Always stay curious

Peter Njonjo, Chief Executive Officer at Twiga Foods

On weekdays I get up at 5 am and workout, either at home or at Jaffery’s Sports Club. I then get ready for work and have breakfast with my children before they head out to school. I have four children – 3, 6, 9 and a 14-year-old.

Twiga Foods sources quality produce from Kenyan farmers and delivers to vendors in urban areas and my role as CEO entails ensuring that we have a strategy that helps us achieve value creation for our shareholders, building a network of stakeholders, and developing people because at the end of the day, the organisation is only as good as its people. I figure out how to continuously develop them and help them be the best they can ever be.

During the day, I have lots of meetings just to get to understand where the organisation is, visit retail customers, go to our park houses to see how things are working there. The day is also spent brainstorming on what we need to do to make the business even more successful. The days at work are normally long, sometimes up to 7 or 8pm.

What I love most about what I do is the opportunity to innovate. We’re solving problems every day that we feel will help the company create the impact that it needs to. The other thing is getting to meet different people, getting to understand different perspectives and learning as a result. It is also inspiring to see the impact of what we do. When I visit farmers who could not access markets before and they share their stories about how Twiga has helped them improve their livelihood, that for me is very inspiring; or when I meet mama mboga who was having a very tough time waking up at 4 am everyday going to the market to buy produce, and for us to be able to deliver produce to her, that is something that I am really proud of.

One of the challenges we face is right now is the fact that the country is grappling with the impact of climate change. Before the rains started we had a prolonged drought and that had a huge impact on food pricing. Another challenge we face is that many young people have moved away from agriculture because they see it as something for older people, and they don’t see it as something that can provide gainful employment.

I prefer an empowering leadership style because if I micromanage, I am subjecting the whole organisation to the limit of my capabilities, which means that if I am making all the decisions, then the company will only be good as my capabilities, then there is really no need for hiring smart people. But if you hire smart people, smarter than even you are as a CEO, then the subtotal of everything that they do makes the company greater. Allowing people to make mistakes, letting people make certain decisions, is very important because if they learn from those mistakes then essentially the organisation improves.

Early in my career, I always liked analysing things, finding problems and things that are not working and took such joy in presenting them to my boss. One time he told me that if I brought him one more problem he would fire me. I became so afraid of sharing problems again that I always looked for a solution first. In that I got the best advice that has helped me thus far – always be part of the solution.

The best advice I’d give is always stay curious. When you stay curious, you read more because you want to find out why things work the way they do, you experiment more because you’re always trying to find different ways of doing things, and you’re always not satisfied with the status quo. I would never have discovered Twiga if I was not curious. That mindset allows you discover so many things and will help you improve because the more curious you are, the more you try to find solutions and the more it differentiates you from everybody else, and the more consumers or customers can see value in whatever you are selling.

In the evening when I get home, if the children are awake we’ll discuss our days. I am very lucky because my wife looks after them on a fulltime basis. I really appreciate what she does because if she couldn’t do that I wouldn’t be able to do what I do in terms of the number of hours I am able to put in the business. I watch very little TV. Before I sleep I’ll listen to an audio book and by 11 pm, I’m in bed.

I’m currently listening to The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone, a biography of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Every week I listen to a book. I read a lot of articles as well, and the last great one I read was on PitchBook, a platform that reports what’s happening in the venture capital space. The article was about the journey that different companies had taken from when they were founded to when they listed on the stock market. Reading such stories is inspirational because Twiga is a company that’s both venture capital funded and very reliant on technology for growth.

My Saturdays are unstructured. I can play golf, hang out with my family at home or invite friends over for dinner. I have just been in Kenya for two and a half months. I was based in Nigeria for three years, so I am still getting my rhythm back. Sundays, on the other hand, are very structured. By 9am we are in church, then we have brunch and chat, and in the evening we’ll order takeout food.