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Fortnightly

Friday Shot

ISSUE #211 2 OCT 2026

A WOW EXPERIENCE

Bandejas, bajadas & bragging rights EO Members connect to serve up more than just aces on the court. READ MORE INSIDE →

LEARNING EVENT RECAP

LEARNING EVENT

IN THE BOARDROOM

Strategy with Sunny Bindra

Hiring A Players

With Abubakar Aidarus

The 4 Stepper

A curated event based on Member feedback

You read the story, now be in the room.

PLUS EVEN MORE INSIDE →

STRATEGIC ALLIANCE PARTNERS

WOW VENUES →

WOW DEALS →

E O K E N YA · E V E N T S C A L E N DA R

Upcoming Events, October to January.

Oct 2026 — Jan 2027

Nine curated sessions across strategy, succession, hiring and human performance — plus member engagement and our student awards. LEARNING

ACCELERATOR

IN THE BOARDROOM

30 Sep – 4 Oct

MEMBER ENGAGEMENT

1:30PM – 3:00PM

9 EVENTS GSEA / MYEO

6 Oct

8:30AM – 5:00PM

MYEO · GARBA

ACCELERATOR · PILLAR 2 OF 4

Garba Workshop

EO Accelerator — Strategy

All levels · KES 5,000 Five days of coaching across 12 Garba styles. Spouses and kids welcome. Brahma Sabha, 3rd Parklands

8 Oct

EO Accelerator Programme Turning strategic thinking into a written, actionable plan for growth.

Venue TBC

23 Oct

4:30PM – 10:00PM

IN THE BOARDROOM

MEMBER ENGAGEMENT

You've Read the Story. Now Sit in the Room.

Ready. Set. EO!

Abubakar Aidarus · Solargen Technologies

Solargen Technologies

30 Oct

Member Kickstart An evening welcoming our newest members.

Venue TBC

9:00AM – 1:00PM

12 Nov

LEARNING

Succession Planning

Hiring A Players

Entrepreneurs & business leaders An interactive conversation with leaders who have hired exceptional talent.

Capital Club

Postponed

5 Dec

T OP

The Formula One of Performance

Pitching for a place on the global GSEA stage.

22 Jan

8:00AM – 8:00PM

Student Awards & Holiday Social

Brilliant Beyond Belief Marginal gains, energy and recovery.

New date TBC

GSEA & CHAPTER SOCIAL

LEARNING

ALN House

In partnership with ALN The conversation every entrepreneur avoids — ownership, leadership, legacy.

Venue TBC

4:30PM – 10:00PM MEMBER ENGAGEMENT

Ready. Set. EO!

Member Kickstart An evening for new EO Kenya members.

Venue TBC

Dates, timings and venues may shift. Registration links go live four weeks before each event — watch the fortnightly newsletter or write to manager@eokenya.org.

T H E F R I D AY S H O T · W E E K LY E O K E N Y A N E W S L E T T E R · 2 O C T O B E R 2 0 2 6

C H A P T E R E V E N T S · S T R AT E G Y L E A R N I N G D AY

The Nerve to Race Onto the Field Sunny Bindra spent a day stripping strategy back to what it actually is — the logic that drives action — and then made us do it, live, on a member's business. Most of us arrived with a SWOT somewhere in a drawer. Four pages of lists, every box full, nothing ranked. Sunny's view of that document was blunt: without filtering, it is useless. And if the budget was set before the strategy workshop, then the budget is the strategy — and the workshop is theatre. He started instead with a definition. Strategy is the logic that drives action: analysis, plus inspiration, plus doability. It is not mimicry — copying competitors concedes psychological defeat before you start. It is not a chessboard exercise either; the analytical part is small and the human part is large. And it is not a mountain-top revelation. M-PESA and Equity Bank did not arrive at their strategies fully formed. They worked them out as they went: think a little, act, learn, adjust, repeat.

Sunny Bindra opens the Strategy Learning Day.

