Every practice has an origin story, and mine begins in a room most people never see: the floor of one of Kenya’s leading investment banks, where I spent my early career selling regulated investment products to people whose wealth had earned them the right to be taken seriously.
I loved that floor. It taught me the machinery that quoted returns politely hide: mandates, fund structures, fee lines, the difference between a product that serves a client and a product that serves a quarter’s targets. I learned to read both kinds quickly. And slowly I noticed the thing that would eventually walk me out of the building. Nearly everyone advising Kenya’s wealthiest people was paid by the institutions whose products they recommended. The advice could be excellent. The seat it came from was never neutral.
The most expensive thing in most portfolios is advice that was free.
So I did what finance people love to recommend and rarely attempt. I left a salary and built two businesses of my own, Viren Collections and then Yaretzi Beauty. Running them taught me everything the floor could not: payroll in a slow month, pricing with my own name on the product, the particular arithmetic of cash when nobody is coming to save you. If the bank taught me how money is structured, the businesses taught me how money is felt.
This practice is where the two educations meet, and it is built on one structural decision. I hold no licence to sell you investment products, and I have arranged my work so I never need one. My income is the coaching fee you pay me and a small set of referral relationships with licensed institutions, every one of them disclosed to you in writing before it comes anywhere near your plan. The market norm here is the quiet commission. Mine is the open ledger, and I intend to be boringly repetitive about it.
Who I built the seat for
My clients run companies, portfolios, and careers that fund both. They are past the budgeting apps and the saving challenges. Their questions are about structure, preservation, and what happens after them, and until now those questions have had no dedicated room in Kenya. I keep one. In it, you get the banker who understands the products and the entrepreneur who has carried the risk, in one chair, on your side of the table.
There are also things you will never get from me, and I would rather you hear them now. I will never pick a stock for you. I will never promise a return, because nobody honest can. And I will never let an engagement outlive its usefulness; my retainers end when your plan can walk on its own.
<div class=”takeaway”><p>If your money has grown faster than the thinking around it, that is the exact gap this practice exists to close. A discovery call is thirty minutes, and it costs you nothing but intent.</p></div>
The door is open. Come with the ambition and the numbers, and we will build something meant to outlast us both.