities for funding, networking, research, and more. We discuss what it takes to launch a successful startup, and how to keep it growing, on this Talk of Alaska.

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

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

Hey there, I went to my local bank and was asking about getting some startup SBA financing. They weren't so keen on lending to a startup. Can you walk me through the SBA financing process? Thanks, Steve If you'd like to meet with Beau to talk financing, book a call here ( http://bookwithbeau.com/ )

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

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

Almost every entrepreneur dreams of becoming a unicorn — a startup that reaches a $1 billion valuation. But to date in Africa there are only seven companies that have achieved that distinction. Andela, led by co-founder and CEO Jeremy Johnson, is one of them. Hear how and why Andela became such a success story and gain insights on 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 Ojoma 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 Ojoma, “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 Ojoma 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.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 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 CoachDo 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.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.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.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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

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.

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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.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.

“The biggest thing that I noticed in me after starting to work with you is just a boost in confidence. I certainly went into it having major imposter syndrome.”—  Sarah Beth DavisAs entrepreneurs, we know how valuable our financial resources are and want to make sure we put every cent of it to good use. Unfortunately, the most common mistake young businesses make is not hiring a professional to do their financial and business accounting. And this error could cost your young business thousands of dollars because of unforeseen expenses, wrong inventory projections, high attrition due to not having a standardized salary scale, or even inadequate capitalization because of inequitable business partnerships.My guest this week speaks most about the latter and how she was able to traverse that difficult time in her business due to a dissolved business partnership. Sarah Beth Davis runs a brick-and-mortar store selling curated children's clothing. She witnessed firsthand how a small business can suffer from curve balls such as restructuring the organizational design early on in the business. Since working with me, she has seen financial stability, increased confidence, and overall peace of mind knowing that things are finally in place. Sarah Beth emphasizes essential lessons from her experience: Being a business owner can be extremely overwhelmingGetting thrown a curveball in your small business can be distracting and ultimately damagingChoosing a business partner is like choosing someone to marrySimulating and visualizing your business by thinking through all of the hypothetical situations and how you would handle themInvesting in hiring professional help to straighten out the financials of your businessHighlights:‌01:13  The joy of dressing up a baby led her to starting a business02:46  Finding helpful financial data and information when you're starting out is difficult06:30  Started Wynnie's with two partners08:08  Things started to shift and the partnership was no longer equitable09:55  Important parallels of business and marriage 11:04  Honeymoon and divorce stage of a business partnership12:37  Protecting your personal assets early on14:22  The curse of the Impostor Syndrome15:27  Changing your financial habits17:20  Simplifying things makes a world of difference17:49  Working with a CPA for your business is a practical and valuable investmentLinks:‌ ‌  Sarah Beth Davishttps://wynniesboutique.com/Facebook: @wynniesboutiqueInstagram: @wynniesboutiqueMain website

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. Doing her research, she discovered a disturbing fact about Botswana's rising cancer rates. Although its population is quite small, only 2.3 million, she explains, “Around 35 to 40 percent of the population have HIV. So, their immune responses are already low. Cancer hits when your immune responses are low. Eighteen percent of the population have cervical cancer, 17 percent have breast cancer, and 21 percent of men have other cancers.” 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 Nandi 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, Nandi Water sets up a 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 village can ultimately run the water center themselves.Even with their 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 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 Nandi'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:See 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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.