S14E15: Do CEOs really have (or need) a super power? with Rebecca Harrison

Richard Medcalf
Do you need to have a superpower to be an effective CEO? What happens if you don’t feel you actually have that kind of, super skill? And how can you build a pan continental business with zero experience? And as you do that, empower your managers to lead effectively. This is what I explore today with Rebecca Harrison. Rebecca has spent the last decade building the African Management Institute, Africa’s leading provider of business and management learning. It supports over 30,000 37,000 businesses in 39 African countries, has impacted over 1,500,000 livelihoods, and contributed over a 130,000,000 into the African economy. So in this conversation, we’re gonna look at why Rebecca is so impact driven and what caused her to pursue that impact business in a sector and a market she’d never really had much experience in, and what did she have to learn the hard way on that journey? We also look at this question of superpowers, why she doesn’t at least initially think she has a particular superpower, what she says is important instead, and then a reframe that I give her that perhaps helps her see things a little bit differently. And then finally, we look at 3 hard won tips that Rebecca wants to share around building effective middle management, which is such a key issue, and how to do this in a hierarchical culture, which often we African markets and actually many other markets around the world will actually have as a as a default assumption, the assumption that obedience to your leader is better than ownership of the task. And we really get into how she has achieved that in her own business as well as teaching her own clients, how to do that. So this is a great conversation.

I love Rebecca’s heart, her mission, and the impact she’s made, and the journey she’s on. Enjoy this conversation with Rebecca Harrison. Welcome to the Impact Multiplier CEO podcast. I’m Richard Metcalfe, founder of XQuadrant, and my mission is to help the world’s top CEOs and entrepreneurs shift from incremental to exponential progress and create a huge positive impact on our world. Now that requires you to reinvent yourself and transform your business. So if you’re ready to play a bigger game than ever before, I invite you to join us and become an Impact Multiplier CEO. Hi, Rebecca. Welcome to the show.

Rebecca Harrison
Hi, Richard. Great to be here.

Richard Medcalf
So we get back a long way. I think we first met 25 years ago, when you were a hotshot journalist and I was doing who knows what, and we kinda lost touch over the years. And then 25 years later, I we we kind of reconnect. And you have been spending the last decade building the African Management Institute, AMI. And looks like it’s been absolutely amazing ride. So I’m really really looking forward to getting into what that journey’s been. Before we could restart, do you wanna just explain, like, what is AMI, and, like, where like, now 10 years in, what’s the scale of what you’ve been able to create?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. Thanks so much, Richard, and thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. So AMI stands for African Management Institute. We are an edtech scale up based in Africa, as you can probably figure out from the name. We leverage technology to deliver workplace learning to Africa’s ambitious companies and talent. So training company, training sometimes kind of doesn’t sound as exciting and impactful about as as as what we do. So, we think more of ourselves as a kind of learning and business growth company.

We’ve been around for about 10 years as you said. We’ve worked with businesses now about 37,000 businesses across Africa in pretty much every country in Africa. Now we’ve got team based in about 8 countries, team about a 130, and we’ve had a ton of impact. So, yeah, reaching a hundred and sorry. Reaching 37,000 companies that’s generated, we’ve estimated, added about $130,000,000 to Africa’s economies and impacted about 1,500,000 livelihoods. So we’re mission driven, and we really believe that by building businesses, we’re driving prosperity, creating jobs, improving livelihoods across the continent. So, yeah, that’s who we are and what we do.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. So it’s amazing. You’ve expanded into 39 different countries, 1,500,000. You kind of rushed over it. Right? But I’d like to stop and think 1,500,000 people have had their lives impacted because of this journey that’s been only actually a decade. Right? Not actually that long in in many ways, and yet you’ve had this impact. And so, it’s, yeah, really exciting, work that you’ve been doing. So kind of perhaps, take us back just at the very start.

Like, what was it that got you to kinda leave your, high flying world of journalism and get stuck into probably you know, Africa has been not the easiest place to do business, I suspect. It’s probably a huge learning curve. What was it that was, like, made you go, that’s my mission. That’s what I’m gonna do, and I’m all in.

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. Yeah. It’s I I love telling this story, and it’s funny how something that now seems so blinding the obvious, you know, obviously took a bit of time to evolve. But, I I don’t know. I certainly don’t know if I was high flying or hot shot journalist, but I was a journalist. And, and I had been posted to Johannesburg. So I think when we met, I was living in Paris. I was sent to Johannesburg by Reuters.