Why does it get so complicated? Partly because academics and consultants are paid to make it so — six-month engagements need large teams and thick decks. Partly because we treat it as an annual ritual rather than the creative, energising session it should be. And the five-year plan, he argued, is largely obsolete. Geopolitics, AI and a Gen Z workforce are too many moving variables to plan around with any confidence.

“The role of strategy is to give you the nerve to race onto the field.” TOM PETERS Quoted by Sunny Bindra

THE CORE SKILL

Signal, not noise The strategist's real job is to filter — to find the three or four things that truly matter and ignore

SEE MORE PHOTOS FROM

the rest. School rewards the comprehensive answer; business rewards focus. Alongside that,

T H E D AY

optionality is now essential: committing everything to a single path is too risky in this environment. On AI, his read was measured. It is real and unavoidable, but not yet the gamechanger it was hyped to be. Watch it carefully.

Members working through the morning session.

New & Tenured members attended the learning day.

CONTINUED OVERLEAF →

T H E F R I D AY S H OT · 2 O C TO B E R 2 0 2 6

THE NERVE TO RACE ONTO THE FIELD · CONTINUED

DIAGNOSE

POSITION

STORY

ACTIONS

What's really going on? Two sentences, max.

Where do we play, and how do we win?

A human narrative — stories, not slides.

Three to five action sets. Get on the pitch.

THE FRAMEWORK

Four steps, one slide each Diagnosis comes first, because if you misdiagnose, the treatment is wrong too — and the discipline is to keep it to a sentence or two. Position means choosing segments, territories and products, not being everything to everyone; that, Sunny reminded us, was Nokia's stated strategy. Story turns the logic into something people can carry: the Wildlife Conservation Society's "Stop the killing. Stop the trafficking. Stop the demand." It goes to employees first, then becomes the marketing. Actions are three to five high-level action sets — strategy, not a task list. Apple was the worked example: a 2010 diagnosis that powerful computers were moving into every pocket, a premium position built on a hardware-and-software ecosystem, and action sets from a hyper-efficient supply Sunny Bindra, facilitator of the Strategy Learning Day.

chain to high-touch retail. Underneath it all sat one question every business must answer: what are we the most

of? There is no pure commodity business. In a market of a hundred vendors selling the same produce at the same price, ten or twenty always outperform — on human connection and knowing the customer. And culture is the hardest moat of all to copy. You cannot poach an entire culture. ON THE PITCH

Market Car Hire takes the win Then the room went to work: four tables, four real companies, one slide per step, reviewed at noon. The winning table took on Market Car Hire, a well-established Kenyan car rental business serving corporate and individual clients. The table worked through all four steps, but the feedback centred on the story — written for the team first, and built to give customers a reason to choose the company rather than just a car. It hit all the right notes. And it made the day's central point better than any slide could: strategy is often less about the analytics and more about connecting emotionally — with the people who have to deliver it, and the customers who have to believe it.

“We often think about strategy as being a complex exercise often decided in an offsite weekend, but Sunny broke it down into 4 simple steps.” ANUJ RADIA Market Car Hire

The 4 Stepper - in progress

Clarity, focus and a strategy taking shape.

The Strategy Learning Day.

W H E R E T O TA K E T H I S N E X T

Run the four steps on your own business Write your diagnosis in two sentences, then take it to your Forum and let them pull it apart. Thank you, Sunny, for a day that made strategy feel like something you do, not something you file.

9/10 M E M B E R R AT I N G

T H E F R I D AY S H O T F R I D AY 2 5 S E P T E M B E R

E O PA D E L N I G H T

BANDEJAS, BAJADAS & BRAGGING RIGHTS Last Friday, EO Members, SLPs and Mini EOs took to the court to show off their finest

Split into Social and Competitive draws, the night served up plenty of competition, even more

bandejas, bajadas and smashes.

camaraderie and, most importantly, a lot of fun.

Billed as EO vs Stanford Seed, it quickly became something better: EO Members teamed up with Stanford Seed members to complete the roster.

