How to Choose the Person Who Runs It: Vetting an Operator Back Home

You are not investing in a business. You are investing in a person.

That sentence is the whole of this article, and almost everyone gets it backwards. They spend three months researching whether a cold room, a poultry farm or a laundry is a good idea, and about forty minutes deciding who will run it — usually landing on a cousin, a school friend, or whoever raised the idea in the first place.

Then the business fails, and everyone concludes the sector was wrong. It usually wasn’t. The operator was.

From four thousand miles away you cannot manage a business. You can only choose someone and then verify them. So the choosing has to carry weight the way it never would if you were around to notice things going wrong.

The trap: enthusiasm is not competence

The person who brings you the idea is rarely the right person to run it.

They are enthusiastic, which feels like commitment. They have thought about it a lot, which feels like expertise. They are family or close to it, which feels like safety. None of those three things predicts whether someone can run a business day after day for four years.

What predicts it is dull and checkable: have they done something like this before, did it survive, and can you see evidence that does not come from them?

So separate the two roles in your mind from the start. Whoever suggested the business is a candidate, not the default. If they are genuinely the best person, they will still be the best person after you have checked. If they are offended that you looked, you have learned something worth more than the money.

Verifiable track record versus track record you are told about

Everybody has a track record when they describe themselves. Very few have one you can independently see.

Here is the difference in practice:

• Told about: “I ran a shop for five years.”   Verifiable: the shop’s name and location, the landlord who can confirm the lease, a supplier who can confirm they paid.
• Told about: “I know poultry, my uncle had a farm.”   Verifiable: they currently work at a farm, and you can call the owner.
• Told about: “I have a business degree.”   Verifiable: the institution confirms the award.

You are not looking for an impressive CV. You are looking for one claim you can check that turns out to be exactly true. That single confirmation tells you more about how this person handles the truth than an hour of conversation ever will.

Pick their most specific claim, check it properly, and notice how it holds up.

Apply the two-week test to people, not just sellers

This is the cheapest tool you have, and it works on operators as well as it works on land sellers.

Ask the same factual question twice, two weeks apart, and compare the answers. Not a trick question — a plain one with a fixed answer: what the monthly rent on the premises would be, what a bag of feed costs, how many staff are needed, what the equipment quote was.

Someone working from reality gives you the same figures both times, and finds the repetition boring. Someone improvising drifts. The rent moves. The quote becomes “around” a number. And most tellingly, they become irritated that you asked again.

That irritation is the signal. A person with real numbers finds your questions tedious. A person without them finds them threatening.

Reference calls, and the one question that works

Ask for two people who have worked with them or employed them, and actually ring them. Most people skip this because it feels awkward and because they assume the referees are friends anyway.

Referees usually are friendly. So do not ask them to praise the person — they will. Ask instead:

• “What did they find hardest about the job?”
• “Was there ever a disagreement about money, however small?”
• “Would you employ them again tomorrow, in the same role?”

The last one is the important one, and it is the hesitation you are listening for rather than the answer. A genuine “yes, absolutely” arrives immediately. Anything that starts with a pause, or with “well, it depends what for”, is a real answer that the person is trying to deliver politely.

Start with a paid trial, not a launch

This is the single change that protects the most money, and almost nobody does it.

Before you fund the whole thing, give the candidate a small, paid, time-boxed piece of work that resembles the real job. Pay them properly for it — this is not a free test, and treating it as one tells you nothing good about you.

Examples that cost you very little:

1. Get three written quotes for the main equipment, from three named suppliers, with contact details, inside ten days.
2. Visit two similar businesses in the area and write you half a page on what they charge and how busy they are.
3. Price a full month of inputs — feed, stock, packaging, fuel — and send you the breakdown with photographs of the price lists.

What you are buying is not the information. You are buying a small, safe demonstration of how this person behaves when you are not there. Do they deliver on the date? Do they deliver what was asked or something adjacent? Do they go quiet and resurface with an explanation? Do the receipts match the figures?

A few hundred pounds spent here has saved people the entire capital. And if the candidate will not do a paid trial because it feels like distrust, that is your answer arriving early and cheaply.

Put the boundaries in writing before anyone starts

Warmth is not a substitute for a document, and a document is what lets the relationship survive a disagreement. Before money moves, write down:

• What they are paid, how often, and whether anything is performance-linked.
• What they may spend without asking you — a specific figure, not a feeling.
• What they may never do: sell or pledge any asset, take on debt in the business’s name, hire or dismiss above an agreed level, sign a lease, or move money between accounts.
• Who holds the bank mandate and whose name is on the accounts, the lease and the equipment.
• What they must send you monthly, and by what date.
• What happens if they go quiet for three weeks, and how either of you ends the arrangement.

None of that is hostile. It protects them too — it means that when something goes wrong, the question is “what does the agreement say” rather than “whose memory do we believe”. If writing it down feels like an accusation, how to have that conversation with family is worth reading first.

Frequently asked questions

Should I let a family member run my business back home?

Family can be the right choice, but relation is not a qualification. Run a family candidate through exactly the same checks as anyone else: verifiable track record, reference calls, a paid trial, written boundaries. The common failure is not dishonesty — it is that nobody wrote anything down, so two sincere people remember the arrangement differently three years later and there is no document to settle it.

How do I know if a business partner in Nigeria or Ghana is genuine?

Check one specific claim properly rather than assessing them generally. Take their most concrete statement – a former employer, a current role, a supplier relationship – and verify it with the third party directly. Then run the two-week test on factual figures and watch for drift and for irritation. Genuine people find repeated factual questions boring; people improvising find them threatening.

What should I do if the operator stops sending reports?

Treat silence as information, not as a delay. Agree in advance what happens if reports stop: a written reminder, then a pause on further funding until the reporting resumes. The mistake is continuing to send money while waiting for clarity, because that is precisely the period in which the position becomes hard to recover. Ninety days with no verifiable deliverable means the arrangement has stopped, not slowed.

Your next step

If you are still deciding what you are building and who needs to be involved, start with the free 3-minute Readiness Scorecard.

And if you want the actual vetting scriptbook — the reference-call questions, the trial brief, the written boundaries in a form you can send — that is in the Diaspora Toolkit.

The Mainland teaches process, not legal or financial advice. Employment and contract law differs by country; take qualified local advice on any agreement you intend to rely on.