I was working with Reuters News for about a decade before this. And I thought in a slightly naive kinda way, I thought that I would be sent to Africa to write about, you know, poverty, HIV, human rights, all of these good things. And I got there and my editor said, no. We want you to write about technology and, companies and markets. And you can imagine, like, my heart sank. I’d imagine myself as this kind of swashbuckling journalist and here I was having been told I had to write about technology and markets. So I wasn’t initially all that enthusiastic about this, but I really quickly realized this was kind of I’ll I’ll betray my age, but this was kind of mid 2000, and it was a moment when mobile technology was sweeping across Africa really, really rapidly. And I could see in front of me, you know, how ordinary people were using mobile phones to create mini businesses, to generate livelihoods for themselves and their families, to access all sorts of things, whether health care, education, whatever it was.

And it suddenly became obvious, you know, mobile tech was gonna change, people’s lives in a way that, you know, traditional aid and development and all the issues I thought that I will be writing about really had failed to do. And so I got really excited about this kind of opportunity and moment in time. And I’d always had this vague idea in the back of my business in back of my brain that one day I would start a business. So, yeah, so I took the leap and and actually went to business school first. So it was a pretty safe mini leap to start off with. Went to business school, met my cofounder. And basically, I was looking for a problem to solve where technology could democratize access to something. And my business partner was he was running the business school, that I went to, and he was fascinated by the idea of how could you make business education, and support much more accessible.

And so we kinda came together around a lot of different whiteboards kind of thinking about, well, how could we, you know, how how could we kind of marry these two ideas? How could we use technology to to bring really practical business growth, business learning, business tools, to, you know, eventually, 100 of 1000, millions across the continent.

Richard Medcalf
How Paul’s there? Amazing. Yeah. So so how did you kinda get started? Or at least, I’m sure there was a phase of exploration and messing around, for one of a better word. Right? Trying to figure things out. But, like, yeah, what were the may what are kind of some of the major breakthroughs that then allowed you to kind of really start to scale up and get serious about it?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. You know, I often say that, you know, I think the 2 necessary ingredients for an entrepreneur are, naivety and stubbornness, or you can kind of frame those more a bit more positively as optimism and grit. But I think, honestly, it’s like naivety, and I was hopelessly naive about what it would take to build this. Right? So I think most entrepreneurs are, if you knew what it would take, I don’t know if anyone would actually start a business if you really knew what it would take. And and to do it in a in frankly, to do it in a market that I didn’t know in a sector I wasn’t from, I’m not even a techie. You know, I’m a nontechnical fan. I mean, there were so many things wrong with this idea. The the only thing that was right, I think, was the the purpose and the intent behind it.

But, yeah. So when we first started, we thought that because all founders like to have, we’re the x of x, we were like, we will be the Coursera for Africa. We thought that we would just put online courses onto the Internet and magically, you know, millions of people across Africa would would pay us for them and that they would have an impact in their business. Funnily enough, not so funny enough, that that failed quite spectacularly. We we actually got about 10,000 people onto the platform quite quickly, and there was a lot of interest. But, I mean, payments, you know, we were working on a freemium model. Upgrades were, like, barely double digit. You know, it was it was embarrassingly bad.

Bad. So, so we pivoted pretty quickly. We were we got a bit of traction working directly with bigger businesses to train their teams, kind of corporate learning. But it was really tough. I mean, in in there there was no culture really of digital learning in most of the markets. South Africa, there was. By then, we had shifted to Kenya as our base. And and we were an unknown brand with, you know, not not really a proven product, and no one was paying for anything on the Internet either.

So there were all these kind of challenges we hadn’t really foreseen. Then we stumbled on the business model that has really driven a lot of our growth, which is working with large development agencies to support several 100, now thousands of smaller businesses at the same time. So Tiptoe now, a large part of our business is really working with development actors where, you know, they have a a goal around a certain kind of segment of business they want to support, and we’re able to roll out a program at scale. So but that, like, finding that initial business model, figuring out how we have impact, and then how we, you know, how we build a sustainable business from having that impact. Those two things, I would say, took us a good 5 years to figure out.