Keep an eye on the MyEO calendar to see what's in store for you next.

THE WINNERS

CO MPET I T IV E · WI N NE RS

CO MP E T I T IV E · RUN N ER - UP

C OM P ET IT IV E · TH IRD PL ACE

S OC I A L · WI N N E RS

S O C I AL · R U NN ER - UP

S OC IA L · TH I RD PL AC E

Ali & Danyol

Raj & Tanushree

Yash & Tilman

Zafir & Troy

Yishika & Tariq

Shanay & Pratik

MEMBER STORIES

The Grid He Built Himself Abubakar Aidarus lost his mother at two, won the scholarship that changed his trajectory, and built a multi-milliondollar renewable energy company in one of the hardest markets on earth. He'll tell you the harder thing was learning to talk about it. GARISSA

A start most people don't come back from Abubakar was born in Garissa. He was two years old when his mother died, leaving his father with two small boys — Abubakar and a seven-month-old brother. Raising them alone was not going to work. Abubakar was sent to live with an uncle, and that decision quietly determined everything that followed: it put him in a classroom. He was good in that classroom. Good enough that the classroom kept opening more doors. S TA R E H E

The scholarship The biggest of those doors was Starehe Boys' Centre, where Abubakar won a four-year scholarship. Starehe gave him more than an education — the programme built in structured exposure to the working world, and one of those placements took him to Equity Bank. It was his first look inside a real business. From Starehe he went on to the University of Nairobi to read Electrical Engineering.

Abubakar Aidarus, founder and CEO, Solargen Technologies.

UNIVERSITY

The grinder years University students study. Abubakar studied and traded. Alongside a friend, he ran a stall in the Nairobi CBD buying and selling clothes and shoes — the kind of unglamorous, margin-thin hustle that teaches you more about cash flow than any lecture. He also enrolled in the Equity

“The entrepreneur was already there. He just hadn't found the thing yet.”

Leadership Programme, a paid internship he kept returning to between semesters. THIRD YEAR

The spark He found it in solar. In his third year, Abubakar started researching renewable energy seriously and posed as a client at Kenital Solar, an Italian-run outfit in Nairobi — this is how he learned how to design and quote for a client. Kenya's solar sector was in the middle of turning from novelty into industry, and he was standing right next to it. FOURTH YEAR

The failure nobody puts on a website He opened a shop in Garissa. It didn't work. He couldn't sustain it, and he closed it down.

“Most versions of this story skip that year. It's worth keeping, because what happened next only makes sense with it in.”

A technical tour.

LEARNING · IN THE BOARDROOM

ABUBAKAR AIDARUS FOUNDER & CEO, SOLARGEN TECHNOLOGIES

From a small start in Garissa to a seven-country renewable energy business. You read his story in last week's Friday Shot. Now hear it from him, in the room.

ONLY

SEATS

“The entrepreneur was already there. He just hadn't found the thing yet.” FROM HIS MEMBER STORY

An intimate conversation with EO Kenya member Abubakar Aidarus on the real story

behind Solargen — USD 400,000 raised to launch in Mogadishu in 2011, projects across Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique, and the failure in Garissa that came first. KEY THEMES THE JOURNEY

Garissa, a Starehe scholarship, a CBD market stall — and the spark in solar.

THE REAL STORY

The wins, the shop that closed, and what he would do differently.

“Most versions of this story skip that year. It's worth keeping.”

LEADERSHIP & TALENT

Building and leading teams in frontier markets.

ON THE FAILURE IN GARISSA

PURPOSE & IMPACT

Clean energy and water for underserved communities — 2019 Greater Good Award for minigrid.

DATE

Thursday Wednesday 8th October 2026

TIME

9:00 – 11:00 AM Light refreshments

VENUE

Solargen Technologies, Nairobi Full address shared on confirmation

Real stories. Practical insights. Peer learning.

