Work out whatyour evidence says

The strategy came first. I worked out what I wanted an assessor to believe about me by the final page, then went back through everything I had done and asked what each piece proved. The same project can be strong under one criterion and wasted under another, so where I placed it mattered as much as having it. Some work I was proud of stayed out because it did not serve the case. A venture that had not succeeded went in, because it showed exactly what one criterion was looking for.

The storytelling held it together. My statement begins with where I come from and ends with what I intended to build in the UK, and every document in between was written to sit on that line. I explained my market, my numbers and my plans in terms a reader in Britain would recognise, so that nobody had to guess what an achievement in Lagos meant.

The preparation was the longest part. Each claim needed something behind it that I had not written myself: press coverage, official records, live data, the words of people senior enough to be believed. I chose the people who wrote for me so that each could speak to a different side of my work, and I prepared them properly, so that what they said agreed with what my evidence showed. I laid out every file so an assessor could open it and know at once what they were looking at.