Highlights from the first episode of Déclic Digital, kaikai's monthly conversation with leaders who have changed the way they steer their business. Guest: Malaye Ndao, financial expert, founder and managing director of MN PRO.
On 29 July 2026, kaikai launched Déclic Digital, a monthly series hosted by Mamadou Djigo, co-founder and managing director, and Nils Kaiser, founder. The format is simple. Every month, a business leader comes to describe the exact moment they realised they could not carry on the way they had been, and what they put in place afterwards. The starting point, the obstacles, the results. No theory, and no 18-month programme.
Opening the series with data was a deliberate choice. As Nils Kaiser noted in his introduction, data is the fabric that ties kaikai's pillars together: impact, partnerships, and a way of working centred on people and organisations. The question of the day, framed by the guest himself, fitted into a single sentence: how do you make decisions with your data when it is scattered everywhere?
Our guest
Malaye Ndao is the founder and managing director of MN PRO. A financial expert, he returned to Senegal after eleven years of professional experience in France, a detail he is keen to mention. He has built an advisory firm that relies heavily on digital tools, supporting entrepreneurs from company formation right through to their accounting, tax and strategic structuring. More than a hundred companies have passed through his hands, many of them led by members of the diaspora.
That dual position is what made his account worth hearing. He advises business leaders on their numbers, and he first applied to his own organisation everything we were about to discuss. When you run a business from abroad, he adds, you cannot decide on gut feeling.
The numbers that framed the session
Two figures set the scene.
The first comes from ANSD, Senegal's national statistics agency: only 53 % of newly created Senegalese companies are still active five years later. The first year is generally cleared without much trouble. It is over time that the difficulties surface. Put differently, close to one company in two does not make it past the five-year mark.
The second comes from a study by the European analyst firm BARC, cited by Nils Kaiser: more than half of the leaders surveyed say they decide primarily on instinct and experience rather than on data. Even when the data exists, it goes unused. So there are two challenges to tackle at once: making data available and usable, and turning its use into a reflex across the whole organisation.
Which leaves an obvious question. Why do capable leaders, who already have their numbers, keep deciding without them? That is where our guest took over.
The rear-view mirror and the windscreen
Malaye Ndao summed up the problem with an image the audience remembered.
When a leader sets a price, hires someone or buys equipment, what does that decision actually rest on? Most often on experience, on intuition, on urgency, on a friend's opinion, or on the accountant's report that lands six months later. Many run their company while looking in the rear-view mirror: last year's balance sheet, last semester's results, yesterday's invoice. "You do not drive a car looking in the rear-view mirror," he says. Steering with data means looking through the windscreen, at what is happening now and what is coming next.
On top of that reflex sits a structural problem. In a trading company, sales live in an Excel file, accounting sits in a software package or with an external provider, payments are at the bank, customer relationships run on WhatsApp, and contracts are on paper. Every function knows part of the story. Nobody knows the whole story.
"This is not a data problem, it is a problem of conversation between the data."
That diagnosis stays abstract until someone puts a number on it. Our guest did exactly that, with three cases from his own experience.
What steering on instinct actually costs
The advertising budget that was never spent. A company was convinced it was short of customers and was about to invest heavily in advertising. A look at the numbers showed plenty of leads and plenty of quotes, but only 35 % of quotes were converting. The problem was not attracting customers, it was following up with the ones who had already asked for a quote. Millions of francs of media spend were replaced by proper sales follow-up.
The machine that was not needed. A business owner felt overwhelmed and wanted to buy a second machine to lift revenue. The data showed that the existing equipment was running at only 60 % of its capacity. The right answer was a reorganisation, not an investment.
The 60 invisible days. One Monday morning, four out of five employees arrive late at MN PRO. Malaye Ndao logs each delay: 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and so on. Total for that single day: 2 hours and 35 minutes of lost work, recorded nowhere in the accounts. Even using a conservative estimate—a cumulative one-hour delay per day for the team—this adds up to about 20 hours per month, or nearly three days of work. And that’s just the delays: if we factor in a single unplanned day of absence per employee per month, for five employees, that totals 60 days over the course of a year—the equivalent of one person being absent for three months. Shared openly in a team meeting, the calculation above all gave him a factual basis for the conversation.
The lesson goes well beyond attendance: "Having time-tracking software is not enough. It records hours without anyone analysing the figures." The tool produces the data. It does not produce the decision.
In all three cases the information already existed somewhere. So the real question becomes: which data do you look at first?
Five indicators, not fifty
That is precisely the situation of one participant whose data is spread across three tools, a spreadsheet, emails and WhatsApp, with nothing connected. Does everything need to be connected before you start? The answer came in two parts.
