Failure is a word that apparently means different things to different people. Most entrepreneurs have experienced failure at some point in their lives; it is the successful ones that have the resilience required to bounce back.
There are two amazing stories of resilience that come to my mind. The first is a story of Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora Radio in California. Pandora was started with an initial cash injection of $2 million in 2000, but it went bankrupt in 2001.
Incredibly, the 50 employees at Pandora stayed with the radio station, after Westergren asked them to continue without a salary. For two years, Westergren met 347 prospective investors who did not support him.
A ray of light eventually shone on Westergren as he presented his business to the 348th potential investor who gave him $4 million. It was not the business model that caught the interest of the funder, but resilience and ability to convince people to commit to an idea without financial rewards. Today, Pandora is prosperous and listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a hefty market capitalization.
The next resilient entrepreneur is someone most would be familiar with: Walt Disney. He was fired by the Kansas City Star newspaper editor because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas”.
Disney formed his first animation company, Laugh-O-Gram Films, which did not succeed after an important distribution partner had to shut down.
He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. Actually, the proposed park was rejected by the city of Anaheim on the grounds that it would only attract riffraff. The movies and the theme park in the United States are now hugely popular and profitable.
Failure can be either humiliating or a catalyst to set you on a path of improvement. It is well known that Silicon Valley embraces failure. In what is probably the most innovative part of the world, it is thought that in order to succeed quickly, you need to double your failure rate.
It couldn’t be further than the attitudes you can encounter in Africa. On our continent, when you fail, it is as if you are cursed and business associates desert you. This is the reason many African entrepreneurs go back to being employees instead of trying again. If failure is not embraced by those around you, simply change your outlook. Only your view of failure can determine your approach to it.
Africa needs to embrace those who tried and failed. They need to be given a second, third and fourth chance until they get it right. If they know they won’t be punished for trying, Africa’s pool of successful entrepreneurs will start to overflow.
Nelson Mandela once said, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done’. We know that it can be done, because entrepreneurs have been bankrupt, only to return smarter and stronger.
There is one point, however, that is important to note. We need to be committed to building successful companies rather than being committed to an idea. Entrepreneurs can be blinded by their love of an idea, even if the market says otherwise.
If your goal is to succeed and change the world, you will move on to a business that works. It might mean that you have to change your business model, like American Express did when it switched from freight delivery to finance.
The failure of a company is not necessarily the failure of its founder, as they may succeed in something else. We need to stop confusing an experience with identity.
There is something about people who have repeatedly experienced failure. Once they get things right, their drive and vigilance make them remarkable. Steve Jobs, Arianna Huffington and Donald Trump are all examples of this.
An attitude of doing whatever it takes to be successful is crucial. Remember, barriers are only things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

conquer the fear  of failure

Apaltry rate of investment in infrastructure has dimmed the otherwise bright future for our continent.
Decades of self-serving economic policies, political agendas and some may say cynical or ‘feel good’ aid flows to Africa clearly have not delivered much. Yet, there is a new sense of enthusiasm and positive energy from Africa. The new generation of Africans is seizing the future.
The people are moving and the opportunities are endless for Africans. Entrepreneurs from around the world are engaged, but the picture has flaws; the story is oversimplified. The basic needs are still missing. Where are the ports and harbours, railways, roads, power plants and electrical and water distribution to support growth?
It is Africa’s diversity that makes it so rich, but it is also this diversity that remains the biggest hurdle to the growth that is eagerly expected.
Africa comprises 53 diverse countries – historically impacted by colonial era and cold war foreign ideologies; diverse languages, inefficient bureaucracy, nationalist inward-looking focus and economic protectionism. The continent often lacks experience when it comes to major infrastructure delivery and attracting private sector or foreign development investment.
Enter the World Economic Forum (WEF) and many other NGOs and Develop Finance Institutions (DFIs) who seek to usher in a better world.
WEF is a private institution respected as an influencer and incubator in helping the world understand the future.
The focus on Africa, in the last decade, has done good and raised the economic profile of the continent around the world.
WEF has no implementation resources or infrastructure delivery capacity but are good at investigation, evaluation and think-tanking. Ideas may abound but when does planning turn into delivery? Many highly qualified professionals with great ideas meet annually with apparently limited visible progress when it comes to the hardware on the ground.
In 2013, WEF stated that “with an expected annual growth of 5 percent in 2012-2013, sub-Saharan Africa continues its transformative journey from a developing continent to a hub of global growth. According to the World Bank, almost half of Africa’s countries have attained middle-income status. At the same time, the continent’s positive outlook is threatened by fluctuating commodity prices, rising inequality and youth unemployment.”
At that session, much time was spent on the identification of target and priority infrastructure projects and 51 were shortlisted. The work done on the projects list was commendable, but there were crucial missing factors preventing the realization of the funding and construction of these projects.
The ability to attract large scale DFI funding to the extent required, which is put at $75 billion by 2040, is still elusive due to three factors: the absence of upfront ‘at risk’ funding of early project feasibility studies that can attract full project funding from private, public and DFI sources; a lack of political will and technical knowhow.
At this year’s forum, it’s encouraging to see all three of these key factors firmly on the agenda. There is a realization of the need to have a regional integrated view and that non-returnable funds are made available, to enable project preparation to be effective which will lead to funding and implementation.
My birthplace in Zimbabwe and my own personal African infrastructure adventure, over the last 30 something years, has given me valuable first-hand experience of the immensely difficult task of getting major projects through to implementation, both from a private and public sector perspective.
My personal experience with WEF goes back to the event in Cape Town in 2010. I attended with a special interest in the economic growth drivers and capacity building within Africa’s infrastructure.
In a number of DFI forums, my colleagues and I stressed that while projects may be much needed, project financing funds will not flow unless there were crucial additional funds made available that paid for the early detailed feasibility studies, including the designs and accurate technical scoping, budgeting and funding mechanisms and ultimately project management.
At last, we may be seeing the DFIs and the many agencies seeking infrastructure solutions for Africa coming together to get the African vision moving.
WEF would have thus played a strategic role in unlocking the potential. Africa is waiting.

