A Simuka Advisory Partners argument about what firms are actually paying for
← Back to ThinkingSomething is shifting in how African firms buy advice. For a long time the safe choice was the global brand — the recognised name on the cover of the report, the comfort that no executive was ever criticised for hiring it. That comfort had real value in a market where information was scarce and a brand was the best available proxy for quality. But a proxy is not the thing it stands for, and a growing number of African firms are learning to ask the question the proxy was always standing in for: not "who has the biggest name?" but "who will be accountable for the result?"
When a client hires a global brand, part of what it pays for is signalling — a defensible choice, cover for a difficult decision, a logo that lends authority to a recommendation that might otherwise be questioned. It would be dishonest to pretend that has no value; reputational insurance is a real product. But set the signalling aside and look at the delivery. Often it is a senior partner at the pitch and a team of able but junior generalists doing the work; a framework refined on the problems of frontier-economy corporations; and an engagement that concludes with a thorough document and a handshake. The deliverable is analysis. What happens next is the client's problem.
The real value of expertise is not the framework — frameworks are now largely commoditised and freely available. It is the judgement about which framework matters here, and which of a firm's many problems is the one actually holding it back. That judgement is contextual, and it is senior; it does not come out of a template or a first-year analyst's workbook. The hardest part of good advice is knowing what to ignore, and that discrimination is precisely what experience buys. It is tested not in the elegance of the diagnosis but in the delivery — in staying through implementation, which is where the genuine difficulty lives and where most reports quietly expire.
There is a simple test for whether an engagement created value: did it leave the firm more capable, or more dependent? If management is a technology — something that can be specified, taught, and adopted — then the highest form of advisory is not to hand over an answer but to transfer the practice, so the capability remains in the building after the advisor has gone. An engagement that leaves the client needing to come back for the next answer, and the one after that, has quietly confused dependency for a business model. The better question a buyer can ask is plain: when you leave, what stays?
Ask what the advisor is actually measured on. The prevailing model is measured, in the main, on outputs — the report delivered, the workshop facilitated, the recommendation made. The question African firms are increasingly asking is whether the advisor is measured on outcomes — on what the numbers do after the team has left the building. An advisor willing to be judged that way makes different choices almost automatically: fewer engagements, more senior time on each, a longer presence, and a real stake in the result rather than in the deck.
Frameworks carry assumptions, usually unstated. A playbook built on the realities of a frontier-economy multinational — deep capital markets, an abundant pool of trained managers, infrastructure that simply works — can mislead badly when it is applied unaltered to a firm that enjoys none of those givens. This is not an argument that global expertise is irrelevant; it is an argument that it has to be re-earned in context. The value lies in the translation, and translation requires advisors who genuinely know both the frontier and the ground beneath the specific firm.
None of this is an argument against expertise. It is an argument for it, properly defined. The brand was a useful proxy in an information-poor market; as that market matures — as founders, chief executives, and investors learn to ask sharper questions — the proxy loses its grip and the underlying quality is what commands a price. That is a good development for African firms, and a demanding one for the people who advise them, ourselves included. It rewards depth over recognition, senior judgement over leverage, and results over reports.
The question is no longer which name reassures the board. It is who will still be in the room when the work turns hard, and who will be accountable for the number once they have finally left. Africa's firms are learning to ask it — and the answer, increasingly, is not the global brand.