Vision Works with Sarah

If I put MK10 million into a business and disappear while you spend three years managing staff, finding customers, solving problems, and keeping the doors open...
‼️How should we split ownership of the business?👀

If your salary is your only source of income...
you get paid 12 times a year.
🤔
⚠️How many times does money leave your account in a year? 👀

If money is leaving daily...
at some point you should start asking
how to make it daily too🤷🏼‍♀️

Kodi kukhala ndi ndalama kumayambira pa zingati??

36 Days to 90
We are at MK604,800
Good morning 🥳💃

⚠️Business Lesson #101
Don't hire anyone you're not prepared to fire.
Because the day performance and relationships collide...
things get very educational.🤧

⚠️Social media has confused everybody. So help us.
How do you recognize someone
who has money...👀
without asking to see their bank balance?

‼️What I Would Do Differently Setting Up My Business Now vs 5 Years Ago

Five years ago, I thought business was about how things looked.🤦🏼‍♀️

Now I understand it’s about how things move.

And in this environment, those are two very different realities.

1️⃣. I would stop choosing aesthetics over demand proof

Five years ago, I would spend time perfecting logos, colour palettes, Instagram grids, and brand “feel” before I even knew if anyone actually wanted what I was selling.

It felt like progress. It wasn’t.

Now I would do the opposite.

I would first ask:

Does anyone actually want this?

Will anyone exchange money for this today?

Can I prove demand with real transactions, not opinions?

Because in this market, beautiful ideas don’t fail.

Unvalidated ideas do.

Aesthetic is not validation. Cash flow is.

2️⃣. I would design for how money actually moves, not how theory says it should move

Earlier me would design a “perfect payment system.”

Now me knows perfect systems don’t matter if they don’t match reality.

I would build around:
mobile money first (Airtel Money / Mpamba)
cash where necessary & flexible payment timing where income is unpredictable

Because people don’t fail to buy because they are unwilling.

They fail to buy because the structure doesn’t match their financial rhythm.

I will match the harvest or monthly pay cycles were possible

3️⃣. I would treat business as distribution first, branding later

Earlier me thought branding was the starting point.

Now I know branding is what happens after something is already moving.

First:
Can it sell?
Can it move without me forcing it?
Can it survive real behaviour?

Then:
We refine how it looks
We sharpen the message
We scale the identity

Not the other way around.

Let’s just say,

Five years ago, I was building businesses for how I wished the world worked.

Now I build for how it actually works here.

And that difference changes everything.

Survival in entrepreneurship is not about the best idea.

It’s about the most grounded ex*****on

if you had to rebuild your business today with only what actually works on the ground, what would you differently?

What’s one business you saw online and thought “this one will print money”
👀
Only to discover that theory and Malawi market conditions
are not on speaking terms 🤧

I sometimes think I graduated from the ultimate Malawi school of entrepreneurship.

Not because I built some wildly successful company.

Not because I raised capital, exited a startup, or appeared on a "30 Under 30" list.

Mostly because I have tried things.

A lot of things.

Enough things to have accumulated the kind of experience that only comes from repeatedly saying, "This seems like a good idea," and then discovering that Malawi has other plans.

Looking back, every business venture taught me something different. But the lesson that keeps returning is surprisingly simple:

The business is usually the easy part.

The ecosystem is where the plot thickens.

When people talk about entrepreneurship, they tend to focus on ideas.

The App. Product. Service. Innovation. Market gap.

The thing itself.

But nobody tells you that once you start a business in Malawi, the business immediately becomes only one of many things demanding your attention.

The business may be selling products.

You, however, will be managing power cuts.

The business may be offering delivery services.

You, however, will be learning more about motorcycle maintenance than you ever intended.

The business may require employees.

You, however, will find yourself unexpectedly working in conflict resolution, counselling, negotiation, and occasionally detective work.

Somewhere along the way, entrepreneurship stops feeling like running a business and starts feeling like participating in a very elaborate social experiment.

I learned this lesson most vividly during COVID when we launched Anambewe, a delivery startup in Blantyre.

Like many first-time founders, we began with confidence.

An unhealthy amount of confidence, if I am being honest.

We had Ideas. Energy. Plans.

Most importantly, we had the conviction possessed only by people who have not yet encountered reality.

We believed we were building a delivery company.

What we were actually building was an education.

The motorcycles taught the first lessons.

In business plans, motorcycles are called assets.

In practice, they are highly emotional family members who require constant attention and financial support.

One week everything runs smoothly.

The following week a chain snaps.

A tyre gives up.

An engine develops a mysterious condition that no mechanic can properly explain.

Suddenly your growth strategy is sitting at a workshop while somebody tells you that replacing one small part somehow requires an amount of money capable of funding a small election campaign.

You begin the month discussing expansion.

You end it discussing spark plugs.

Then there were the riders.

Now before I continue, let me say this clearly.

Delivery riders work incredibly hard and the business would not have existed without them.

At the same time, managing people introduced an entirely different curriculum.

There are things business books never prepare you for.

For example, trying to establish the truth when a customer insists an order never arrived and a rider insists it absolutely did.

Or discovering that the phrase "I'm almost there" occupies a very flexible relationship with time and geography.

Or learning that every workplace contains disputes, misunderstandings, frustrations, ambitions and personalities that no spreadsheet can predict.

At some point I realised I was spending less time thinking about deliveries and more time thinking about human beings.

And that may be the most underrated lesson in entrepreneurship.

Businesses are rarely about products.

They are about people.

The other surprise was discovering how trust actually works.

The internet had convinced me that growth was about visibility.

Run advertisements. Build a brand. Create awareness. Generate leads.

What I found instead was that people trusted experiences more than campaigns.

A polite rider could generate more business than a sponsored advertisement.

A recommendation from a friend could outperform an entire marketing strategy.

A reputation built slowly over months carried more weight than anything we posted online.

The longer I spent building businesses, the more I realised that many of the frameworks we consume online are developed in environments very different from our own.

They assume certain things.

Reliable systems. Predictable infrastructure. Established consumer behaviour. Smooth operational processes.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurship in Malawi often feels like building while the ground beneath you is still deciding what shape it wants to take.

You adapt constantly.

You improvise frequently.

You learn to solve problems that were never included in the original plan.

And perhaps that is why I no longer judge entrepreneurial ventures purely by whether they succeed or fail.

Some ventures make money.

Some don't.

But almost all of them teach.

Looking back at Anambewe, I don't see a failed delivery startup.

I see one of the most expensive and valuable classrooms I have ever attended.

It taught me about systems, people, resilience and most importantly, it taught me humility.

Entrepreneurship has a way of introducing you to yourself.

It reveals how you respond when things break, plans change and money becomes tight.

At the same time the solution isn't obvious.

And in Malawi, those lessons arrive quicker than you can process.

There are entrepreneurs across this country quietly learning the same lessons.

They are running businesses, yes.

But they are also navigating infrastructure, regulations, logistics, staffing, customer expectations and a thousand other realities that never appear in the motivational videos.

They may not describe it this way.

But many of them are attending the same school.

The Malawi School of Entrepreneurship.

The tuition is painful.

The lessons are practical.

And graduation, as far as I can tell, never actually happens.

What's a lesson Malawi taught you that no business book ever could?