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I keep coming back to this one sentence.
Twelve years ago, in Accra, an investor told me one thing. I haven't been able to put it down.
It was said to me once, across a desk in an office in Accra that was bigger than any house I have ever owned, by a Lebanese millionaire and the richest man in West Africa at the time, who was about to give me a multi-million-pound blank check. I think about it most weeks. I have used a version of it in every founder session I have run since. And the longer I sit with it, the more I think it is not really about Africa at all.
I want to walk through the story properly, because it matters how it landed, not just what was said.
I was on the shore of Lake Tanganyika at the time. Designing a safari lodge for a client out of London. It was 2013, I had been in Southern Africa for 3 years by then - sixteen openings across six countries, a couple of hotels, a few private investments and I had got used to the weeks where the work happened in places without addresses.
The Skype call came through on the lake, on a connection that should not really have worked. My old boss in London on the other end. He used to run the operations group I had cut my teeth in before I went out into the continent properly. He still kept me on a sort of mental short-list for things he did not have an obvious answer to.
He said: there is a guy in Ghana who wants to open a Japanese restaurant in Accra. He wants someone with Mayfair-level operating experience and someone who actually understands working in Africa. Those two lists, in 2013, did not really overlap. Yours does, by accident.
I flew to Accra a week later. I will be honest, I had no real intention of taking the job when I got on the plane. I was doing well on the lodges, the budget for Ghana would mean leaving the project I was on, and the thing he was describing - a Michelin-star-level Japanese restaurant in sub-Saharan Africa was, on its face, slightly absurd. There was no Japanese chef in Ghana. There was no Japanese supply chain in Ghana. There was no-one in Ghana who had eaten enough proper Japanese food to know what they were even meant to be reviewing. By every reasonable measure, the brief was not deliverable.
I went anyway. Because when an old boss tells you there is no-one else, you go.
The investor's office was on the top floor of a building in central Accra. He was warm, very precise, immaculately turned out in a way that I have only ever seen done well by men of a certain generation in West Africa. We talked for about ninety minutes. He understood the constraints of what he was asking better than I did. He had thought about it more than I had. By the end of the conversation, I had, almost without noticing, agreed in principle.
And then he said the thing.
"You will never use Africa as an excuse for not delivering my vision."
He said it once. Not in the way a tough boss says a tough thing. In the way a contract is signed. There was no anger in it and no warning. It was the deal. If I wanted the project, that was the term.
I said yes.
We opened Santoku six months later. The first Michelin-star-level Japanese restaurant in Africa outside of South Africa. I will spare you the production story - it involved a sushi master flown in for nine months, sashimi-grade tuna freighted in by a route I am still slightly proud of figuring out, and a wine list that took eleven attempts because the first ten kept disappearing into customs - but the place was full from the day we opened. Three-month waiting list. Booked solid for the first year. The reviews, including one from a Michelin inspector the investor had paid to fly in on a whim, were the best I have ever had on any project, before or since.
People still ask me how we did it. The honest answer is: by not using Africa as the excuse.
That is not a clever line. It is a description of what the discipline actually felt like, every day, for six months. Every problem that arrived on my desk, I was aware that the easiest answer was Africa. No tuna. Africa. No chef. Africa. No onyx for the bar. Africa. Every one of those answers was true, and every one of them was, in the deal we had made, not allowed.
So I had to find the other answer. The one underneath the easy one.
And I will tell you something interesting that happened over those months: the other answer was always there. Sometimes it was three days of work to find. Sometimes three weeks. Once, three months. But the other answer was always there. It was always findable. The first answer, the obvious answer, was the lazy answer, almost every time.
That is what I have been carrying for fifteen years. Not the line. The discipline.
And it is not really about Africa.
I think about it most often when I am sitting opposite a founder who is telling me what is wrong with their brand. Almost every founder I have sat with in fifty sessions does the same thing in the first twenty minutes. They tell me where the problem is. Not the work-itself problem. The problem-elsewhere problem. The market is small. The category is crowded. The product is misunderstood. The team is junior. The budget was wrong. The competition raised. The agency that was supposed to fix it didn't get it. The last campaign was the wrong angle. The website doesn't convert.
Every one of those statements is, almost always, true.
And every one of those statements is the easy answer. The Africa answer.
There is another answer underneath. There almost always is. The harder answer is usually about something the founder themselves has been carrying - a sentence in the deck that came from someone else's deck, a positioning angle that was inherited from a category leader they admire, a value proposition that was written in a hurry by an agency that was briefed before anyone sorted the story underneath. The market was not really the problem. The competition was not really the problem. The agency was not really the problem. The story was not really sorted, and so everything downstream of the story has been, quietly, working against the founder for years.
That is the work. Naming the easy answer. Putting it down. Looking for the other one.
It is harder than it sounds. I will tell you a slightly embarrassing thing.
I am, at the time of writing this, in the middle of an SEIS raise for a product I have been building for the best part of a year, called The Foundation. Last week I sent out twenty-three pitches. I sat down to write the deck and I will tell you what happened: I led with the features. The same mistake I tell founders not to make. The Africa answer, as it were. Look at this product, look at this AI, look at the price point.
I caught it on read-back, fortunately. Rewrote it from the why. But it was a useful reminder that the discipline is hard for the person who teaches it, too. Most founders I meet are clever enough to know what the right framing should be. They are also inside the framing they have, and the inside view is always harder.
Which is why having someone in the room or at least, something in the room that will not let you take the easy answer is, in my experience, the single most useful intervention available in this category. The whole reason there is a product at all is because I have spent three years sitting in rooms watching founders take the easy answer when the harder one was right there. I have come to think the work is not strategy. Or it is, but the strategy is the easy bit. The work is refusing to let the founder, or yourself, off the hook on the easy answer. The work is what the investor in Accra was insisting on, twelve years ago, in a sentence I did not understand the importance of at the time.
If you are reading this and you are mid-build, mid-launch, mid-rebrand, mid-raise - let me ask you the question I would ask if you were sitting opposite me.
What is your Africa?
What is the easy answer you have been giving yourself, or letting other people give you, about why the brand is not working as hard as it should? The market. The competition. The category. The team. The agency. The budget. The product is too early. The audience is not ready.
All of those answers are probably true.
What is the answer underneath?
Sit with it. If you cannot find one, that, in my experience, is the point at which the work actually starts.
See you next time.
Cheers,
Marcus
P.S.
I have been writing more about how to actually do this work. The Brand Visibility Diagnosis is a free, ten-minute version that runs the swap test on your own pitch and tells you which lines are yours and which are inherited. One conversation, no pitch. https://brandvisibility.scoreapp.com/