RSVP NOW EO members & SLPs only

MODERATED BY

LEARNING · PANEL DISCUSSION

HIRING A PLAYERS Real stories. Honest lessons. What actually works.

LIMIT

We listened to your feedback to curate this event.

ED TO

30 SEATS

Carol Musyoka

Business leader and executive coach — guiding an honest, practical conversation.

An interactive conversation with leaders who have hired exceptional talent — and learned the hard way. Hiring for C-suite and key roles: what worked, what didn't, and what they'd do differently.

OUR PANEL

Hasit Patel

Andreas von Paleske

Jean Meeks-Koch, PhD

Sehar Neky

Group CEO of a diversified East African group; scales businesses and develops leadership teams across industries.

CEO of one of East Africa's leading retail chains; has built and led teams at scale across fast-growing businesses.

Founder & CEO of a global leadership firm; 20+ years building high-performing leaders and cultures.

Founder & CEO of a pan-African talent and HR solutions business; expert in executive search and leadership development.

Ramco Group

Naivas Limited

Positively People

Hyre Africa

WHAT TO EXPECT

DATE

Wednesday 12th November 2026

REAL STORIES

Candid experiences of successful hires — and costly mistakes.

TIME

8:00 AM – 11:00 AM

INTERACTIVE CONVERSATION

Breakfast & networking from 8:00 · Panel 9:00 – 11:00

Ask questions, share your own experiences and get practical advice.

VENUE

Capital Club

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

Walk away with ideas you can apply to your business and your next critical hire.

Nairobi

Open to EO members, SLPs and EOA.

Better hires. Stronger teams. A healthier business.

Dance · Connect · Have fun K E N YA

Garba

WO R KSH O P

Group coaching session or Garba ance classes WHAT IS GARBA?

THE EVENT

A traditional folk dance from Gujarat, celebrated for its energetic moves, colourful attire and joyful rhythm.

STYL ES

All levels welcome

Join a fun-iflled group coaching session to improve your Garba, get exposed to 12 different styles and connect with a great group of people who love to dance.

WED

30 Sep

THU

1 Oct

F RI

2 Oct

Open to spouses & kids

SAT

3 Oct

SUN

4 Oct

D AT E

CLASS TIMES

VENUE

CO S T

30 Sep – 4 Oct

1:30 – 3:00pm

Brahma Sabha, 3rd Parklands

KES 5,000/-

Five afternoons. One dance floor.

G S E A K E N YA 2 0 2 6 / 2 7 · C A L L F O R N O M I N AT I O N S

GSEA is back. And we're looking for Kenya's next student entrepreneur.

Last year, GSEA Kenya brought together some of the country's most promising student entrepreneurs — young founders balancing lectures, assignments, and the very real work of building businesses.

Brian Ndung'u of EcoBana, GSE Kenya 2025/26 winner, with the EO Kenya team on ifnals day.

H O S T E D BY

N O M I N AT I O N S A R E O P E N

Send in your nomination

→

eonetwork.org/gsea/apply

W H AT H A P P E N E D L A S T Y E A R

W H Y I T M AT T E R S T O Y O U

WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Brian Ndung'u of EcoBana emerged as the GSEA Kenya 2025/26 winner — and his journey hasn't stopped there. Qualifying through GSEA opened doors most student founders never reach that early.

GSEA is the one EO programme where a member's time converts directly into a young founder's trajectory. Judging, mentoring, or putting one name forward is a small ask with a disproportionate return.

A student — full or part time, at any recognised institution — who already runs a business. Not an idea, not a plan: revenue, customers, something operating while they study.

Around him stood a ifeld of ifnalists building in waste, agriculture, robotics and education — pitching to a panel of EO members, in front of a room of entrepreneurs who have all stood at that same starting line.

Every ifnalist arrives because someone told them the competition existed. Most of them hear it from an EO member. That is the whole mechanism — and it is the part we need you for.

The 2026 GSEA Kenya judging panel.

The 2025/26 ifnalists and judges after the ifnal pitch.

