Mufambi Advisory
Think of it as a GP for businesses. I go in, listen to the symptoms, and find what's actually broken — not the surface version, the real one. With 20+ years across East and Southern Africa, I work with founder-led businesses, growing SMEs, and social enterprises where unspoken dynamics are stalling growth, draining morale, or killing execution. I surface what's really going on. Then I fix it.
Start a conversationWho I work with
Where the founder is the culture and sometimes the problem itself. Growth has outpaced the way the team was built, and the friction is starting to show in ways that are hard to talk about.
Teams that worked brilliantly at twenty people are breaking at sixty. Strategy is sound. Execution keeps stalling. The problem isn't the plan. It's the people dynamics underneath it.
Where mission and dysfunction are quietly at war. The values are real. The work matters. But something between leadership and the ground is not translating and everyone feels it.
How I work
I'm equally effective with the CEO and the janitor. The truth about what's broken usually lives in the gap between them.
Most organisational problems have a surface version and a real version. I work to find the real one — the dynamic no one has put into words yet.
Intervention, facilitation, coaching, structural change — whatever the situation calls for. The goal is resolution that doesn't need to be revisited.
"My work sits at the intersection of deep people insight, operational wisdom, and honest intervention. Not HR. Not conventional consulting."
About
I started my career as a lawyer in Malawi. Over the next two decades I became a company secretary, a head of operations, a founder, an HR consultant, and an executive coach — moving across Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, and South Africa as the work demanded, and working with clients across Africa, the UK, Europe, and North America.
What stayed the same across all of it: I kept finding that the presenting problem was never quite the real problem. The compliance issue was masking a broken team. The recruitment problem was actually an onboarding problem. The strategy problem was a trust problem.
Mufambi means traveller in Shona. It felt right — not just for the geography, but for the work. I go into organisations. I move through them at every level. And I find what's actually broken.
In practice
A business was losing staff within months of hiring them. Leadership had invested significantly in getting their mission, vision, processes and procedures right — everything was documented, refined, and on paper, coherent. New recruits came in and were handed stacks of documents to read and sign.
When I spoke to those recruits, the picture was different. They felt they'd been put on a conveyor belt. The process felt impersonal. Worse, the signed documents made them feel they couldn't afford to put a foot wrong — which made them guarded rather than engaged.
The culture was real. The problem was that new people weren't being introduced to it — they were being administered into it.
I proposed a pilot: each new recruit would have an informal meal with each member of the leadership team. The leader would share what they loved about the business and explain, conversationally, what their area actually did and why it mattered. Simple in concept. Harder in practice — it turned out most leaders couldn't articulate it yet. That became part of the work.
The result was a 90% increase in retention — and an overhaul of the processes and procedures themselves, simplified to reflect the actual human experience of working there.
A cross-functional project team was stalling. The commercial stakes were significant. On the surface it looked like a delivery problem — missed timelines, poor collaboration, a finance lead who seemed to be creating most of the friction.
I met with each team member individually and asked a simple question: why do you think you were nominated to this team? The answers were consistent. They felt they'd been chosen because they were the most dispensable person in their functional unit. The finance lead was convinced it was a way of managing them out of the business entirely.
Then I met with the departmental heads who had made the nominations. Their reasoning was the opposite. They had chosen people they believed in — people they saw as ready to understand how the whole business worked, as a stepping stone to the next level of their careers.
Nobody was wrong. Nobody was acting in bad faith. The damage was being done entirely by a gap in communication that no one knew existed.
When I fed the reframe back to the team members individually, the dynamic shifted. They began to see the project not as punishment but as an opportunity to prove themselves. The tension resolved. The team delivered an 18% ROI on a project that had been stuck for months.
Get in touch
If something in here resonated, it probably resonated for a reason. I'm based in Johannesburg and work across Southern and East Africa. I'm always open to a first conversation.