Richard Medcalf
So what I’m hearing, Vinnie, well, the key thing there was figuring out who was actually gonna pay. Right? Was it the end users? Was it large corporates? Was it development players? That sounds like a key a key part of what you were trying to figure out, right, the core business model. Is that fair to say?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. Exactly. The the the, the core business model and the the impact model. So, like, working out, like, how are we going to deliver practical, locally relevant, scalable tools and support in a way that was actually gonna make a difference. We didn’t wanna do it just for the sake of it. We would we started from a place that we wanna build businesses across the continent. And, and then on the other side, at the same time, trying to figure out, well, what’s the payment model? We we realized pretty quickly that the people paying were probably not gonna be the immediate end user. There would be some kind of client paying, whether that’s a corporate or a agency or organization.

Richard Medcalf
Have you ever had a conflict between the kind of, like, the commercial kind of drivers of, like, this is how we can make money and the impact agenda? Or has it always gone together because it’s always been in this field of management education, so kind of you didn’t have to think too much about that?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. I I am often asked that, but I really I don’t know. I think because we’ve built AMI so much around a a kind of a purpose and a mission, our business model is very closely aligned to our impact model. So when we make money, we make money when we’re having impact. And I often say to my team actually that impact is our product. It’s what we’re selling to our clients. So if we’re selling to a business that wants to strengthen its team, its employees, and and help them to perform more effectively, the business might call that ROI. Right? So, but if you’re working with a development agency that wants to drive job creation outcomes among small businesses in the dairy sector in 3 East African countries, they would just call that impact outcomes.

But either way, that your client is essentially buying from you performance or improved outcomes. And so I I feel really fortunate that, like, we don’t really have to make that trade off because if we’re doing our job well, we get paid for it. Our clients renew our business growth. So yeah.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Well, actually, it’s it’s a great point because, I when I’m working with CEOs and entrepreneurs around their own business vision and their sense of purpose, I really say, like, these things should align because if actually the main driver you know, if you’re, if you want to inspire people, you have to have actually an impact KPI, I call it. You have to because otherwise I mean, you might get out of bed possibly for for you because you’re a shareholder, possibly. At some point, probably not, actually. And certainly most of your team are not gonna go out of bed for that. So, actually, you do wanna get clear on the impact you want to make. And if the impact is not actually related to your core business, you have a problem. Like, you you they’re always gonna be sub optimizing.

And, and so I think I would encourage people to say, like, what is it? Like, you know, if you make cheese, then what is it about making cheese that gets you out of bed? Right? You know? And, like, what is it? Is it just literally the product? Is it the way you make the product or whatever? Right? But the the actual the the core of the business has to be its own reward in in some ways. Right?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. Yeah. No. I totally agree. Totally agree. And I I’ve heard I I didn’t coin this phrase, but I really like it. A mentor once told me, you know, fall in love with the problem, not the solution, which I think is just a great way to think about business building when you’re purpose driven is, you know, I I didn’t set out to build a business for the sake of building a business. And I I love business building, so I do that.

It’s part of it for me. But, but, you know, we set out to support to enable, you know, ambitious businesses across Africa to thrive through practical tools and training. That is our vision. That’s our mission. We want to see strong businesses that create jobs. You know? Yeah. So so that that has to, you know, that has to be at the core of what we do, and and we may change what we do in order to further that mission, rather than the other way around. When you fall in love with your solution, not the problem, then you kind of it’s easy to lose your way or to get stuck on something isn’t solving the problem in the first place.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. I mean, one of my clients runs a $100,000,000,000 business, and as we work together, he realized that he’s the star. He really inspired his his team and himself. And over time, the kind of money had kinda crept in, and he realized he was talking more about the financial goals than about the true impact and heart behind his business. And, another another, CEO entrepreneur of about $50,000,000 business I was working with, I said, basically, when I asked him about his vision, it was basically, like, sell the business in 2 years. And I was like, okay.

Fine. But, like, that’s like my my mental model was you’re a pirate, you know, on the open seas, and you’ve got this big treasure, you know, you know, hoard in your in your in your boat, and you’re gonna get back to port to spend it. But the actual journey is miserable. You know, you’ve got, like, the story you know, see in your face, and you completely you’re seasick, and you’re hating the journey. Versus I said, what about if you if you actually create another image, which is, yeah, there is some gold in this boat, but actually there’s, you know, you’re enjoying the the lash of the sea and the sea air and the salt, and actually you love being at sea. And therefore, what is it about the journey that would get you excited, like, even if there was no end? And when I actually got him to really think about that, he found a purpose within his business and within what he was doing that allowed him to actually get excited for the business and not just for the sale.

