What Public Speaking Taught Me About Kenya

This post is part of "The Entrepreneur's Safari" – a series of candid reflections exploring the entrepreneurial journey of building Complete Safaris with my Kenyan partner, alongside lessons learned from leadership and business development.

The Unexpected Classroom

Preparing a speech for Rotary, a chamber event, a business forum, sounds like performance preparation. Get the facts right, tell it well, don't run over time.

What it actually is: a ruthless editing process for our own story.

Every detail that feels important because it was lived has to earn its place. Not everything that was significant gets to stay. Preparing forces a question that's uncomfortable and useful: is this detail meaningful to the person listening, or only to the person who experienced it?

That distinction changes the story every time.

What Keeps Becoming Clear

The more the Complete Safaris story gets told out loud, the more precise it becomes. Anthony's 30 years of lived field expertise and my continual immersive tourist experiences no longer are random ingredients. They are, it turns out, exactly the right combination. The November 2023 meeting in Kenya that started this business feels less like a happy accident every time it gets described and more like something that was always going to happen.

Telling the story accelerates the understanding of it.

And something else keeps surfacing: going narrow lets you go deep, and depth is the moat competitors can't easily cross. Every speech lands on this truth a little harder. It's not positioning language anymore. It's conviction.

Three Things No One Warns You About

The questions people ask after. What someone holds onto after listening reveals what actually landed. The lingering questions are the signal. They show me which thread someone's brain wanted to pull, which part of the story still has something in it worth exploring.

The facts that spill out in conversation. Someone mentions they work in tree services. Suddenly there's an entirely unrehearsed explanation of the 40 species of acacia trees in Kenya, how the fever acacia got its name, or the tree nursery at Mount Elgon. I marvel to myself, briefly, who this person is!

The friend who listens differently. A good friend often joins me to take photos. She watches the room. She notices what lands and what doesn't, and she says it plainly afterward. That kind of feedback is rare and worth protecting.

Your Turn

For entrepreneurs who are building something:

• When did you last tell your story out loud to someone outside your industry?

• What detail do you keep including that might only matter to you?

• What question does someone always ask that you haven't fully answered yet?

• What do you know now about your business that you didn't know you knew until you said it?

This is the work we do, a conversation before a proposal, and a Kenya safari built around how you actually want to travel, not a template. Anyone can book you a safari. What you're really paying for is not having to manage a single detail of it yourself.