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| Image (c) Ruka Sanusi |
Ruka
Sanusi is the brain behind Alldens Lane, comprising business advisers with a
unique focus on providing coaching services to female entrepreneurs in Africa’s
small and growing business sector. Through an iterative coaching process,
Alldens Lane provides female business owners with business direction, balanced
support and thought provoking business performance and growth analysis to
transform their business. Here is Ruka's story, in her own words.
Interestingly, I never planned a career in gender
advocacy. I planned a fabulous
international career in international development, and then later in management
consultancy. But The Creator was and
continues to be gracious to me and through Alldens Lane has provided me with an
even more fabulous life – a life in which I get to daily connect with
remarkable, determined women CEOs and entrepreneurs (tomorrow’s business
leaders, I call them), and a life in which I am privileged to support them
through an executive and business coaching process, to bring their business
aspirations alive.
My professional story began twenty years ago in the
UK, where I started my career. I worked
in international development for the first decade, travelling all over Africa
and supporting governments and predominantly public sector institutions on a
whole range of international development consulting topics across sections such
as economics and finance, development policy, private sector development, trade
and investment. A decade later, working
from Africa, my focus shifted more towards supporting private sector
institutions and corporations on issues of business strategy and business
operations.
And therein, somewhere along that path, came the
birth of Alldens Lane.
Alldens Lane was birthed through the demands and
relentless requests of female friends who owned their own businesses, and who,
knowing that I work with big business, continuously asked for business
advice. This I willingly and freely
provided over the years, but then five or six years into providing them with
support, a couple of them pulled together to encourage me to think about
working with women entrepreneurs and CEOs full time, noting that they and their
business had benefited greatly from my support and assistance over the
years. The more thought I gave to the
idea, the more sense it made.
And then one weekend, almost magically, the idea
blossomed. The name for the business,
the preferred clientele, systems
You see, ordinarily, a lot of women start a business
out of passion; but yet they have very little business management or operations
skills. Whilst a passion can sustain you
for a while, you will reach a stage where the lack of business know-how will be
a stumbling block to your business operations and growth. And that is really how I began – supporting
women in business and CEOs to think strategically about their business, and
helping them to apply and integrate international best practice tools and norms
into their business operations
Key challenges along the journey? Well, firstly, having to demonstrate that
there is value, real, added value, to what I do. The very notion of business coaching is very
new particularly in West Africa, but not so new in East and West Africa. As such, from the outset I had to devise an
operational strategy that would comprise a lot of advocacy and demonstrating
value. My quarterly Thought Leadership
events were free, and in the beginning I heavily discounted fee rates. But that was a strategy, for I knew that I
could demonstrate value to each client that I worked with. 6 months later, they provided testimonials of
the benefit of my executive and business coaching to them and their
business. We recorded the video
interviews of the testimonials, and we showed this at the next Thought
Leadership event – that really set the ball rolling.
So I guess the key issue and challenge was working
hard to demonstrate added value to clients.
I continue to make that my focus and continuous objective. The next challenge to be conquered is scaling
the business.
Primarily I think women just want to live the lives
they have dreamed. The women I work with
have tremendous ability, capability, ideas and so on – and quite simply they
just want to get on living their business dreams. The challenge is that sometimes culture and
societies may want to stop them from living that dream, or they themselves are
crippled with fear as to whether or not they’ll succeed with what they want to
do.
So to my mind their challenge as women is twofold –
societal or cultural constraints, and constraints around self-belief or
fear. Both of these, thankfully, can be
overcome. I think what we are ignoring
is that fact that although there are traditionally clearly defined roles in
society for men, and clearly defined roles for women in society, these roles
are now less clearly defined. This can
bring a lot of societal and domestic friction – imagine the battle Emmeline
Pankhurst (the British political activist and leader of the British suffragette
movement who helped women win the right to vote) had to fight. It is this societal friction, and how to ease
the friction successfully, collaboratively and inclusively with other women,
men and society at large, is what we need to focus on. This is the battle that we all have to see
the benefit of, and win, in so many areas – whether that is in women’s
reproductive health, access to education for women and girls, access to
financing and banking loans for women etc.
I believe that our lives are not without
purpose. I am passionate about purpose –
very purpose driven personally and professionally. Before I enter into any venture I will always
ask what the purpose, the bigger picture, of this friendship, this
relationship, this new business idea, is.
As such, my dream and my desire for the women that I work with, is to
support them to attain economic empowerment through entrepreneurs, equipping
them with business management and leadership skills to operate their businesses
professionally and successfully – thereby transforming their businesses, and
their lives.
To
know more about Alldens Lane, log onto any of the following:
Webpage: www.alldenslane.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/alldenslane
Twitter : @alldenslane
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