Do not ask a rich man to give you money. Rather, ask him for an opportunity to help him make more money. If you have a habit of asking rich people for money, they will cut you.

But if you have a habit of coming up with ideas to help them make more money, you will join the inner circle, and they will reward you. Relationship building with people at the top demands many nuances: do not hit the send button on impulse. Focus on one thing at a time and make the email very short.

When in their presence, do not talk too much – focus on listening even if you think you are very knowledgeable. From that listening, you will get their priorities and see how to position yourself for opportunities. But when they want you to talk, take over the moments.

You do not have to be working for these men to be working for rich people. There are many around you there. (source: wealth gorilla)

Always remember – the best time to win hearts for opportunities is when there is no opportunity. Develop a capability at least in one specific area so that when the moment arrives, the inner aides will call for you. I promise you, one job with them can cover all your toils for a year. But they want quality and I mean absolute quality because before them you are nothing but a number. Where you fail to deliver, you are out. That wealth was not built by assembling failures.

That you have a man’s business card does not mean you have a relationship with him. The key is to understand the small frictions he has, and then architect a roadmap. A durable business relationship that is asymmetric in nature can only work when there are benefits: you must offer something of value to the other person. Yes, just as companies accumulate capabilities, you must offer something of value to build and nurture that relationship.

If you do business in Nigeria, do not take for granted the opportunities in Anglophone West African countries. Their bureaucracies are lighter compared to what we have in Nigeria. I mean it – you can get something done fast in some of these countries than in Nigeria.

Anglophone Africa includes five countries in West Africa (The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, and the most populous African country Nigeria, as well as a part of Cameroon) that are separated by Francophone countries, South Sudan, and a large continuous area in Southern Africa and the African Great Lakes.

When our representative in one West African country shared a letter written by a Minister of Health on a product, I was surprised that he got that letter within two days. My conclusion was that the minister wrote the letter without using an aide. Certainly, that is not possible in Nigeria with all layers of bureaucracies.

But to enter these markets, do not go and open offices. My suggestion is simple – look for reliable local partners and be generous with the benefits. Strategic partnership will improve your scalable advantage.

To thrive in business, especially in Africa, where our markets are extremely heterogeneous, requiring huge marginal costs for scaling, across disparate territories, you need to develop a mechanism to partner with others. With partnership, you would reduce the burden of massive operating capital, mitigate new market exposures, reduce operating risks and typically move faster.

Do not just spend all your time in Abuja – think West Africa, at least, as things happen faster there. Lagos is a good place but you need to be really good to thrive in Lagos. I mean it – Lagos is a center of excellence and it is one of the most competitive markets in the world. If you are average, Lagos is not going to cut it for you. Largely, it is irrelevant what you (legally) do in Lagos. Provided you are good, Lagos will reward you!

For West Africa, outside Nigeria, there is one main issue, though; the deals are never as big as the ones Nigeria offers. Yes, they do things with moderation.

One of the greatest moments in the creation of Instagram was when the founders (Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger) discovered that its first idea to clone Foursquare (a location app) was not cutting it. Instead of people caring about location, they were interested in sharing photos. Just like that, the founded abandoned Burbn, the Foursquare-clone, and created Instagram which focuses on helping people to share photos.

Burbn was not, however, terribly successful. The app was too complicated, Sawyer points out, and had “a jumble of features that made it confusing.” Systrom, however, kept tweaking the app. He paid attention to how people were using it. He brought on another programmer, Mike Krieger; the pair used analytics to determine how, exactly, their customers were using Burbn. Their finding? People weren’t using Burbn’s check-in features at all. What they were using, though, were the app’s photo-sharing features. “They were posting and sharing photos like crazy,” Sawyer notes

Contrast that with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel who had a wonderful product in Snapchat but felt he knew what he wanted. He went on excursion and redesigned the product, pushing many out of his platform. Good enough, he has recovered: “The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate,” he wrote.

In a 15-page memo to employees, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said his company is aiming for profitability next year and apologized for the much-criticized redesign of the Snapchat app. “The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate,” he wrote. (Fortune Newsletter)

In business, a product is for whatever customers use it for (legally) – forget what you have in mind. From suya joints to pineapple sellers across Nigeria, they have converted toothpicks into a quasi-wooden fork. You would be naïve to tell customers toothpicks are for picking teeth and not for eating pineapples or suya. The key is looking at your data to understand what customers really care for and how they are using your products. That way you can quickly pivot.