Help an entrepreneur make it

Small business will not take off properly in SA unless those who can help are willing to lend a hand, writes

AMONG all the workshops on how to write a business plan, apply for a tender, understand a balance sheet and so on, the essential truth of an entrepreneurial journey from the get-go is the person’s ability to adapt and persevere.

This is dependent on a host of factors: cash flow, reinvention of the business model, self-reflection, analysis and composure – anything that can help you survive. It demands resilience at a superhuman level.

As a start-up, its further dependent on whether you have the chutzpah to persuade your office landlord to hold off on that eviction notice for just one more month, or convincing your family that you need lunch money for just a few more weeks until your business stabilises.

It’s a triple whammy when you’re a young black person from a poor community. Most entrepreneurial development literature is so removed from an actual understanding of the authentic life lived in this country of being young, black and poor that it seems to assume that every aspiring entrepreneur is either sitting on a trust fund or a generous allowance from a kind relative that allows him or her to constantly dabble in and, fail at, exploiting opportunity.

Entrepreneurship doesn’t occur in an ideal world where all you have to contend with is the market – entrepreneurs from poor communities have to deal with just getting through the harshness of daily living life close to the poverty line.

Sometimes the biggest challenge in the life of an aspiring South African entrepreneur looking to break out of a cycle of poverty is having taxi fare of R30 (the cost of a return trip to the business district) to meet a prospective client.

Remember the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” I’m saying that it may well take a country to raise an entrepreneur.

Musician Pharrell Williams, when referring to his extraordinary success, always thanks “the folks that conspired to get him here”.

Like him, the successful and truly upfront entrepreneurs will tell you that nobody really makes it alone. Behind each of their apparent individually driven success is a confluence of both people and circumstances that conspired to get them there.

So I say let’s be that force for good, the folks that “conspired to get him or her there” with no expectation in return other than to help our fledgling South African entrepreneurs to endure and hopefully – given time – to be successful.

If you’re a captain of industry or a very successful entrepreneur or simply someone who’s doing very well financially, then conspire to help an aspiring entrepreneur with a “perseverance allowance” for 18 months (because evolving as an entrepreneur takes time).

Find someone with that glint in their eye, a little wild promise of a burning passion for what they do, one who understands that as entrepreneurs we should be made of sterner stuff, one who is prepared to delay gratification until they truly make it, who has a great job-creating, innovative business idea but really needs a break: the “Cinderellas” of entrepreneurs.

Support them with exactly the amount of money they need to get through each month on a personal, not a business level. Just enough to get by, to eat, to get to the presentation, to refine their product or service, to network – even to attend that workshop on how to complete a tender application. It could be anything from R1 000 to R 4 000 a month for a period of 18 months.

We’ll lose a few along the way; some will take the money and run. I can’t guarantee their commitment or their loyalty to the scheme. Some will fail. I expect all of them to fail at something in the first few months