L Layby Africa Team & Operating Map
Operating Structure · v2 · Aug 2026

The people steering Layby Africa.

This is the operating map as it stands today — who owns what, who reports to whom, and where the seams are. It is deliberately lean and built to grow: seats get added as the platform and the country units scale. v1 is the team that takes Layby Africa from one founder carrying everything to a structure that can run without a single point of failure.

7
People in seat
+1
Hiring now
3
Anchor tenants
3
Advisory board

How it's organised.

Three tiers: Layby Africa is the platform, ZimLayby is the first country unit, and the storefronts (A&H, Beds, Sofa & Couch, Groceries, Restapedic, Capri) are the businesses that run on the rail. Under the CEO there are two pillars — Platform & Product and Country & Operations — with Finance bridging both so the books stay clean across entities.

Stephen Kahwiti
Founder & CEO
Interim CTO / Product · arbitrates the seam
Tawanda Samson — Accounts & Finance
Cuts across Layby Africa (Steve) and Appliances (Ronald) — one set of clean books
James Jambaza — Admin & Corporate Governance
Cuts across both entities — statutory records, filings and the discipline that keeps holding and trading properly separate
Pillar 1
Platform & Product
Layby Africa · led by Steve (interim)
Tapiwanashe Maposhere
Lead Developer
Joseph Chitsaya
Commercial & Business Development
Direct → CEO
Tafadzwa Heath
Executive Assistant · virtual, interim
Pillar 2
Country & Operations
ZimLayby · led by Ronald (Co-founder)
Lovemore Vheremu
Retail & Logistics
Marketing Intern
Brand (LA) + social (A&H / Beds) — split
Hiring
The businesses that run on the platform
A&H — Appliance & Home live Beds live Sofa & Couch POC

The people, and what each owns.

One lane each, one number each. The point of the structure is that nobody is guessing what they're accountable for — and the founder stops being the bottleneck on engineering, commercial, and operations all at once.

Lead
Stephen Kahwiti
Founder & CEO · interim CTO/Product · reports to Board
  • Platform vision, product direction, and fundraising
  • Holds engineering & product until the team is deep enough
  • Owns the Layby Africa parent brand and investor relationships
  • Arbitrates the Commercial ↔ Operations seam
North star Platform live, fundable, no single point of failure
Lead
Ronald
Co-founder · Country GM + Head of A&H / Beds Ops · reports to CEO
  • Owns the ZimLayby country P&L and ground operations
  • Runs the storefronts (A&H, Beds, Sofa & Couch and the rest) day to day
  • Turns signed tenants into active, paying tenants
  • Line-manages Retail & Logistics + the social side of marketing
KPI Activation rate · active tenants @ 90d · Zim GMV
Governance
James Jambaza
Co-founder · Admin & Corporate Governance
  • Company administration across the group entities
  • Statutory records, resolutions and filings kept current
  • Governance discipline as the structure separates holding from trading
KPI Statutory record clean · filings current
Bridge
Tawanda Samson
Accounts & Finance · cuts across CEO + Country GM
  • One clean set of books across Layby Africa and Appliances
  • Tenant margin reconciliation and payout accuracy
  • Cash-flow visibility, tax structure, audit readiness
  • Numbers the investor conversation can stand on
KPI Books reconciled monthly · zero payout disputes
Platform
Tapiwanashe Maposhere
Lead Developer · reports to CEO
  • Takes platform engineering off the founder's plate
  • Multi-tenant code path · WhatsApp + POP pipeline
  • Production reliability, deploys, security hygiene
  • Builds toward a second engineer as load grows
KPI Ship velocity · uptime · POP pipeline health
Direct → CEO
Joseph Chitsaya
Commercial & Business Development · reports direct to CEO
  • Pipeline of prospect tenants → signed agreements
  • Margin negotiation and onboarding kits
  • Hands signed tenants to Operations to go live
  • Owns the top of the funnel; shares the outcome with Ops
KPI Tenants signed that go live within 30 days
Country
Lovemore Vheremu
Retail & Logistics · reports to Country GM
  • Order fulfilment and delivery coordination
  • Stock accuracy and reservation lifecycle on the ground
  • Front-line retail execution across the anchor stores
  • Feeds delivery exceptions back to Operations
KPI On-time delivery · stock accuracy
Platform
Tafadzwa Heath
Executive Assistant · virtual, interim · reports to CEO
  • Calendar, inbox triage, and follow-ups for the founder
  • Meeting prep and partner-comms scheduling
  • Light project coordination across the team
  • Interim seat — formalised or replaced as load grows
Mandate Free ~10 founder hours / week of admin
Hiring
Marketing Intern
Split · brand (LA) + social (A&H / Beds) · CEO + Country GM
  • Layby Africa brand content + the ZimLayby consumer story
  • A&H / Beds social — the owned-audience launch channel
  • Campaign support for tenant launches
  • To hire — first marketing seat on the team
KPI Qualified apply-form traffic · social reach

