Five Lessons From 25+ Years of Building Businesses in East Africa
Building one successful company is difficult. Building a dozen, across wildly different industries, over twenty-five years, tends to teach a narrower set of lessons than you might expect.
1. Distribution Discipline Transfers
The retail and distribution discipline built through Simba Telecom's early growth turned out to be relevant far beyond telecom, informing how the Group approached hotel operations, energy distribution, and even agricultural supply chains.
2. Regional Thinking Early Pays Off
Expanding into Tanzania and Kenya within three years of launch forced Simba Telecom to build regionally-minded systems from the start, an advantage that later ventures didn't have to relearn from scratch.
3. Diversify Deliberately, Not Reactively
Every major expansion, energy in 2005, hospitality in 2007, waste management in 2018, followed a deliberate gap analysis, not a reactive chase of trends.
4. Values Have to Survive Scale
Ubuntu, Integrity, Customer First, Excellence, and One Simba only matter if they still apply when a company has grown from one shop to a dozen sectors. Keeping them enforceable at scale has been an ongoing effort, not a one-time decision.
5. Measure More Than Profit
Perhaps the most consistent lesson: businesses that also measure jobs created, skills built, and communities supported tend to make better long-term decisions than those measuring quarterly profit alone.