First, do not look for all the data, look for the right data. Five indicators are enough to begin:
- revenue
- cash position
- gross margin rate
- customer payment terms
- number of new customers
The profit margin is what remains from each sale after the merchandise has been paid for: it indicates whether prices are holding up. The payment cycle shows the average number of days it takes for customers to pay, and thus where to focus efforts to ease cash flow. Revenue, cash flow, and the influx of new customers, on the other hand, indicate the state of the business. Malaye pointed out, as an accountant, that other concepts appear in financial statements—such as payroll expenses, break-even point, and inventory turnover—but that, to start with, these five are sufficient.
Second, move forward step by step. Many people believe everything has to be connected before they can start, and that is simply wrong.
"A simple dashboard you improve as you go is worth more than a big project you never launch."
Nils Kaiser summarised the method in three points: a limited number of indicators, indicators genuinely suited to the business, and a gradual build-up. Malaye Ndao added the fourth, the one most often forgotten: decide on a regular basis. Data sleeping inside a software package is useless. A steering meeting, weekly, monthly or quarterly, is often more valuable than a new tool.
That discipline does not appear by accident. For our guest, it grew out of a very specific turning point.
The turning point
The shift had nothing to do with technology. It was the day he stopped seeing his figures as an administrative obligation and started treating them as a decision-making tool: whether to invest or not, whether he could afford to, whether the investment was worth it at all.
The data was already there, backed by invoices and mandatory tax filings. What changed was the way he questioned it, followed by a dashboard fed from his accounting tools to give him a real-time view of sales and unpaid invoices. In his line of work, he points out, the difficulty was less about collecting than about receiving on time: clients sometimes send their invoices a month late, which makes any analysis arrive too late as well. Today a single platform centralises client requests and appointment tracking, and the whole team works from the same dashboard.
One example shows what that reflex changes. A company was pleased with a healthy year-end profit. Reviewing its receivables, it identified a client in difficulty whose invoice was never going to be paid. The data prevented the distribution of a profit that did not exist.
But not every form of resistance can be solved with a dashboard, and the audience made that point forcefully.
Data is not only a question of tools
Gnylane Thiam, who supports companies on organisational and team development, raised the sociological and psychological dimension of our relationship with data in the Senegalese and African context. Counting carries a long history, including colonial census operations, which partly explains the resistance still observed during headcount exercises today. She then added a very concrete dimension for leaders: the fear of the mirror. Once the data is there, the truth is fixed and the story can no longer be adjusted. Bound up with it are questions of transparency, the fear of losing power, and tax-related anxiety.
The guest's answer was direct. The data exists whether the leader chooses to look at it or not. It is like spending without checking your bank account: deep down, you already know what you will find. Facing reality is part of the job.
Mariama Ba then moved the discussion towards management. Beyond financial indicators, which human markers should a leader track? Three suggestions came back. Attendance. Whether each person delivers on the tasks assigned to them. And a short daily check-in where every team member shares their mood, the files they worked on yesterday, the ones they are handling today, and any blocking points, a practice already in place at kaikai. A file that keeps reappearing day after day signals a blockage to address, and therefore a colleague who needs support.
The exchange also exposed the limits of the exercise. Mariama Ba tried it with eight or nine collaborators and found it tedious: what works well for a team of three or four generates too much information beyond that size. The right setup depends on the size and context of the organisation, never on a default template. That diagnostic work is exactly what we do with the organisations we support.
Some good news, announced live
kaikai is now accredited by 3FPT, Senegal's vocational and technical training funding body. In practical terms, Senegalese companies can have our data and decision-making training and support programmes financed. The webinar participants were the first to hear about it.
The way we work follows the logic defended throughout the session: start from the pain point, work with the data already available rather than waiting for a perfect system, produce a first decision dashboard, then extend it. As Nils Kaiser stressed in closing, part of the job is to demystify digital, data and artificial intelligence, which are often perceived as multi-month undertakings, when the real point is to adapt to each organisation's size and budget and to demonstrate impact quickly.
Key takeaways
- The problem is almost never a lack of data, it is the absence of structure and dialogue between data sources.
- Five well-chosen indicators beat fifty indicators nobody ever reads.
- An imperfect dashboard today beats a perfect project in 18 months.
- Data that never enters a decision-making meeting serves no purpose.
- The tool never makes the decision. It informs the leader's decision.
The closing word belongs to our guest:
"You do not need a new tool. You need five indicators and a steering meeting. Start small, but start tomorrow."
Going further
The full replay of the first episode is available here: https://youtu.be/6Cfij-9OBhw
The next episode of Déclic Digital will focus on environmental intelligence: measuring air quality and tracking what our organisations consume, energy in particular. The guest will be announced shortly.
Want to identify your first decision dashboard? Book 30 minutes with the kaikai team to walk us through your context and constraints.