Nobody to Ask
Theo Baloyi opened 24 stores during a pandemic that was closing everyone else down. He could do it because he had taken no outside money, and so there was nobody who could tell him not to.
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Every edition, ordered from newest to oldest. Filter by the industries shaping the country.
The Recipe Under the Bed
George Sombonos built the largest non-American fried chicken chain in the world on a $1,000 untested recipe. The lesson is what he chose to own, and what he deliberately let other people own instead.
Read the edition→Her Name on the Line
A loan shark funded the first Tashas. Twenty years later, a war in the Middle East nearly took it away. The thread running through both is the one thing most founders treat as soft: people.
Read the edition→A Cheeky Bet
How two men who knew nothing about restaurants took peri-peri chicken to the world. The lesson is not the chicken. It is the decision to build a brand before they had a business.
Read the edition→How Yoco Made Small Merchants Worth Serving
Yoco did not win by inventing card payments. It rebuilt the economics, the onboarding and the trust around the independent businesses the banks had quietly written off.
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