When I was choosing a name and logo for my consultancy, I could have gone the safe route. Something generic and corporate. ‘Operational Excellence Ltd’ or ‘Strategic Business Solutions.’
Instead, I chose a symbol that represents everything I believe about how businesses should grow: Sankofa.
Sankofa is a word and symbol from Ghanaian culture. It translates roughly as ‘go back and fetch it’ – the idea that we must learn from the past to build better futures.
In the Akan language of Ghana, ‘san’ means to return, ‘ko’ means to go, and ‘fa’ means to look, seek, and take. Together: return, go back, and fetch what was lost or forgotten.
The traditional symbol shows a bird with its head turned backwards, feet facing forward, and an egg in its mouth. Moving forward while looking back. Protecting what matters while learning from what came before.
This isn’t just beautiful philosophy. It’s exactly what growing businesses need to do – and exactly what most of them skip.
The ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Problem
Modern business culture glorifies relentless forward momentum. Move fast. Scale quickly. Disrupt. Iterate. Growth at all costs.
And there’s value in that urgency, particularly in the early startup phase. When you’re validating product-market fit or racing to secure funding, speed matters.
But somewhere around 10-15 employees, something shifts. The things you skipped in the rush to grow start causing problems:
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- You never documented your processes, so new hires are lost
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- You never set up proper financial controls, so you don’t know where money’s going
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- You never built decision-making frameworks, so everything escalates to the founder
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- You never created compliance systems, so audits are terrifying
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- You never thought about team structure, so reporting lines are a mess
The things you said ‘we’ll fix that later’ about? Later has arrived. And now they’re strangling your growth.
This is where Sankofa becomes essential business wisdom, not just cultural philosophy.
What Sankofa Means for Business Operations
Sankofa, in a business context, means this: sometimes the smartest way forward is to pause, look back, and establish the foundations you skipped.
It’s not about slowing down permanently. It’s not about losing momentum or abandoning your growth ambitions.
It’s about recognizing that you can’t build a skyscraper on a foundation designed for a cottage. At some point, you have to stop piling on floors and strengthen the base.
Practically, Sankofa looks like:
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- Documenting processes that currently live in people’s heads before those people leave and take the knowledge with them
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- Building financial controls for the business you’ve become, not the business you were two years ago
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- Creating compliance frameworks that meet today’s regulatory requirements, not yesterday’s informal approach
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- Establishing team structures that can scale beyond founder-led chaos
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- Implementing systems that should have been set up before you hired your 15th person
Yes, this feels like going backwards. You’re ‘wasting time’ on infrastructure instead of chasing the next customer or building the next feature.
But here’s the truth: time spent building proper foundations isn’t wasted. It’s invested.
Sankofa in Action: A Real Example
I worked with a professional services firm experiencing rapid growth. Impressive revenue trajectory. Chaotic operations.
The founder was working 70-hour weeks, most of it firefighting operational issues. They wanted to hire more people but knew their systems couldn’t support it—new hires were taking months to become productive because nothing was documented. Client delivery quality was inconsistent. Financial visibility was terrible—they discovered budget overruns too late to do anything about them.
They came to me asking for help with ‘scaling processes.’ What they actually needed was Sankofa—to go back and build the foundations they’d skipped.
Here’s what we did:
Month 1: We stopped. We documented how things actually worked (not how they thought they worked). We identified the 20% of processes that were causing 80% of the pain.
Months 2-3: We built proper client delivery processes. We implemented financial controls and monthly management reporting. We created onboarding documentation for new hires. We set up decision-making frameworks so not everything needed founder approval.
Month 4: We trained the team on the new systems. We adjusted what wasn’t working. We embedded the changes.
Did this feel like going backwards? Absolutely. For three months, the founder spent significant time on ‘operational stuff’ instead of business development.
The result? New hire productivity time cut in half. Founder reclaimed 15 hours per week. Client delivery quality became consistent. Financial surprises disappeared. The business could actually scale sustainably.
Six months later, they confidently hired additional team members without breaking a sweat. The foundations held.
That’s Sankofa. Going back to establish proper foundations so you can move forward with confidence.
When Your Business Needs Sankofa
How do you know when it’s time to practice Sankofa? Here are the signals:
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- You’re growing but it feels fragile. Success feels precarious because it relies on heroic individual efforts rather than robust systems.
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- Knowledge lives in people’s heads. When someone’s on holiday or leaves, you realize how little is actually documented.
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- You’re constantly firefighting. Reactive mode has become your default because you never built preventive systems.
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- New hires struggle. Onboarding takes forever because processes are informal and inconsistent.
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- Financial visibility is poor. You discover problems after it’s too late to fix them.
If you’re nodding along to two or more of these, your business needs Sankofa. You need to pause forward momentum temporarily to establish the foundations that will support sustainable growth.
Moving Forward by Looking Back
The Sankofa bird looks backwards while moving forward, feet planted firmly, protecting what matters.
That’s what sustainable business growth looks like. Not reckless forward momentum that ignores foundations. Not paralysis from fear of missing opportunities. But intentional growth that learns from experience, establishes solid infrastructure, and moves forward with confidence.
Sometimes the smartest way forward is to go back and fetch what you left behind.
Is your business ready to practice Sankofa? If you’re growing fast but operations feel shaky, it might be time to pause and build proper foundations. Book a free discovery call to discuss where your operations are now and what foundations you need to establish.