Rebecca Harrison
I I love that. I I love that because I think it’s particularly as founders and if you have raised VC and there’s always this exit horizon or, you know, or however you’re thinking about it. It there can be this kind of constant sense of delayed gratification, like, we’re always building towards something and the next thing and the next you know, whether it’s the next annual sets of annual targets or the next 5 3 to 5 year strategy or your exit strategy, whatever it is. And it’s so easy to get I think as entrepreneurs, you tend to be pretty goal oriented, right, and pretty driven, which is a good thing. But I think it’s so important what you just said about that image is gonna stick with me of the pirate on the seas. But, you know, what you just said about the journey, like, it’s really we’re missing the whole we’re missing the fun and missing so much of the value, if if you don’t kind of take in what you’re doing along the way, which is kind of building value for all of your stakeholders. Hopefully hopefully creating an environment of human flourishing for your team, putting a great product out there, changing how your sector maybe works, you know, all of these things. And, yeah, I say that’s part of the journey.

Richard Medcalf
So So let’s change gears a little bit. One of the questions I asked you before a couple of weeks quite a couple of weeks ago was around what you think your superpower is. What you know, where you think, you know, your genius zone is, where where you shine. And you had a really interesting response. You said to me, I don’t really think I have a superpower. I think it’d be really interesting to expand on that. So, like, tell me what was going on when I said that and why you kinda said I’m not sure that’s really my thing. I don’t have a superpower.

It’s a common phrase, right, in business leadership.

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. I think I it’s not just false modesty. I’m I’m not, I think I can do lots of things, but, I don’t I I think I just I I don’t find it a super helpful mental model because I think we can get caught up on having to be brilliant at this one thing. And and I genuinely, as particularly as a founder CEO, I think the the one thing that you can do better than it there’s 2 things you can do better than anyone else. 1 is that you care more than anyone else, really, about whether the business is growing and whether you’re achieving your your mission and and and purpose. And as much as you can hire fabulous, you know, team members and and colleagues and fellow kind of journeymen and women along the way, no one else is gonna care quite as much as you. So and and that means that you will always be able to connect dots and drive progress more than anyone else. So I I guess and and that I guess that doesn’t really feel like something you put on and who I’m I’m a superhero to do that.

But I I think in order to be able to do that, you need to have kind of range and breadth and need to be able to dive into a lot of different things. So, you know, I’m I’m absolutely a generalist. I have no I always joke with my team that we have to keep AMI going because I don’t think I’d be able to get a job anywhere else. I have no specialism. You know? I just really care more about the the mission and the purpose of AMI than anyone else, apart from my cofounder, of course. But but and because I’m in the CEO seats, I’m able to, like, drive that progress better than anyone else and and see how do you connect those dots. How can we unblock kind of dismantle obstacles, move things forward. And I and I I think that’s the the way that I found a CEO can be most useful.

So that’s I guess that’s my superpower somehow. Unblocking and driving forward and connecting dots. I don’t know what the superpower cape would be for now.

Richard Medcalf
Well, actually, a few things come to mind there, actually. So first of all, there is, in my book, I have a chapter called, are you Superman or Batman? And originally, I was like, you know, because basically you want I originally thought, well, you want to be Superman and not Batman because Superman is like the real deal. You know, he’s like authentically, you know, like that’s who he is. And Batman kind of like, you know, assembles this personality, right? He kind of builds his gear. But then I thought the other way around, well, actually, it should be Batman and not Superman because Batman actually, kind of creates himself, you know, and, like, levels up, where Superman actually dials himself down as it becomes Clark Kent and kind of melts into the background for a hard time. So I actually realized you could probably be both. So I think almost this conversation is, you know, perhaps you’re more like a Batman figure where actually you’ve basically said this is what I need to create in order to drive this business that I care about. You know, I care about Gotham City or whatever it is.

Right? And therefore, I need my bat cape and my bat suit. I need to make these things happen to get there. So it’s just a different perspective. But I would say when I and I work with these leaders, CEOs founder I mean, founder CEOs do create value in very distinct ways. They don’t always see it, Because often it’s like, it’s just it’s just who we are, and we think it’s normal. So I suppose, I think I really believe what you said. I think it is like being the one that cares the most is, you know, is like a rocket fuel right inside and and it really, really matters. And I think that comes out.

