refreshed-2026
What Your Prospects Are Actually Trying to Solve (And Why It Is Almost Never What They Asked About)
When prospects come to you with a request, the request is almost never the actual problem. The problem sits underneath it, often unspoken, sometimes unknown to the prospect themselves. The work of marketing is to surface the real problem and address it directly.
The Three Things Marketing Must Do, In the Order It Has to Do Them
Marketing has three jobs and they have to be done in sequence. Most marketing campaigns do one or two and skip the third. The skipped step is almost always urgency, and the absence of urgency is why most marketing produces interest without action.
The Founder’s Relationship Portfolio: Five Categories That Move Your Venture, and One That Doesn’t
Most networking advice tells founders to build relationships. The advice is too vague to act on. There are five categories of relationship that actually move a venture, and one that absorbs founder time without producing anything. Knowing the difference is the discipline.
The Second Loss: Why Predictable Discounts Train Your Customers to Wait
When you discount, the obvious cost is the discount itself. The hidden cost is that you have trained your customers to wait for the next one, and waiting customers do not come back at full price.
The Stuck Middle: Why Most African Ventures Disappear Into Their Own Category
Premium ventures attract customers willing to pay for excellence. Economy ventures attract customers buying on price. The middle attracts no one. Most African ventures end up stuck there, and the stuckness is what kills them.
When Founders Ask for More Leads, They Are Asking the Wrong Question
Almost every founder who comes to me for help opens with the same request: I need more leads. The request is almost always pointing at the wrong problem. The work is to find the actual one.
Stop Saying Solutions: The Vague Word That Is Costing Your Venture Customers
Solutions is the most overused word in business marketing. It is also a tell for founders who have not yet done the work of articulating what they actually do. Here is why the word is costing you customers, and what to use instead.
Stop Thinking Big. Start Thinking Specifically.
The advice to think big is one of the most repeated and least useful pieces of founder counsel. Vague ambition produces vague action. The discipline that actually grows ventures is to think specifically about a finite outcome that can actually be reached.
Sales Targets Are Output Metrics. The Founders Who Hit Them Track Inputs.
Most founders set monthly sales targets and watch the team scramble to hit them. The founders whose targets actually get hit consistently track a different category of metric entirely. Here is the distinction that separates the two.
The Unique Value Proposition Most African Founders Should Stop Trying to Write
The standard UVP framework was built for crowded markets. African founders often face the opposite problem: the category itself does not exist. Here is the discipline that produces a value proposition that actually does work in a market that has not yet been formed.