Africa Is Building At Last

Every day, African entrepreneurs are faced with the same problem. On the one side we have a financier looking for ventures to invest his money in; on the other we have a business owner unable to push their products at the pace they would like.
It is not that business owners don’t ask for financial assistance and it is not that funders don’t receive proposals; but a fundamental problem exists. You can have two companies that both sell the same electronic gadgets, but money flows to one business and not the other. Often, it come down to packaging.
Entrepreneurs haven’t come to terms with packaging their businesses for far too long. A bank’s main product is money, but why do we choose one over the other? Again, it is the packaging. Our choices are made around the value added services the banks have around their product, such as technological advancements or insurance services.
I have sat in many meetings and listened to investors saying, “we have money, but we just don’t come across the best investment opportunities”. At the same time, they acknowledge there are many entrepreneurs with brilliant products and services. These entrepreneurs have pitched their ideas, only to have them declined. It is likely that their proposal was not correctly packaged.
Legendary venture capitalist, Tom Perkins, knew about the two Steves (Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs) in the early 1980s, but did not invest in Apple. It was not that the concept lacked substance, it was how the idea was put across.
The South African government established the Small Enterprise Finance Agency (Sefa) in 2012. It has a Youth Fund worth $145.71 million which was supposed to be spent within five years, but two years later, there is still $119.9 million in the fund’s coffers. Less than a quarter of the money, meant to kickstart small businesses, has been spent. Are they struggling to find bankable business cases because the new ventures are not packaged in a way that will attract investment? I suspect so.
This is a matter that needs urgent attention!
A product’s packaging needs style and a unique design. It needs to evoke emotion and needs to appeal to the relevant niche market.
Companies need to package an experience in their products and services. People are emotional beings driven by feelings; often our spending power is propelled by sentiments rather than reason.
In order to connect to a customer, you need to tap into their emotions by creating an experience through your product. At the end of the day, what matters is your unique selling point.
Functionality is a key factor beyond packaging a product. For example, the software inside a tablet matters more than the design. Reviews for this type of product will focus more on functionality than what it looks like.
Although I have emphasized how packaging your business’ products and services will determine the appeal they have on the market, the approach will vary for different companies. It is important to know what your market expects in the segment you operate in; however Henry Ford and Steve Jobs have a different view to this.
“Customers don’t know what they want until you show them,” said Jobs.
“If I asked the people what they want, they would have said a faster horse,” said Ford.
Great entrepreneurs dictate what the market wants and then improve their products as they receive feedback.

