Founder resilience: A lesson from Family Bank

The listing of Family Bank on the Nairobi Securities Exchange on June 23 is a testament to why resilience, not capital or a forgiving market, is the real secret sauce of any successful business.

Founder Titus Muya was turned down for promotions early in his career for lacking a degree, registered a banking company in 1977 that sat dormant for three years due to lack of capital, and was then rejected for a banking licence outright. He switched to a building society instead. It was not until 2007 that the society became a bank, and almost two more decades before this listing.

Replace the banking specifics, and this becomes a familiar Kenyan business story, except that this one had a happy ending, thanks to the founder’s resilience.

Ask any Kenyan entrepreneur why their business failed, and you will hear a familiar list: funding was hard to come by, the regulatory environment was unforgiving, the economy was tight, the market wasn’t ready.

These are genuine reasons. Capital is truly scarce, and the business environment punishes small players. But more often than not, they usually make us avoid asking the harder question: How many businesses failed not because the idea was bad, but because the owner stopped showing up for it too soon?

We rarely interrogate founder resilience the way we interrogate funding gaps. It is easier to blame the bank that declined the loan than to ask whether the founder stayed with the business long enough to learn what wasn’t working.

Yet resilience – the willingness to absorb a setback, adjust, and try again rather than conclude the whole idea was wrong – is arguably the single most decisive variable in whether a venture survives its difficult middle years.

Around the world, almost none of the founders and inventors whose names became shorthand for success got it right on the first attempt. What set them apart, like Muya, was an unusual tolerance for being told no repeatedly without quitting.

Most businesses don’t die in their first ambitious leap. They die in the unglamorous middle, when the first version doesn’t work, and the founder chooses to quit instead of adapting.

I see this all the time, not in a boardroom, but in a classroom.

I run a writing programme that teaches professionals to publish opinion pieces in national newspapers. Cohort after cohort, the same pattern repeats itself: Week One, everyone is present, energised, certain this is their chance to finally get published.

By week two, one or two students send polite apologies for missing class. By week five, fewer than half are submitting their assignments. By week seven, attendance has roughly halved. Many alumni who do complete the course never write again afterward.

It is usually not about their ability, but their willingness to stay with something once the initial excitement dies down. The early weeks reward enthusiasm; the later weeks demand the much less glamorous work of revising a draft for the third time after being told it still isn’t ready. Similarly, it is at the revision stage – when persistence is required – that founders abandon businesses.

There’s a version of this idea that has been circulating recently in entrepreneurship circles. The fastest way to stay poor, the argument goes, is to keep starting new ventures instead of staying with one long enough to actually master it. The idea applies to any skill – writing, leadership, negotiation, institutional reform – that only pays off after a long, unglamorous middle.

The next time a Kenyan business fails, we should not only ask what it lacked, but also how long its founder stayed with it before deciding to quit.

Francis Ayieko is a Founder of The OpEd Experts and a media strategist. Email: [email protected].