And I would have thought it was a bit of homework. I’d always say, like, go back, over the last 6 months or year, and write down three moments where you feel you added the most value. These 3 specific situations where you know what? Like, if I just done those three things last year, it would have, like, I would have got 80% of the way there anyway, just if I made those three movements. What I find when I talked to one client, it was like, oh, yeah. I’ve made these deals, you know, like these 2, you know, with another one was, oh, you know what it was? Whenever I’m in my zone, I’m inspiring people by my personal kind of credibility and my vision. And it’s just those moments where I get to speak and inspire. And that are the game changers for me. Somebody else one of my other clients, you know, he’s like brain signs of a planet and will, you know, just seize business models, business opportunities like ecosystems that he could put together that nobody else is even thinking about.

And he knows that, like, when he just comes up with that model, that’s his value. So they are different. Each of those are quite different in design. I suspect yours is different as well. So I would encourage you to look for it because when you find it, like, you might realize that a lot of the other stuff you do, you do because you care, but it might not be that kind of magic.

Rebecca Harrison
Oh, I no. I agree. I don’t I don’t think it means you need I don’t think caring the most means that you should do everything at all. So there there there’s definitely there’s there’s certainly things, for example, I I know I’m not good at and and I wouldn’t do. So I I don’t think it’s the same as saying, oh, I I I care the most, so I must do everything, or I must be involved in everything. Not not at all. I think it’s more this this momentum ability to to kind of give momentum, and unblock and use your bird’s eye view to to connect these dots. That I think is where in general, a kind of a a founder CEO can add a huge amount of value.

I really like your your Batman and Superman kind of analogy, though, that because one one one kind of side of the whole founder kind of mystique and, like, whole tech bro kind of culture that has always bothered me is this idea of these superheroes that somehow fall out of the sky with this unique set of characteristics and that you’re born, you know, you’re you’re born that way, which I really think is nonsense and and a bit of a myth. And and so I I much I think I prefer the maybe the Batman analogy of, like, putting, you know, taking resources as you come across them and and being opportunistic and and piecing together what you’re good at, your your strengths, but also then going out and and, you know, finding complementing that with great people, using resources that you’ve got, networks that you have, you know, kind of using what’s there to construct something unique and and fantastic and and kind of hopefully world changing, I guess. Stretching the Batman analogy, but, you know what I mean.

Richard Medcalf
I hope you’re enjoying this conversation. This is just a quick interlude to remind you that my book, Making Time For Strategy, is now available. If you wanna be less busy and more successful, I highly recommend that you check it out. Why not head over to making time for strategy.com to find out the details? Now back to the conversation. Yeah. Beautiful. So let’s change gears again here, Becker. I’d love to speak about, how you your own journey about building middle management because, you know, I know you said that was a bit of a journey in itself.

It was a key layer. Right? You’ve got your executives, then you got to build these middle managers. And I know that you’re saying it’s ironic because they’re obviously all about management and yet that’s not necessarily the easy thing to do. And I’ve I know many SAP founders and CEOs who do kind of struggle with the kind of, you know, they spend a lot of time at the executive layer. They’re not quite sure how to how to do that middle layer. So kind of what’s your journey been around that, and, like, what advice would you give, you know, what would be your top three tips for for other leaders who are thinking about how they get more out of their middle layer?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a it’s a great question. And I often joke that, you know, management is literally a middle name and yet still took us a while to figure out how to do it. It’s much easier to teach it turns out than to actually practice. So we have loads of great programs on management, but took us a while to to learn how to do it ourselves. I think so three tips. I think one is that really and we encourage our clients with this as well, is to develop a language around what management means in your organization.

And I think, you know, I I I think for early stage companies, this is perhaps less important, but pretty quickly, as you start to think about kind of culture and building good culture, you you need that kind of language around, around management. So we we, like, really early on just made this kind of had a had a separate little onboarding track for managers with this simple one pager on, what does it mean to be a manager at AMI? Which sounds so simple, but just we realized that there was this it’s this vague word, right, that we use in so many different ways, and that means quite different things to different people, particularly across cultural context. So remember, we’re an international team working in, you know, we have teams in 9 markets in Africa who all have a different understanding of what management means. So just writing down, if you are people manager, this is what we expect of you. And so I think going through that and and, of course, to get to the one page that took a lot of thinking and and had to distill a lot of ideas. So I think I always we always encourage our clients to do that is to really think about, you know, what does management mean to you and develop a kind of shared language around that and and shared understanding of what it looks like. And that can be calibrated to the kind of stage that you are as a business. Obviously, big businesses, you know, have lots of models for this and smaller businesses can be a little more relaxed about it.