YOUR PACKAGE could be worth millions

In the heart of San Francisco, not too far from the Golden Gate Bridge, lives one of Africa’s most successful technology entrepreneurs, Vinny Lingham – an erstwhile university dropout from the University of Cape Town.
It seems that almost any chance encounter could spark the imagination of the entrepreneur, who became a Global Young Leader in 2009. A simple moment in a coffee shop gave birth to an idea that would make him millions.
“I walked into Starbucks in San Francisco and paid for my coffee using a mobile gift card on my iPhone. It was then that I decided to build an app that could let consumers do this for any merchant out there.”
His research showed a great demand for such gift cards. So in 2012, without hesitation, Lingham left his job as the CEO of Yola.com, one of his start-ups, to launch Gyft – a digital gift card app. The app sells gift cards and makes it easy for businesses to offer loyalty programs to consumers.
Gyft grew into a success and became one of the top gift card services in the world. It also appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres talk show.
Last year, Lingham sold Gyft to First Data – a global payment processing company – for $54 million. This was another great feat for the man who gained international success from his other start-ups, including the Silicon Cape Initiative and Clicks2Customers.
But Lingham’s new-found success in the United States (US) was miles away from his humble beginnings in South Africa. He grew up in the Eastern Cape and later moved to Cape Town where he studied Information Systems at the University of Cape Town. In his final year, Lingham dropped out to pursue his own ventures.
Lingham relocated from Cape Town to the US is 2008 with hopes to compete in the global technology market and take advantage of the opportunities that Silicon Valley offers. The US market promised platforms and billions of dollars for tech-entrepreneurs to develop and test business and technology ideas and has made household names of companies such as Snapchat and Uber.
“The South African market is constrained by both capital and the skills to execute and therefore the approach has had to be different. Investors in South Africa by and large do not understand how to finance, grow and support early stage start-up technology businesses – the balance sheets, financing and execution strategies are not well understood here – but in the US it’s become a well-oiled machine,” he said.
Lingham says there are few opportunities for investors in South Africa to exit their start-up companies as larger companies are not interested in mergers and acquisitions.
“Almost every business in Silicon Valley, doing more than $50 million a year in revenue, has a corporate development person who has a full-time job finding companies to buy. That culture has not permeated into South Africa and so the upside for angel investors is quite limited when it comes to making a return on investment in a short space of time.”
He says there is a need for entrepreneurs in Africa who are focused on shaking up the system and drive down margins of larger companies. This could draw the bigger companies into mergers and acquisitions.
In 2014, Lingham served as a judge on the South African version of Dragons’ Den. The television show, which originated in Japan, allows entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch business ideas to a panel of businesspeople in search of financing.
“Through this experience, I learned that I really have an affinity for consumer products – I really loved the entrepreneurs who were pitching ideas that consumers would want to buy, such as TodPod and CandyWasted – which recently aired.”
When it comes to advice for budding entrepreneurs Lingham keeps it simple.
“Focus. Do one thing really well, and try to be the best you can be at that one thing.”
He says far too many entrepreneurs try to do too much too soon.
“I meet too many entrepreneurs who are doing five different things in their business and making money from either none of them or some of them – both being bad strategies. You need to find a product market fit and focus on your core business. That’s the key,” says Lingham.
When he’s not launching businesses or advising budding entrepreneurs on new ventures you can find Lingham on the golf course, with family or even in the line of a coffee shop awaiting his next million-dollar idea.

