My Full Story and some pictures
Ploughing through
About 40 years ago I started my very first business venture – a tractor with implements to plough barren gardens in a developing suburb. The first lesson of business: Location + Situation = Opportunity! I was working as researcher in Dairy Science at that stage and realised I HATED my work and started looking for other opportunities. I happened to join a private dairy farm with a small factory and learned my second lesson of business: Not everything that looks successful are! I was the last lifeline, due to my qualifications, to save an already dying business – it died due to outsized dreams, negative cashflow and bad business management. My getting-away-from-an-environment-I-hate in tatters!
Follow your Passion
I struggled for another year in the dairy industry before I decided to rather starve on bread alone while doing something I love and I started managing a framing business for friends. Third business-life lesson learned: Follow your passion!! I LOVED working with my hands and being creative. But another situation/opportunity crossed my path in a few months – due to movements in the night life in Pretoria we had the chance of filling a gap in the night club market after one of the big players at that stage decided to ignore municipal regulations and was closed down – the locks on the front door type of thing you know! Fourth business lesson learned: Follow regulations as far as possible!! A few friends and I knew the market, knew what they wanted, found a premises and jumped for it – three weeks after prepping the premises we opened and reached capacity of 3000 visitors per week inside 6 weeks!! Fifth business lesson learned: TIMING is EVERYTHING!!
But we made an enemy – the guy that got the chained-door treatment tried to close us down by anonymous/fraudulent letters to the municipality, fire-department, health services, narcotics at the police and who knows what else. He struggled for about three months before trying to get his own business running on another premises – but we took the whole market and he disappeared off the map… MAJOR business lesson learned in 6th place: Focus on what YOU do and not on breaking down the competition!
Clubbing away
So there I was a successful night club co-owner which lasted for 13 years – what an easy life! With lots of time on my hands I started to learn programming on MS Access in order to manage the business – from daily cashflow/banking to stock control and even developed our own touch screen POS system directly integrated with our stock management. Major life lesson learned – Upskill yourself as far as possible! You simply never know when it will be your next life-line or even become your main occupation! I also bought a hair dressing salon in this time and went through many iterations of managing it over a 10 year period – valuable lessons all the way!
Diving Deep
A night club business is never a long-term thing as society changes, cities change, politics change, young people and their focus change so the club was always doomed for extinction – the only question was when.
Due to my programming skills which landed a number of small business systems, I stayed alive after it eventually happened. With a series of small steps in between, including qualifying as Microsoft ERP Specialist, I ended up with another partner doing mobile business software where my first-hand experience of practical business played a major role in consulting and analysis of businesses. And I got exposed to cloud software, big database systems (SQL based) and developed a keen sense for how internal business forces work, how information flows and also what make many businesses grow and others stagnate and die. My main focus in later years fell on Business Intelligence – the practical questions asked by management to know how to manage their business. My big gain here was exposure to many different business models and sectors – engineering, pharmaceuticals, medical, marketing, sales, logistics, trade unions, mining, services, etc. And all the time honing my Critical Thinking Skills – really understand the smaller parts but never see anything in isolation!
… and then Covid
Everything has a sell-by date and a year after major covid ended, I decided I need to go on my own again and became a small entrepreneur in a VERY different world of social media, a very bad economy with a very strange and strangled marketplace in South Africa. I ventured into designing and textile printing, photography portfolio marketing, ecommerce website development, social media marketing, video production and marketing and branding in general. I learned another hurtful lesson: Exactly how difficult it is to put yourself on the map as a small business in South Africa.
All the avenues of marketing which worked well for small entrepreneurs for 5 to 8 years before covid, changed completely in about 12 months into a very different very fluid and exceptionally confusing network of noise. Finding your way through the maze of YouTube, TikTok, Google, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, open air markets, millions of online Gurus, friends and acquaintances “who have all the answers” and figuring out who to listen to and what to simply ignore, is really challenging. And then you still have to survive…
So now what??
My history shaped me into someone who can LISTEN to you from a very broad base and really analyse your ideas and strategies to help you find answers that will work for YOU where YOU ARE in SOUTH AFRICA. This last bit is key – how we grow our businesses is not remotely comparable to how they do it overseas. Simple things like exchange rates, export and import constraints (not legally but practically!!), size of our market, the extreme fragmentation of our market re culture, demographics, geolocation, economic status, etc. all determine YOUR success. Let me help you make sense of it practically.
I do not do pie in the sky. If that is what you want then just rabbit-hole into YouTube and Instagram and knock yourself out – I’ll see you on the dark side!!! 😀