The handoff that matters most: signed → live.

Joseph closes tenants; Ronald makes them live. The classic failure mode is a stack of signatures that never go into production. So they don't get two different scoreboards — they share one north star: active, paying tenants. Not signatures, not logins.

Prospect → Signed → Live → Retained
  • Shared north star. Both are measured on tenants that are live and paying — the same outcome, not two halves of it.
  • Commercial's number Joseph is tenants signed that go live within 30 days. A signature that stalls in onboarding doesn't count.
  • Operations' number Ronald is activation rate, active tenants at 90 days, and Zim GMV.
  • One board, both names on it. A single shared funnel — Prospect → Signed → Live → Retained — that they both look at, not separate spreadsheets.
  • Weekly 15-minute sync. Standing slot on anything stuck between Signed and Live. Short, specific, unblock-or-escalate.
  • The CEO arbitrates the seam. When a tenant is stuck and it's not clear whose move it is, Steve calls it — fast, so nothing rots in the gap.

The advisory board.

Counsel, not control. Three advisors chosen for the specific risks of a layby business — a model that lives or dies on how well you price deposits, predict completion, and hold your nerve under pressure.

Tatenda Tawonezvi
Strategy & Compliance
Start-up consultant from day one. Keeps structure, governance and compliance honest as the platform scales across entities and, later, across borders. The steady hand on how the company is built.
Simba Chinyani
Risk & Actuarial
Actuary and mathematician with multinational experience. The single most valuable outside lens for a layby book: default-completion modelling off the live data, deposit and term pricing, provisioning and reserves, and unit economics that hold up in an investor room. A natural future Chief Risk Officer if the loan-book grows.
Kurai Chimuti
Strategy Challenge · Red-team
The designated challenger. Pressure-tests every major decision before it ships — grills it until it's ripe. Exists to find the hole in the plan while it's still cheap to fix.
Tsitsi Mariwo
Legal & Regulatory
Legal and regulatory counsel as the group takes shape across entities and jurisdictions. Sits with the team every three weeks to review Layby Africa's status — a standing rhythm, not a number to call once something has already broken.
Advisory ≠ statutory. This board is informal — counsel and challenge, not fiduciary control. The statutory board stays lean for now (the founder, and Ronald at the relevant entity). Formal directorships and a proper board get constituted at the raise, when there's capital and a cap table to do it properly.

Built to grow.

v1 is intentionally small. These are the next seats — each tied to a trigger, so we hire when the business earns the hire, not before.

Next · Platform
Full-Stack Engineer #2
Trigger: tenant count or POP volume outpaces a single engineer + on-call.
Next · Risk
Head of Risk / CRO
Trigger: the layby book is large enough that default modelling becomes a full-time job — formalises Simba's lane.
Later · Finance
Finance / Bookkeeper
Trigger: transaction volume frees Tawanda to move from books to strategic finance.
Later · Expansion
Country GM — Market #2
Trigger: ZimLayby proves the model; the next country unit (Zambia / Botswana POC) opens.
Later · Ops
Operations Lead
Trigger: verification queue + tenant relationship load exceeds the Country GM's bandwidth.
As we build
+ more
The team grows with the platform. New seats slot into a pillar with one lane and one number.