Yeah. So that first first point is, you know, developing a shared understanding and language around management. The second is, obviously, you know, it’s it’s become almost a bit of a cliche to say you kind of hire for culture, culture eats strategy for breakfast, all of these things. Culture is absolutely critical when you’re building a company, but particularly even more so for your middle management. And I think we made the mistake of, you know, really focusing on that kind of senior hire and then like just kind of letting everyone get on with it. And we realized that we really needed to embed hiring for culture and values into I mean, across the whole organization, but particularly for, managers, middle managers. And we realized that when we compromised on that, that had has ripple effects very, very quickly through a whole, you know, through a whole vertical. I mean, you can certainly look and see, you might you you know, you can have a whole team that suddenly is out of sync with the rest of the organization because you haven’t got that kind of the key manager, right, from a culture perspective.

Richard Medcalf
And what does it mean to hire for culture and values?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. So I I mean, I guess, first, it’s been clear about your what what your values are. I’m sure you’ve talked to your clients at length about this, but, you know, we went through quite an extensive process identifying what our values were. We workshopped that with the team a long time ago now, probably 8 or 9 years ago. And and then we’ve kind of built them out over the years to really try and, I guess, codify what do those values mean day to day. So one of our values is, for example, own it. And we found particularly in our context where we had a lot of people coming in who were used to a more hierarchical style of, organizational style and management, were used to being told what to do and just delivering inputs, basically. Delivering what they would been told to do rather than taking ownership or a result or an outcome.

And so we made that really one of our core values for and and it’s still one of our core values, but really, arguably, one of them are the most important. And so really, you know, working out, well, what does that mean? That means, you know, when you’re asked to do something, you don’t stop until you deliver. If you need to, you know, work late to do it, you work late to do it. Just like very, very kind of specific things. And then we basically have taken those values and then work them into our whole kind of hiring process. There we have questions, hiring questions mapped to each value that go into every interview. We have a kind of scoring mechanism for those, and then we have a final for anything kind of manage middle manager and above, we have a final culture interview that myself and my cofounder do or or someone else if we’re not available. So, yeah, we’ve been pretty written about about culture, particularly from a kind of middle management perspective.

Richard Medcalf
Beautiful. So I think that was 2. Right? So we got language and really build out that language and philosophy around, middle management. And then, yeah, hiring for culture and values, I think really great examples about practical, practical examples around the means to own it, and you have the values and have the behaviors and really kinda make it crystal clear for people what that is. What was the third one, Katie?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. And the third yeah. 3rd, most important given what we do is is develop your managers, which sounds so obvious, but yet so many people still fail to do it. And I don’t I mean, I speak to a client almost every week who says, it’s always the same. Oh, yeah. We have great you know, we have really good technical people who we promoted, and now they’re managing a team, but, you know, they’re not doing so well. And we realized, yeah, that’s because they don’t know how to manage people. You know? And and, again, others have talked about this at length.

I’m sure you work on this with your clients. But, you know, just because people are good at that job doesn’t mean that they’re good at getting other people to do their jobs. You know, someone can deliver results, but can you get results to other people? It’s a really different skill. And so really being intentional about developing those specific skills, and and that not everyone needs to be on that track. It’s not right for everyone to manage other people.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. That’s yeah. It’s it’s a great point. I remember one of, the earlier guests on the podcast actually saying, he was actually the, Ben Page, the chief executive of, Mori. Well, ITZOS, I think it’s called now. ITZOS, globally. And he said that when they did research on managers and and leaders, he said, everyone always says the same thing. It’s just that the difference is the good ones actually do the stuff.

Like, they, like, they actually, like, have one to ones with their team. Like, and I said, you know, they actually they actually develop their leaders. You know? They they actually coach rather than micromanage, etcetera, etcetera. And it’s really interesting that that was, like, really came out in the data when they looked at it.

