Two geographies. One standard.
What we own and operate today is in the United States. The second geography we are building is in Sub-Saharan Africa, starting in Kenya. The filters do not change between them, and neither does the burden of proof.
Two places on the map, marked differently on purpose.
Filled in where we own and operate. Shaded where we are building. Left plain everywhere else, which is most of the map and is meant to be.
The two pins mark Charlotte, North Carolina and Nairobi. Everything left plain is a place we have no claim on and no view worth publishing.
Two things move across.
The first is an operating discipline you can check: books closed every month, a weekly operating review, and reporting a lender would accept. We point it at businesses that have never had it. The second is a first-hand read on which businesses in Kenya are real, which is not something a data room can tell you. A holding company with only one of those two has to buy the other.
United States.
Charlotte is the base, and most of the operating work sits here. Small and mid-sized companies where systems, succession, or scaling need hands rather than advice. This is where every business we own today operates.
Sub-Saharan Africa.
We own nothing here yet. Kenya is first, and we add a market only when we can name the three people we would call there before any money is committed. Kenya meets that test and no other market in the region has. We would rather be genuinely useful in one market than hold a map with pins in fifteen.
Why the second geography is held to the first one’s standard.
Maraville’s founder grew up in Kenya and has spent a career building and running operations in United States industry. On a return visit, what had changed at home was not how people felt about the continent but the everyday infrastructure underneath it: mobile money and mobile phone networks had made it normal to take payments and reach customers, and businesses that were impractical a decade earlier had become ordinary.
Build, Buy, Back is what those two halves look like put together: operating discipline pointed at businesses that have outgrown their systems, and first-hand knowledge pointed at businesses an outside buyer would either overpay for or never see.
That is the extent of the personal story this site will tell. Maraville is a quiet company on purpose, and where the founder is from matters here for one reason: it is why the second geography is held to the same standard as the first instead of being treated as a gesture.
A market is ours when we can name the three people we would call in it, and they would take the call.
Until then it is a view about a landmass, which is not something to commit money against. The longer version of that argument is Note 04, and what we look for once a market qualifies is on the criteria page.