Rent My MBA

Rent My MBA helps Ugandan pharmacy owners run their businesses better: operations, finance, regulatory navigation — the side of pharmacy that nobody trains pharmacists for. Derrick has decades of his own pharmacy operating experience, an MBA, and a published book. The practice is real.

The website didn't reflect any of that. Generic template, vague hero, services list buried, the book mentioned almost in passing. The kind of site that makes a credible business look DIY. I asked if I could redesign it as a spec project. He said yes. He's been hands-off throughout, which means everything in this case study is mine: the decisions, the wrong turns, and what I learned from doing the same redesign twice.

I built v2 about six months into design. Real photos instead of stock placeholders. A proper book section on the homepage. A dark testimonial band. Card grids with rounded corners. Compared to the original WordPress template the practice was using, it was a real step up.

But look at the hero: "Turn Your Pharmacy or Healthcare Business Into a Thriving Enterprise." That sentence is the original site's sentence, lightly edited. It means nothing. Anyone could say it.

I'd gotten better at executing the brief. I hadn't yet realised the brief was the problem.

I kept the multi-page structure. The default move in 2026 is a long-scroll one-pager, and I tried it first — prototyped the full site as a single anchored scroll with Claude Sonnet, just to feel it at full length. It was a slog. I couldn't sit through it myself, and a pharmacy owner busy at 9pm definitely wouldn't.

Multi-page came back. Seven pages: Home, About, Services, Training, Training deep-dives, Resources, Contact. Each page carries its own pitch. Each one earns its place.

Every page uses the same hero structure: small letterspaced kicker, H1, supporting copy, sometimes a stat strip. Same proportions, same type sizes, same horizontal padding, same divider beneath. Different shades of navy depending on the page's role, but the shape is identical.

This is the kind of decision that's invisible until you notice it's missing. On the original site, each page had a different hero treatment, which meant navigating between them felt like jumping between websites that happened to share a logo. The unified pattern does two things. It makes the pages read as one property. And it lets a visitor land on any page from a search result and immediately know where they are.

The original site had a services list. Just a list. Every service got equal visual weight, with no signal about who each one was for. A first-time pharmacy owner and a multi-branch operator were being asked to evaluate the same cards the same way.

I introduced a tag system on every service and training card: Flagship, For new venture, For growth-stage, For investors, For owners, For operators, For multi-branch. The flagship tag uses a gold accent; the rest are neutral. The tag sits at the top of each card so it's the first thing a reader processes (is this for me?) before they read the title.

This was the design decision I'm most proud of, and the one nobody would notice unless they were looking for it. It's not a visual flourish. It's IA work. Taxonomy disguised as a badge. It lets the same card grid serve four different buyer types without any of them feeling lost.