Rebecca Harrison
So so key. In fact, our our whole kind of learning methodology, not to go into too much detail, but, you know, most management training or most kind of workplace learning fails because it starts with this kind of it starts with a framework or a concept or an idea or a piece of knowledge, and it fails to kind of translate into what you actually do day in, day out, those kind of micro behaviors, that like having a regular one on one with your team. So what we actually did when we we realized that, you know, so much 1,000,000,000 of dollars just in Africa every year is wasted on kind of obsolete training and its work. We said, well, let’s start with the behavior or even better the business practice in a small business. So we started by mapping out and looking at the evidence, you know, what actually drives small business growth for small businesses and what drives good, employee and manager behavior, you know, across kind of, you know, cross cutting soft skill type, you know, and mapped out what does the evidence say that these are, what have we seen in our experience, and and kind of mapped out a set of behaviors and practices, and then work backwards. So every

Richard Medcalf
Can you give some examples? So, like, what are those tangible focus on?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. So in a small for when we’re working with small businesses, we have kind of 5 practice areas around managing money, managing markets and customers, managing people, managing operations, and having a strategy and a plan planning, basically. And those and what a typical training program would do is say, oh, I will teach you about cash flow. This is how cash works. This is how cash flow flows through a business. Here’s some kind of a video to watch about it. Now go and now go and manage cash flow in your business. And most people can’t make that conceptual behavioral leap from, oh, someone’s told me what cash flow is to what do I do in my business.

So we start with, okay, do you or don’t you forecast your cash flow every month? Yes or no? There’s there’s no middle ground. Yes. You do every month or you don’t. And if you don’t, well, tick circle that one. That’s one you need to work on. And here is a tool that will, show you how to forecast cash flow with a little video and then kind of some reminders to do it. So it’s focused on those kind of day in, day out. On on the on the employee side, on the workplace learning side, management side, it might be something like, do you do 1 on ones with your team regularly? You know, do you do you have a, you know, at least say biweekly 1 on 1 with your team? If you don’t, circle that.

That’s something you should be doing. Here is a framework for how you do 1 on ones. You know, we do a kind of a a simulation, some workshops, practice doing it. But the focus is on doing those things, not on learning about what it might be like to do a 1 on 1 one one day or why performance management is important. Those things just don’t translate into kind of behavior change. So we start with the so to your point on the differences doing it, a 100% like execution every time. Right? So let’s get executing. Let’s, like, get doing it, immediately.

Richard Medcalf
Beautiful. So tell me about let’s go into the future, very briefly as we wrap up here. What would, how do you want AMI to multiply its impact over the next few years? Like, if we’re having this call in 3 to 5 years’ time, what would you love to be different in in how you’re operating the business or what you’ve achieved?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. We’re really excited about what’s ahead. We feel like we were a bit of inflection points, with the business where our impact is so clear. We’ve been able to collect data and tell those stories of how what we do kind of changes businesses, so effectively, that we’re, really ready to scale up. And, also, there’s been some changes just in our kind of the the particular markets that we’re in, in our corporate market, for example, like COVID. As much as I hate saying those silver linings to COVID, there there were some. And and one of them was that it massively accelerated digital adoption across Africa, particularly in urban markets. So, where we used to have to we we were building the market for digital learning.

We were having to explain to customers why this might be a good thing to consider. Now it’s become the default option. So we’re really seeing fantastic growth. We’ve seen kind of almost a 100% year on year growth on our on our corporate business, and we’ve started to be able to reach much greater scale on our work kind of SME business. So we’re really poised for rapid growth. We’re actually raising some external capital. We’ve been mostly internally funded so far, but raising some external capital now, from, Impact Investors and, aiming to scale up the business by about 10 x over the next 5 years, to be Africa’s leading learning company for business. And, yeah, it’s exciting.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. It is. And and my my favorite question, which I have to ask every guest really is, like, how are you gonna need to evolve and level up yourself for you to multiply your impact, in accordance with that business? Like, what what’s your edge and learning curve going forward?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. I mean, I I spent a lot of time thinking about this over the last few years as we really, you know, at this inflection point, you start thinking about naturally, you know, like, is what’s my role for the next 5 years? And am I the right person to carry this forward? I decided yes. And and but but, of course, there’s a learning curve. And I think for me, what’s been big the last few years is I realized that I think I held my I’ve I’ve held myself back previously due to kind of fear of failure and fear of somehow, am I doing this the right way? You know, there’s no playbook when you’re building a business, but but we we we still yearn for the playbook and and and kind of feel like, well, am I am I doing this right? Do other other people think or you know? And and I realized I kind of had a bit of a moment, over the last few years that, you know, really, we don’t no one knows. We’re we’re doing this for the first time. No one has ever built, you know, a scaled up digital learning business in Africa before. It doesn’t exist, so no one knows how to do it. I probably know better than anyone else at this point because I’ve been doing it for 10 years.