If you know one — in your team, your family, your supply chain, or your last hire's WhatsApp group — that is the nomination. Send us the name and we will take it from there.

Peter Kimani, Cobot Kids Kenya, on the ifnals stage.

B A C K T H E N E X T G E N E R AT I O N O F B U S I N E S S S A V E T H E D AT E

Nominate one student founder — then keep 5 December free to watch them pitch.

8:00am – 8:00pm · Venue TBC

Nominations, judging and sponsorship: speak to the GSEA Kenya team or reply to this Friday Shot. Full details in chapter comms closer to the date.

5 Dec

E O K E N YA 2026 / 27

EO MEMBER ASK — SPONSOR DRIVE

You already know our next sponsor. Make the intro.

GSEA is EO's flagship programme for students already running real businesses, and our Kenya winner represents the country at the Global Finals. To run it again in 2026/27 we need sponsors — and the fastest route to them is you. One warm introduction to a brand that backs entrepreneurship, innovation or youth is all we're asking for. W H AT W E ' R E O F F E R I N G T H E M

Lead Sponsor Headline billing, stage time, a judging seat and direct access to the founders. 1 slot.

Supporting Sponsor

KES 500,000

Strong brand presence across the whole competition. 2 slots.

Community Sponsor Recognition across event communications and merchandise. 2–3 slots.

INTROS NEEDED BY

K E N YA F I N A L S

October 2026

5 December 2026

KES 1.75M

KES 250,000 SEND THE INTRO TO

James Savage

GSEA Kenya Chair

gsea@eokenya.org · +254 733 835 963

E O K E N YA · M E M B E R S H I P D R I V E

A CALL TO EVERY MEMBER

EO NEEDS YOU. Not for a committee. For one name — the entrepreneur you already trust, who should be in EO but isn’t yet.

WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR

US$1M+

in annual company revenue

10+

full-time employees on the payroll

Founder-led a shareholder and executive actively running the business All in

open, curious, generous with what they know

EO Kenya is not-for-proift. Every member we add gives the chapter more to put back into all of us — better learning, stronger events, and more perspectives in every room.

NAME ONE PERSON. Two minutes. The Membership Committee takes it from there — conifdentially.

REFER A MEMBER →

UPCOMING EVENTS

The EO Global Speakers Academy The power of your story 28 Sept - 2 Oct 2026 Location: Bangkok, Thailand

2026 MEPA UNLEASHED

Master the Now. Shape What’s Next 1st – 2nd October 2026 Location: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

MLS – MEPA Leadership Summit Untethered Leadership Lead with Presence 29th – 30th September 2026 Location: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

EO Global Leadership Academy 2026 Where Leadership Deepens. And Purpose Gets Clearer. 8th – 12th, December 2026 Location: Athens, Greece

UPCOMING EVENTS

South Asia RIE 2027 A shared pursuit of growth. 14th – 17th January 2027 Location: Jaipur, India

STRATEGIC ALLIANCE The aim this year is to share a wide range of partnerships, benefits and perks to give EO members more value, variety and make it a Wow Experience. Top Tip: Open up the ‘Wow Deals Deck’ on a regular basis as it is continuously updated with the latest partnerships and benefits. If you have any leads and ideas for partnerships, do reach out! strategic@eokenya.org

VIEW WOW DEALS HERE

DEAL SPOTLIGHT

SPECIAL EO OFFER: A 10% discount on the RRP on products offered by HYPERMART. The 10% discount is applicable exclusively to EO Kenya members who present their valid EO Kenya membership details at the time of purchase. It is only applicable at their showrooms and is not applicable on already discounted products. Email: online@hypermart.co.ke

Click here to see all the WOW Venues and Contact info for easy booking

Your Comms Team Anuj Radia

Past Friday Shots

If you missed any of our past Friday Shots, you can find them here.

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GO TO FRIDAY SHOTS LIBRARY

Wow Deals & Venues

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(ICAL/OUTLOOK Etc)

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