A Million-Dollar Idea  In A Coffee Shop

Two young Capetonian entrepreneurs, Mark Bosman and Jesse Hemson-Struthers, saw the good side of gambling on the streets of London. It inspired them to bring a fresh approach to South Africa through BetTech Gaming.
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In 2009, while the world was experiencing a credit crunch, Bosman was a business development manager and had been in that industry for about 10 years, while Hemson-Struthers was a university drop-out and entrepreneur. Both were looking for new opportunities to make money in an environment that wasn’t very promising. They met when they were in high school in Cape Town and their paths crossed again in London.
“I had been involved in the property industry at that stage and it was obviously not doing well. We wanted to come back to South Africa and do something which would be a sustainable business and would survive the recession,” says Hemson-Struthers.
At the time, he was running an online marketing business for the property industry in Spain, but the market was slowing down drastically. Hemson-Struthers was in Britain trying to keep the business going.
It was then that the duo put their heads together, throwing around ideas that ranged from starting an online nappy business to an alcohol distribution company. They identified a sustainable business in the online sports betting industry in South Africa thanks to Hemson-Struthers’ background in e-commerce.
He had previously founded SAcamera in 2004 and it became the country’s biggest online store for specialist photographic equipment and accessories. SAcamera had distribution networks throughout Southern Africa and a physical showroom in Cape Town.
“In the beginning we funded everything ourselves off the website, set up supplies ourselves, picked up camera’s from suppliers ourselves, delivered them to the post office and then built it over a couple of years to being a retail and an online store,” says the 31-year-old.
“It was a hobby and a way for me to make money when I was young. I dropped out of university after a year into SAcamera because it was actually taking off and I wanted to focus my energy there.”
In 2012, SAcamera was acquired by MIH Internet Africa, a subsidiary of Naspers, one of the world’s largest internet firms.
MIH integrated SAcamera into its e-commerce site, Kalahari.com. The acquisition allowed Hemson-Struthers to focus more on BetTech Gaming which he founded in the midst of the recession while he and Bosman were in Britain.
“Sports betting and casinos are a culture and a way of life there. We saw some exciting stuff we wanted to do in South Africa. We came back and raised some institution money through 4Di Capital,” says Bosman.
“It was a whole process which we ran through South Africa since 2009, essentially building a product, getting it nationally licensed through the national gambling board. We’ve been selling our products since 2011 and we’ve got nine platform clients now who use our software and services.”
When Bosman and Hemson-Struthers started BetTech Gaming they spent around two years trying to understand products, markets and their systems and trying to clarify what it is they were trying to build. The founders conceptualized a business for two years until they were able to make money from it before going public.
Today, BetTech Gaming develops gaming software that can either be white-labeled or used for trading sports betting positions through its platform. It started off as a sports and horseracing wagering module and has since evolved into a business that includes casino, virtual and lucky number based modules across the web, mobile and retail channels. The business allows media partners to have their own betting brand that BetTech operates.
“We are a solution provider. It’s not just about providing software. We have a full suite of products and services. For instance, if a company like SuperSport in South Africa wanted to launch a sports betting business, we’ve got the resources to run the entire business for them, software, trading, content, risk management, client support, the IP management and full works and the partner who owns the business literally just markets it,” says Bosman.
The 31-year-old Bosman is responsible for managing the marketing, business development and operational side of BetTech Gaming. He is an entrepreneurially-focused marketing strategist having worked in the fast-moving consumer goods industry and the business development position for several other companies.
Having started three other businesses, Hemson-Struthers is an entrepreneur at heart and relishes the challenge of establishing new ventures and spending hours to improve it. Bosman is similarly enthusiastic, adding that BetTech is their passion. It’s their baby and they want to see it through.
“When you start a business like we did, it requires about 15 hours a day. You never stop thinking. The job is never done,” says Bosman.
“Being an entrepreneur, you have to create something out of nothing. So it’s about building a product which you see the market needs and then going out and selling it to the right consumers and in some instances you need to convince them of the new product which they might not know they need yet.”
They hope to be South Africa’s premier online and mobile sports betting brand and are branching out into the rest of the continent. Hemson-Struthers says they already have clients in Uganda and Tanzania, will soon launch in Kenya and are eyeing Nigeria. They have also launched the world’s first licensed Bitcoin sports betting operator, BetVIP.
Following their experience with BetTech, Hemson-Struthers advises new start-ups to get their products into the market as quickly as possible and at a minimum cost. This allows for feedback from the market, more testing and time to refine the product.
“I would almost say that if you look at a 100 percent of your budget, you want to hold back as much as 70 percent for marketing. People don’t fully understand how much money it takes to get a business, whether it’s a B2B or a B2C business, out there.”
Sage advice from a young entrepreneur.