And and and I’ve honed the the kind of instincts, to know not necessarily what’s right, but to have a good sense of what might be right and to be able to listen to the market and and the the kind of market dynamics, to be able to then pivot. And and so I think, for me, really, the big learning and has been to to embrace courage, I think, to grow, to and and to give up this idea of, you know, it’s it’s not really about me and whether I do it well, or or me and my personal performance and, you know, oh, what if I mess it up? And I think once you try and once you can let go of that, actually, you’re freed up to take more risks, to think bigger, to do what the market is telling you, not what you think that maybe you should be doing because some, you know, business professor said that’s the way it should be done. So I I don’t know if that’s really

Richard Medcalf
Well, it’s fascinating looking at, yeah, looking at that shift. So I guess I’d I’d ask it in other ways. Yeah. So, like, given that, right, given how you realize you don’t have to follow somebody else’s playbook, what might we what’s what what might be that one little tweak that you might need to kind of focus on? Because normally, we we do what made us successful last year and know what’s gonna make us successful next year. And so the Rebecca who builds this 10 x business is gonna be different from the Rebecca that got it to here. I’m just gonna be wondering what what what ideas you might have. And you might not have it right now, but I’m kinda curious as to what comes to mind when I say that.

Rebecca Harrison
No. And I think yeah. And I think this is that’s what I’m trying to get at, I guess, is this sense that I think the shift for me that has allowed us to get to to this point has has been to say, actually, there is a big opportunity. We and and we’re the ones to seize it. So almost having that, like, a bolder, more courageous kind of approach to the problem we’re trying to solve, rather than worrying too much about, like, well, is it you know, what what if this doesn’t work? What if we’re not meant to be doing it like that? How do we do it? Like, that’s slightly kind of overanalytical or kind of maybe second guessing or, honestly, I think just too much fear of failure. That for me has been the big shift that I think will take us into, you know, the next phase. There are a million things we’re gonna have to learn to get that right data. Right? I mean, so I need you know, I’m talking all the time to CEOs who are running bigger companies than me, thinking about I mean, you know, we we this year, crossed the 100 person mark.

We’re at a 130 people now. And, you know, I’m I’m a very relationship driven manager realizing that, you know, I can’t lead by direct relationship anymore. You know, I can’t I don’t know anyone everyone’s name anymore. That’s gonna take a different kind of style personally realizing that, you know, we have to scale through process. We can’t just scale through grit and hustle and hiring good people. We need to build in kind of replicable processes. You know? Those kind of things. So, yeah, I think I mean, there are a million things to learn, but for me, that core kind of shift is around, you know, giving up your own sense of, like, am I doing the right thing? Might I fail? And I will focus on, you know, singular focus on the mission of the business and having the courage to reach, I guess, and to to aim high and to build.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Wholeheartedly. Yeah. Definitely. Be part of the 10 x mindset. So love loving loving hearing you talking about that. Hey. It’s been a great conversation, and we probably have a time.

So before we go, where can people kinda find out more about you or about AMI?

Rebecca Harrison
Yeah. So, our website’s www. Africanmanagers.com. African with an n in the middle, managers.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. If yeah. Feel free, anyone, to to reach out and ping me if you think we should be working together or collaborating. I love talking about business building, leadership, Africa, all of those good things.

So, yeah, I would love to engage.

Richard Medcalf
Perfect. Well, hey. It’s been a lot of fun, and it’s been great to reconnect in this way after 25 years, a quarter of a of a century. Right? Would you believe? So it’s a bit late. But, it’s been great. Alright. Best of luck. I look forward to continuing, following along on your journey.

And thanks again.

Rebecca Harrison
Thanks so much, Richard. It’s an absolute pleasure. Cheers.

Richard Medcalf
Well, that’s a wrap. If you received value from this conversation, please do leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. We deeply appreciate it. And if you’d like to check out the show notes from this episode, head to xpudrent.com/podcast where you’ll find all the details. Now, finally, when you’re in top leadership, who supports and challenges you at a deep level to help you multiply your impact? Discover more about the different ways we can support you at xquadrant.com.