WHY I'M BUILDING RIMA

This week, I’m pausing our regularly scheduled blog to share a project close to my heart. Since boarding a plane to Ghana in 2017 to build my first startup, I’ve been driven by a singular mission: to create wealth in local communities. Over time, I’ve come to believe the most powerful way to do that is by helping the small businesses that power them.

I’ve been tested, humbled, and shaped by my journey so far - and now, I’m channeling those lessons into a bold new goal: helping small businesses around the world unlock $10 billion in profits over the next decade with the help of AI.

My friend and co-founder, Gana, just shared a post on why we’re building Rima. It captures the heart of our mission and the scale of the opportunity in front of us. I encourage you to read it.

Success is far from guaranteed. The odds of failure are high. But I’ve never been one to follow conventional wisdom. Some calls you can and should ignore. Others feel too important not to answer. This is one of those.

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I met Ced through my childhood friend Kevin at a conference in Durham. Kevin had met him in Minneapolis and said, “There’s this dude into startups - I think you two would click.” He was right. From our first conversation, it was clear we needed to build something together. Cedric was as driven and obsessed with building as I was, and couldn’t care less about traditional career paths.

The challenge was finding an idea we were both excited to pursue. After countless back-and-forths, we landed on a pain point I faced regularly, shipping spare parts from the U.S. to Africa for my dad, who was constantly getting ripped off by local mechanics. With this idea, we launched Garage - a B2B marketplace for auto parts traders - got into Y Combinator, raised a few million dollars, and built the largest network of neighborhood auto parts retailers across Africa.

This journey transformed us. We developed a deep appreciation for how difficult it is for small businesses to start, run, and scale and we learned that the only way to create enduring value is to build sustainable profits.

At scale, Garage operated across three countries - the U.S., Ghana, and Nigeria. Just four months into starting the company, Ghana was hit with its worst macroeconomic crisis in history with skyrocketing inflation and the Cedi tanking into the worst-performing currency in the world. A year later, Nigeria followed. Its currency depreciated over 300%, with inflation gutting buying power. We found ourselves operating in an environment where fuel prices quadrupled, distributors raised prices 40%+ each quarter and customer demand dried up. Our unit economics crumbled, and we were facing a life or death scenario.

Faced with this existential crisis, we had to innovate and reinvent ourselves. So, we leaned into our strengths in data analytics, finance and automation. We set three goals to achieve within six months: cut direct costs by 60%, automate 90% of sales, and grow gross margins to drive profitability.

Our team of data scientists, engineers, and finance managers worked around the clock. We built a machine learning model to optimize fuel allocation and delivery routes, reducing fuel costs - 60% of our direct costs - by more than 50%. We built another model to guide what to stock, when to buy, how much to hold, and how to price. That narrowed our inventory to high-churn, high-margin SKUs and boosted gross margins by five percentage points in six months. Our engineering team also built an AI-powered WhatsApp agent that took orders from retailers, allowing us to automate 90% of sales and retain only our top performers. By the end of this transformation, our largest city in Ghana was profitable and Nigeria was near breakeven.

Through this experience, we saw a bigger opportunity: What if every small business could do what we did without a full team of analysts, engineers and finance operators? What if a business owner could work with an AI agent to define a goal like growing margins by 5% and receive a fully executable plan, powered by both humans and AI, tailored to their business? In late 2024, this idea sounded like science fiction. Today, we are confident it’s within reach. That’s why we decided to pivot from Garage and build Rima.

What we are building at Rima

Jeff Bezos famously said you should build businesses around desires that won’t change not those that change. Business owners will always want higher profits, and investors will always demand better returns. It’s hard to imagine a founder saying, “I wish we earned less this year,” or an investor hoping for lower returns. That core desire for growth, margin, and efficiency is timeless.

AI is destined to help business owners optimize profits and unlock a new era of abundance by narrowing the gap between idea and execution. Tools and capabilities once reserved for large enterprises will soon be accessible to small businesses at a fraction of the cost.

Our purpose is to create this future.

We’re starting by building a full-service, AI-powered CFO advisory firm that combines the best AI tools with the top 1% of finance talent to help VC/PE-backed small businesses, like Garage, uncover insights that drive profits.

Next, we’ll scale this service to thousands of businesses, delivering strategic finance and operational clarity to thousands of businesses and their leaders.

Then, we’ll build an autonomous, self-improving AI co-worker that can deliver enterprise-grade financial insights and execution at a radically lower cost, unlocking profitability for even more small businesses.

We’ll do this until Rima helps generate $10 billion in profits for Main Street businesses around the world over the next decade.

When we started Garage, our goal wasn’t just to fix the auto parts supply chain, it was to help neighborhood traders in Ghana and Nigeria grow their profits and build enduring businesses. That mission hasn’t changed. With Rima, we’re scaling that vision globally, unlocking $10 billion in profits for Main Street businesses over the next decade.

If you are as obsessed as we are about creating wealth in communities by empowering the small businesses that serve them, come join us!