Bet On Them

I go into everything with a huge ego,” DailyWorth founder Amanda Steinberg told more than 100 entrepreneurs this July. What she conceded could be seen as a huge personal defect in the social world turned out to be her biggest strength in raising well over $4 million for her powerhouse personal finance site that’s among the best of the web for women.
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Steinberg picked up the mic last month to talk to female entrepreneurs – in the room, on a conference call and streamed through Google GOOG +0.02% hangout (watch the whole thing, it’s totally worth it) – about the complex process of raising capital for young companies. “I’m going to keep it real,” she said as she regaled the audience with tales from the nine months it took her to raise the first $850,000 for DailyWorth in 2011. She was running on fumes, parenting two small children solo and going through a divorce. Real talk: it got ugly.
But Steinberg’s been-there-done-that advice was frank and refreshing and inspired me to tap other female founders in my network – from YC-alums fresh out of seed rounds to trailblazers with millions in the bank – to find more no BS counsel for entrepreneurs looking to impress investors and fill their own startup coffers.
Steinberg breaks down her top-level fundraising advice into four must-have items, and because her insight is on display on YouTube, we’ll keep it basic (but oh-so-helpful) in this space.
No. 1, a mentor (“Everybody and every website says you need one, but it’s true. You really do. There’s just so much you don’t know”), No. 2, the obvious: your deck (slides on core value proposition, the size of your market, who the customer is, competition, exit strategy, etc.). No. 3, your financial model (map out revenue and expenses with growth rate: “It really shows why you need capital – it’s the justification of what that cash is going to do). No. 4, an executive summary (think the most kick-ass cover letter ever, as in “Here’s why I’m awesome, here’s why it’s going to succeed, here’s why you should talk to me).
&nbsp;
<h4>Katia Beauchamp, cofounder and co-CEO, Birchbox</h4>
Beauchamp and cofounder/co-CEO Hayley Barna have raised more than $11 million for Birchbox, the company that set the subscription commerce trend in motion and has seen continued success since its 2010 launch. What they’ve learned from the process of fundraising while simultaneously scaling a business is the importance of time management – or more specifically learning what’s just a waste of time.
Their advice? Finding investors whose area of interest – or market of choice – is the most aligned with your business. You’re e-commerce and they invest in health tech? You might want to skip it – no matter how many mutual acquaintances you have. “Taking the time to find the right investors is a huge, huge part of the way to spend your time fundraising the most wisely,” Beauchamp told me in early August. “When you talk to VCs they should be someone in your wheelhouse – or for us someone who at least likes the idea of e-commerce.”
This helped in two ways. One, the Birchbox founders didn’t waste their breath on uninterested parties, but more importantly they didn’t spend hours explaining a female-focused business model to male investors who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – understand the consumer. “Pitching is a complex process,” she says, “But pitching to someone whose interests are so far from yours that you have to reeducate them adds a whole new layer.” Lesson learned: choose wisely.
<h4>Michelle Crosby,</h4>
<h4>founder and CEO, Wevorce</h4>
As far as Crosby is concerned, the key to raising capital – whether via angels or venture capitalists – is as much managing your own expectations as it is wowing investors with a flashy business plan. The former attorney applied her disciplined approach in the courtroom to build a structure that she used in every investor meeting. “It’s helped me to manage my own mindset,” she says. “And keep worry – and overwhelming eagerness – at bay as much as possible.” She laughs. “Well those things come anyway, but creating structure helps.”
So what is it? It starts, like any first date, with a bit of flattery. “I call it the bromance section of the meeting and it always comes first,” Crosby says. “I like to lead with a question—usually something I’ve researched before-hand, some nugget of uniqueness about this person –because neuroscience tells us that when someone feels listened to the same part of their brain lights up as when they feel loved.”
Once the meeting is formally underway and decks are on display, Crosby, whose business focuses on divorcing families, turns to cross-checking intention. “I’m focused on recognizing whether their intentions as an investor align with my intentions for the business. We intend to do well by doing good. So I’m looking for people who know that and believe in it from the moment we meet. And I do that by asking what they like the most about the company. If it’s ‘I want a healthy return,’ then cool – but they’re maybe not for us.”
The third prong is (by my own estimation) one of the savviest pieces of advice I’ve heard on the process. Ask this question: How do you see yourself being involved with the company? If the response is a blank stare, it’s a strong sign they’re not interested and, as Crosby puts it, you might as well know that right away. But the ones with clear ideas will stand out – and give you the opening for a strong close on your own terms.
“I always end by asking them about next steps,” she says. “Can I put you down for the round and for how much? If you’re going to think about it, I’ll say I’m holding your spot for X number of days and then release it.” That way you’re killing two birds: one, you’re giving investors and easy out with no hard feelings and two, managing those pesky expectations again. Waiting by the phone is the worst way to spend your time.
Crosby’s fellow YC-alum Deyle, whose Lollipuff auctions second-hand designer goods with the promise of authenticity, actually stopped fundraising mid-process earlier this year. “We received commitments from angels and also a few VCs,” she explains, “But ultimately felt that after putting so much effort into fundraising it was better as an already profitable company to keep our focus on the product.” She may have been right: after doubling users since June, Deyle says investors are starting to pursue them.
Despite that, Deyle and her two cofounders put a method in place that’s a useful piece of advice for all founding teams – provided they’ve got the manpower. “We decided up-front that it was important for one of us to stay back and focus solely on product,” she says. “Not just to keep the lights on, but to keep a real distance from the fundraising process.”
“It’s an emotionally exhausting time,” she says. “Because every time you receive a no – or even a maybe which is really a no – it’s almost as if someone’s telling you your baby is ugly. So ugly they don’t even want to look at it!” Having a cofounder who’s not poisoned by “nos” Deyle says, helped the team as a whole to stay grounded, and to appreciate what they’d built. In other words, to remind them that their baby wasn’t ugly – no matter what they’d heard in a bad meeting.

Female founders speak up:

