Thirty-five years of sitting in the room.
Now I sit just outside it.

“The people closest to a business are often the last to see what’s slowing it down.”

For most of my career I sat inside the room, not outside it. And here’s what I learned the hard way: the people closest to a business are often the last to see what’s slowing it down. Not because they aren’t sharp — usually they’re the sharpest people in the building. It’s proximity. When you’ve built the thing, run the thing, and stayed up at night worrying about the thing, you lose the one vantage point that would help you most — the view from outside.

That’s the chair I sit in now.

I’ve spent thirty-five years in commercial leadership across eighteen African countries — helping build businesses from the ground up, grow them, and steady them when they wobbled. Sometimes as part of a team, sometimes as the founder of my own businesses. That’s where a lot of the learning came from: watching what actually moves a company forward, and what only looks like it does.

I trained at Harvard Business School and at GIBS. But the real education happened on the ground: in the markets, in the boardrooms, in the quiet conversations after the meeting, where the truth finally comes out.

Here’s what those years taught me. Every business has blind spots, and the bigger the momentum, the harder they are to see — because the same drive that got you here is the thing that keeps your head down. Large organisations solve this with a board, a bench of advisors, a room full of people paid to ask the uncomfortable question. Businesses with real momentum and a small leadership team rarely have that. They have each other, and they have their own instincts. Both are good. Neither is quite enough on its own.

The Fifth Chair exists to be the voice that isn’t in the room. No agenda to manage, no politics to navigate, no stake in being right about the last decision. Just the outside view — direct, experienced, and yours when it matters most.

I won’t tell you what you want to hear. I’ll tell you what I’d want to know if it were my business. Sometimes that lands uncomfortably. It’s also, more often than not, the most valuable half-hour a leadership team spends all quarter.

35+

Years operating

18

African countries

1

Outside chair

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