About Us

In 2017, the year Sisal Frontier Strategies was founded, Jeff Bussgang of Harvard Business School used a metaphor in his new book Entering StartupLand, to describe the 3 stages a business passes through. The first stage begins in a jungle, where you’re hacking your way through every day, finding your product-market fit. The second stage is a bumpy and winding dirt road of business model iteration, and the final is the highway stage where you’ve figured out your business and are just executing.  

As a frontier markets advisory that works with companies between the “jungle” and “dirt road” phases, it seemed natural to tie the above metaphor to another partial inspiration for our company name: the basic business advice coined by Guy Kawasaki in his book Art of the Start. His advice is to “Weave a MAT” – or 3 lists consisting of Milestones, Assumptions and Tasks – when building a business. Like a sisal mat woven out of heavy rope, these 3 lists can begin to provide a structure to prioritize where debris – or the chaos inherent in an early stage business – might scatter, or, be effectively managed.

Focusing on these basics served us well in early ventures, and we have since ‘woven’ together our own creative, cross-disciplinary and systematic approach to problem solving to turn your challenges into opportunities for success.

This includes, for example, utilizing methodologies along the earlier stages of the “Innovation Spectrum“, as shown below, while taking a more bespoke approach to ensuring your business strategy, intentions, and actions align:

Sisal is a highly useful and resilient plant; a once major crop in East Africa where we were founded. There are lots of implied or inferred qualities about our services that we derive from qualities we appreciate about sisal.

For starters, sisal thrives in difficult environments all over the world, much like the services we have provided in countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa. It produces the longest and strongest natural plant fibers – not just for your front door mats – but also for fiberglass in high performance cars and ropes that hold battleships, representing our diversity of clients and business use cases.

Since sisal can be used to design intricate patterns that are both mathematically precise and artistically inspired, it should be no surprise that “design thinking” is at the core of what we do. In our emerging markets experience, succeeding with minimal resources and creating your minimum viable product – whether that means managing extra risk and uncertainty or pushing relentlessly to bring your new idea to market before you run out of cash – requires a clear and structured set of formal but context-specific approaches and mechanisms. As such, we are prepared to “weave” together different innovation methodologies, frameworks, and techniques that best fit the stage of your business as it aligns with the solution you hope will address a need or problem in any market.

To use such a sustainable fiber as sisal, however, one must first remove all the extraneous fleshy parts. Similarly, to reorganize and reallocate the resources of your company to achieve even greater levels of productivity, performance and profitability, we can help you get back to the fundamentals of your business by removing all the unnecessary distractions that cause daily challenges. Lastly, to us, the natural image of a plant evokes the thought of a more sustainable approach to running a business.