In his heavy French accent, a six-foot-tall businessman addresses a group of entrepreneurs.
“Do your ideas have conviction? Are they feasible? Eighty to ninety percent of ideas usually aren’t. You need to transform your vision and ideas into conviction for yourself then you can convince customers, financiers and the world,” he says.
It seems like the ordinary talk given by a seasoned executive to young ducklings in the world of entrepreneurship, but encountering Charles Sirois on this warm Nairobi evening is no ordinary experience. With his boisterous personality, this 58-year-old Canadian businessman, best known in the global telecom industry, is on a mission to grow entrepreneurs across the developing world. His first footprints across the African continent were through the Enablis Network, which he founded in 2004.
“I am fascinated by entrepreneurship and technology. Technology without an entrepreneur goes nowhere because it’s just a field of dreams. I have seen so many technologies that sit on the shelves because no entrepreneur ran with them to make them a reality. Entrepreneurs are able to transform an idea, a concept, and technology to an enterprise thereby creating a tremendous amount of wealth,” he says.
Sirois has indeed created wealth he began a paging business, in 1984, in a small, remote town in North Canada with eight employees and $150,000 in revenue annually. By 2001, his business, Teleglobe, had 16,000 employees in 52 countries.
Conviction in his ideas seems to drive his business. In 1990, Sirois had the idea that cellular would be the best communication network in emerging countries because building poles and hoisting cables would be difficult.
“I was sure they would go straight to wireless systems but everyone said I was crazy. As a result, I was the first foreigner to build telecom systems in China, Brazil, India, Czech Republic, Romania and several others. This was before Vodafone’s exploits. Again, I was the first person to adopt the GSM standard for mobile phones in North America, when everyone was on CDMA and quickly got involved in the development of satellites and undersea cables,” he says.
He made a famous $2 billion mistake and when FORBES AFRICA asks him whether this was one of conviction too, he laughs.
“I was so convinced of that idea that I didn’t listen to people around me. I believe in conviction but at times, one needs to take a break. I was wrong and it was painful,” he says.
The mistake was that he bought a company called Excel that had a sales force of one million people. He was interested in the retail business and thought it would be good to use an already existing multilevel marketing force to sell internet services globally.
“The operational risk was too high and I was slow to react. I made the mistake of not understanding that a concept can be right but complex. Managing one million sales people daily is complex. The pack of cards crumbled and we had to do a $2 billion write down. As the largest shareholder of Teleglobe, my balance sheet took a hit, coupled with the internet burst, even though we managed to sell off Teleglobe, including Excel, for $10 billion,” he says.
In 2003, having sold all his telecom businesses, he created a family equity corporation, Telesystems, that backs technology entrepreneurs.
“I firmly believe in technology and entrepreneurship so we have minority and major stakes in 20 enterprises. We hope that many of them will become global enterprises,” he says.
His convictions once again led him to present the idea of Enablis at the 2002 G8 Summit, in Canada. His task had been to find a new way to alleviate poverty in emerging countries. His idea was to have an organization that identifies and develops people with the entrepreneurship drive to increase their contributions. He says that job creation through entrepreneurs rather than governments is the best solution.
“Create a person whose nature is to create jobs first for themselves then for others; then develop the job creator and sustainable wealth comes about,” he says.
The G8 countries supported his theory and because he couldn’t let the idea sit on the shelf, he ran with it.
“I wanted money to build a prototype but the Canadian government said if they gave me money, I had to start in Africa. In 2004, I choose the easiest place, South Africa, and the easiest city, Cape Town. It doesn’t quite reflect the real cities of Africa but I had to start somewhere with the least resistance.”
He says that the Enablis Network develops better entrepreneurs through three pillars of identication, which is why they hold business plan competitions. Enablis develops entrepreneurs through a special recipe of networking, sharing experiences amongst peers, and capacity building through workshops, coaches and mentors. It also assists them with finance by providing endorsements and guarantees to banks so the entrepreneurs can secure loans.
“I strongly believe that a grant should never be given to an entrepreneur. They should build their business in the real world and this doesn’t include getting free money. It’s simply not how you develop a strong entrepreneur. It’s like developing an athlete—you need serious training, not a headache today or skipping training tomorrow. Provide capital by providing access,” he says.
The formula seems to be working as Enablis has grown from the five members in Cape Town to 2,600 in Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, Ghana and, just recently, Argentina.
“My goal now is to develop Enablis across South America, to create one family of entrepreneurs, who can grow and help each other by growing better enterprises thus creating wealth. I don’t get financial rewards from this but giving back my time feels good and exciting. Each time I make a trip through the continent, I get so energized sharing ideas and experiences. They don’t have to make the same mistakes I did and can grow faster,” he says.
Sirois says that entrepreneurship is about shared experiences. He says that it saves a lot of time in business if people simply share the solutions they have found to problems. He notes that Enablis has developed mentors from Canada, who use email and Skype once a month to exchange ideas and share with African entrepreneurs.
“African start-ups face the same challenges to begin as all others in the world with one exception—their access to resources is more difficult. Africans practice extreme entrepreneurship due to the current environment, but they are succeeding. Yes, there is war, poverty, disease but there are also good politicians, talented entrepreneurs and vast opportunities,” he says.
“If I could turn back the clock to do it all over again, I would begin in Africa as an entrepreneur.”

