Venture capital and private equity have long prized speed. Gene Grand, an investor who has spent years navigating market entry across East Africa, argues that the continent’s regulated markets reward a different rhythm entirely, and that the strongest returns go to companies willing to move deliberately rather than quickly.

The standard playbook for market entry rewards speed: identify the opportunity, raise capital, deploy quickly, and iterate once operations are already running. Grand’s argument is that this playbook, developed largely in less regulated markets, transfers poorly to African contexts where regulatory infrastructure carries real weight.

Businesses that spend six to twelve months genuinely understanding the Kenyan market before committing capital, in Grand’s assessment, consistently outperform those that compress this process into weeks. The reasoning is not simply that preparation takes time. It is that understanding the operating environment, building local teams and establishing sound management structures during this period are the foundations that make subsequent scaling both faster and more durable.

“A company that spends a year understanding the market before it launches is not moving slowly,” Grand has said. “It is moving deliberately. Those are different things, and investors who confuse the two consistently misjudge which companies are actually built to last.”

What deliberate entry protects against

Grand sets out three specific risks that a compressed timeline typically produces. Market-entry mistakes made in the rush to launch, from mispriced products to the wrong distribution partners, can take years to correct and sometimes outlast the capital raised to fund the original expansion. Teams assembled in haste, without adequate time for proper vetting, often lack the depth needed when the market turns difficult. Systems built for an initial, smaller scale frequently strain and fail once transaction volume increases, precisely because the additional months that would have allowed for more robust design were treated as an unaffordable luxury.

This pattern is consistent with broader research on growth strategy across industries generally. Companies pursuing growth at all costs, without adequate attention to organisational capability, frequently fail to sustain that growth over the long term, with research across thousands of companies finding that most firms barely grow once inflation is accounted for, while a smaller group that grows deliberately and sustainably captures a disproportionate share of long-term value. Grand applies a version of the same logic specifically to African market entry: growth achieved by skipping foundational work rarely proves durable.

Why local competition makes patience essential

Gene Grand’s case for deliberate entry rests partly on a further observation: African markets are frequently underestimated as competitive environments. International entrants sometimes assume they are moving into relatively unsophisticated territory, when in reality local competitors have often developed sharper strategic instincts and stronger operational discipline out of necessity, having built their businesses without the cushion of external capital that international entrants typically enjoy. Broader research on emerging-market competition supports this pattern more generally, finding that leadership positions in fast-growing developing economies are considerably harder to sustain than in high-income markets, precisely because local competitive intensity is often underestimated by new entrants.

Frameworks developed specifically for navigating unfamiliar market institutions reinforce the same conclusion: identifying and responding to gaps in local market infrastructure, rather than assuming those gaps do not exist or can be worked around quickly, is what separates entrants who build lasting positions from those who do not.

What patient operators actually do differently

“The investors who get this right are not the ones who move fastest,” Gene Grand has said. “They are the ones who spend real time on diligence, take longer to build local teams properly, and refuse to compress governance structures just because a fundraising timeline is putting pressure on them to move.”

This preference for deliberate, foundation-first development is not confined to the private sector. Even at the level of national fiscal policy, African governments are increasingly being encouraged to move away from reactive, short-term financing arrangements toward more durable, self-sustaining systems built over a longer horizon, rather than continuing to rely on financing structures that solve immediate pressures without addressing underlying capacity. Grand sees this as the same principle operating at a different scale: durable value, whether at the level of a single company or an entire economy, tends to be the product of patient construction rather than the avoidance of short-term discomfort.

“Institutional investors are increasingly recognising this distinction,” Grand has said, “and rewarding patient, well-prepared operators with stronger valuations and considerably longer runway.”

For investors and operators evaluating African market entry, Grand’s recommendation is straightforward: treat the pre-launch period as an investment in its own right, not as time that could otherwise have been spent generating revenue. The businesses built during a genuinely deliberate entry process are, in his assessment, considerably more likely to still be growing several years on.