Twenty-plus years in sales and business development, most of it spent proving that "impossible market" is usually just marketing-speak for "nobody's tried properly yet." I've sat across the table from telcos, banks, large and small retail, hospitality, property developers and governments on three continents, led teams through both explosive growth and the kind of turnarounds that teach you humility fast, and picked up a healthy respect for what happens when a market leader gets too comfortable — looking at you, Nokia.
I've built channel and distributor networks from nothing, learned that leading leaders is a completely different sport from leading individual contributors, and sold everything from telecom infrastructure to the software stacks quietly running the world's biggest enterprises. I've lived and worked across South Africa, Uganda, Mozambique, the UAE, and — for the last few years — the UK, which means I've pitched, negotiated, and occasionally been humbled in more boardrooms and dialects than I can properly count.
The longer version
My career started in the commercial chaos of early-2000s sub-Saharan Africa — building a 4,000 sub-dealer channel network in Uganda from scratch, negotiating Nokia's official distributor status for the country, and learning very quickly that execution without a real ERP backbone is just optimism with a spreadsheet. That was Simba Telecom. Before it became one of East Africa's more recognisable mobile brands, it was a few of us and a business plan with more ambition than infrastructure.
Nokia came next, and stayed for nearly seven years — first in Mozambique as GM for Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands, then in Dubai leading Pan MEA and Eurasia. Front-row seat to one of the most extraordinary rises in telecoms history, followed by one of the most foreseeable declines anyone inexplicably failed to foresee. I watched a company with dominant market position, genuine engineering depth, and a brand that was genuinely loved decide, one strategic misstep at a time, that it knew better than its customers. It didn't. The Nokia series I've written here isn't a case study — it's a post-mortem from someone who was in the building while the fire started.
"The most dangerous position in business isn't being a challenger. It's being the leader who's stopped being curious."
Intelsat followed — RVP for Africa and MD — and then VAST Networks, where I stepped into a CEO/MD role and learned that running a business is a fundamentally different skill set from running a sales function inside one. Useful thing to know. Arriving in the UK in 2020, I joined Cisco and, in a year that involved a global pandemic and a complete reinvention of how enterprise technology gets sold, ended up in the Chairman's Club — top 1% of the global salesforce. I'll be honest: tripling managed services launch volumes through a primary UK service provider while the world was figuring out how to have meetings on a laptop balanced on a kitchen bin was not how I planned that year to go. But there it is.
Most recently, I am currently an EMEA Client Director at World Wide Technology, selling the software layer that large enterprises increasingly can't function without — data security and management, network orchestration, secrets management, and deploying on behalf of our customer Europe's largest horizontal private cloud. Complex, multi-stakeholder, multi-year deals. The kind where you're managing a CFO's objections on a Tuesday and a security architect's requirements on a Wednesday and trying to get legal to agree by Friday.
What I write about
That's the bit I bring to this blog: real deals, real regions, real scar tissue. I'm not here to repost vendor press releases or tell you that AI is going to change everything (it is, but that's not a hot take, that's a weather forecast). I write about the messy, unresolved, actually-useful parts of commercial leadership, brand strategy, and enterprise technology.
MEDDIC, platform selling, qualification frameworks — the actual mechanics of winning complex enterprise deals, not the LinkedIn-poster version.
How market leaders lose their edge, what challenger brands do differently, and why "we have the better product" is rarely the whole story.
Prompt engineering, AI-assisted workflows, and what the current wave of enterprise AI actually changes — as opposed to what vendors say it changes.
A seven-part insider post-mortem on one of the most instructive corporate collapses in tech history. Written by someone who was there.
Whether I'm unpacking why in-venue Wi-Fi is a harder sell than it sounds, or reflecting on prompt engineering like it's just another qualification framework, I try to bring lived experience, some analytical rigour, and enough curiosity to keep it honest. I also have an MBA, which means I occasionally deploy a strategic framework when a good anecdote would do the job just as well — I'm working on that.
If you're into the messy business of growth — commercial, personal, or digital — you're in the right place.
For those who prefer their biographies less edited — the unabridged version, with the full career timeline and rather more detail than most people probably need, is right here.