The Entrepreneur Coach, Who Lost $2 Billion

It is one of the great economic stories of Africa. When Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975 it was one of the world’s poorest countries. Two years later, it was even poorer in the grips of a civil war which ended in 1992.
Thirty seven years after independence, the southeast African country is booming. Joana Prata Dias Teixeira Duarte, her husband, João Alberty and his cousin Miguel, are three entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of this by putting their shoulder to the wheel in the country’s grassroots growth.
The trio, of Portuguese descent, started up Sociedade Moçambicana de Participações (SMP), based in downtown Maputo, in November.
Already SMP holds stakes in several companies from construction to furniture and media to telecommunications. Mozambique is abound with investment and business opportunities. The country’s GDP is increasing and 38% of its population lives in cities, with this number growing every day. Maputo, the capital city, has a population of 1.5 million.
For the first time in decades, Maputo’s skyline is dominated by swinging construction cranes. New buildings are going up on every corner. If Mozambique needs anything more than food and water, it is bricks and mortar. This hunger to fill Mozambique’s infrastructure gap has seen a dramatic increase in foreign investment. In 2005, foreign investment in Mozambique was worth $108 million, by 2007, this figure more than trebled to $427 million. In 2010, foreign investment stood at $789 million.
This trio of spring entrepreneurs are doing their bit to contribute to this urbanization through construction company Mozago. They have built offices for Millennium bim Bank among others.
“Mozago is our money cow,” says João Alberty.
It’s not just new buildings. João believes that there is also a lucrative market in renovating buildings. This is for posterity as well as profit.
Mozago is renovating a building by the famous Portuguese architect Pancho Miranda Guedes, who designed hundreds of buildings—hotels, schools, colleges, churches, banks, restaurants and apartments—in Mozambique between 1950 and 1974.
João believes that there is a market in renovating the buildings of Guedes. The one they are working on at the moment will be a hotel. They are also renovating a warehouse in central Maputo, on the way to the airport, which will be their new headquarters.
They provide a service where there is a demand. Alongside the construction and renovation side of the business, SMP also focuses on interiors through another branch of the company—Intersection. The company specializes in office design and furniture and represents Haworth, a worldwide office furniture company. Intersection recently designed the interior of and furnished Nestlé’s new offices in downtown Maputo and will do the same for Mimmos—a nationwide chain—at the new Zimpeto shopping mall.
Mozambique’s growth and development is the company’s playground, while it is still a young company itself, it hopes to expand just as quickly. The company is also powering up and connecting the country through Antolux, which specializes in the installation of low and medium tension power networks, where they are most needed, in the provinces. Its focus also lies in telecommunication networks and solutions.
The trio sees opportunity where others might see despair. The coastal nation is often plagued by floods through tropical cyclones, which often sees the country divided and certain cities cut off. In 2000, Mozambique was declared a disaster zone that led to a major aid operation. Many towns were submerged completely and a mother was forced to give birth in a tree above the rising flood waters.
This is one of the perennial problems of Mozambique that these entrepreneurs hope to do business by easing. Many of the country’s bridges are flimsy and poorly maintained.
Edgar Cardoso Mozambique, of which SMP now has a major stake—is a company that specializes in maintenance and rehabilitation of bridges.
Then there is media. Exame Mozambique is yet another of their ventures. This Lusophone business magazine reports on the macroeconomics of the country as well as financial issues, business ventures, investments, consumption, technology and marketing. While the brand belongs to Editora Abril, a major Brazilian publisher and printing company based in São Paulo, SMP owns the project in Mozambique. This monthly magazine, which was launched in June and recently published its fourth issue, is sold in Maputo and Portugal—a large number of Portuguese nationals still seek employment in the country.
Duarte, of Portuguese descent, was born in Mozambique and is the driving force behind the magazine as regulations says media companies can be opened by Mozambican nationals only.
The Alberty cousins had visited Mozambique, from Portugal, on many occasions, before finally making it their new home.
The company sees this investment in the media as prestige to go with the building bricks and mortar.
“We have gotten really good feedback from our readers and the CEOs of companies we have featured. It is bigger than our expectations were for it in the beginning. The people here are looking for something that we offer. We use technical information and put it in a way that everyone can understand it,” says Luis Leitão, editor of Exame Mozambique.
João says that the magazine is forward looking and very deliberately chooses to cover the success of businesses.
“We are perceived by the readers and other businesses in a positive way,” he says.
As Meticais changes hands with the rise of their current enterprises, there is another new company in the making. João said it has got nothing to do with the other ventures and hinted that it is related to the beauty and wellbeing sector.
When Duarte isn’t doing business, she is trying her hand at golf. According to João, her mother’s side of the family has quite a reputation at the Maputo golf course where their trophies are on display. Duarte wants to maintain that proud tradition.
On the golf course trophies are the reward for Duarte reducing her handicap. In the business world contracts are the reward for her part in helping to rebuild the country of her birth.

Development To The  Power Of Three

On a small street off Tubman Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in Monrovia, five red and white umbrellas shade stalls tended by five young men, all of them university students. In between classes, they sell mobile phone scratch cards and exchange grubby Liberian and US dollars. One of the students, 27-year-old Lorenzo Garmonyou, wakes up at 6am every morning and retires at around 1am in a cramped room he shares with his five brothers who also toil on the same corner.
Garmonyou is an economics student at the African Methodist Episcopal University. Like many young Liberians whose education was delayed during Liberia’s long and brutal civil war that ended eight years ago, he is struggling to put himself through school. From his small earnings he puts aside $2 a day to pay for his tuition and keeps a dollar to live on. Garmonyou is uncertain about the future in a nation whose economy is yet to create jobs for the few Liberians who are trained and educated.
Many unemployed graduates like Emmett Chea, a 24-year-old with an economics degree, complain that a culture of “nepotism” makes it difficult for qualified graduates to attain experience and jobs. He says they are yet to really feel the benefits of the billions of dollars of investment that came into Liberia during President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s first term. Analysts and government officials say that while there is a lot of work ahead to make Liberia’s economy one that benefits ordinary Liberians, the future still looks positive for Africa’s first republic.
Since Sirleaf’s election victory in 2006, Liberia has been relieved of its $4.6 billion debt by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under the debt waiver of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPCI). The country has drawn close to $19 billion in investment mainly in the form of mining, agricultural and oil concession agreements, from major companies such as ArcelorMittal, BHP Billiton, Union Sime Darby and oil majors like Total and Chevron.
With single digit inflation, a projected economic growth rate of 9.4% for 2012, up from last year’s 6.9%, there is an upward trend. All the more remarkable, so soon after a war that saw Liberia suffer one of the severest economic collapses recorded by any nation.
Despite this significant economic growth, Liberia remains among the poorest countries in the world, according to the United Nations Human Development Index. This is underscored by the extremely low rate of employment: only 15% of workers are employed formally and 79% of those employed are without a steady income, according to the Ministry of Labor. With 70% of the population below the age of 30, youth unemployment is regarded as one of the biggest threats to Liberia’s future.
In the wake of last year’s tense election, Sirleaf, now into her second term, acknowledged the need to create jobs and development.
In her annual address to the 53rd Legislature, she asked:
“How, then, do we transform our old economy from a plantation or concessionaire economy perceived to run for the benefit of a few, to a modern, inclusive economy?”
This big question is one that alludes to the difficulties of the past. Liberia’s 14-year civil war killed 250,000 and left the nation’s infrastructure in ruins. It drew into sharp focus the role economic disparities play in fomenting conflict.
Critics of Sirleaf’s government emphasize that income distribution has remained virtually the same since Liberia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy was introduced in 2008, with recent World Bank figures showing three out of four Liberians are still living below the poverty line. While there have been reports of a growing middle class in Africa—a recent report by the African Development Bank estimated that 4.8% of Liberia’s population can be considered middle class—this is the lowest percentage on the continent. The government is currently undertaking a project called Liberia Rising 2030, to replace the Poverty Reduction Strategy, with the goal of making Liberia a middle-income country over the next 18 years.
Liberia’s economy has been plagued by inequality since the nation was founded by freed American slaves in 1822, known as Americo-Liberians, who returned to Africa to create a new land of Liberty. Instead they ended up subjugating the native population and subjecting them to forced labor on plantations. Under the leadership of President Winston V.S. Tubman during the 1950s, Liberia had the highest economic growth rate in the world through its exports of iron ore, rubber, coffee and cocoa; yet it also had an extremely high poverty rate.
Liberia’s rapid economic growth and lack of national development led Robert Clower to publish an economic study on Liberia titled Growth Without Development that is now a seminal text in the study of post-colonial third world economies. During this time, growth merely benefited the few Americo-Liberians living in major cities such as Monrovia and excluded the rest. Yet even today, Liberia’s recent infrastructural restoration and development—electricity, paved roads, hospitals and running water—can be seen mostly in the seaside capital, Monrovia.
“Liberia traditionally has been a concession-based economy,” says Chairman of the Liberian National Investment Commission (NIC) Natty B. Davis.
“It’s an economy that produces what it doesn’t consume and consumes what it doesn’t produce to a certain extent.”
Davis says that granting major concessions to multinationals is to fuel economic growth to help reconstruct the country’s shattered infrastructure.
The civil war destroyed an estimated 75% of Liberia’s infrastructure, and left behind a generation of lost youths with little education. The war saw the end of the Mount Coffee Hydroelectric Dam, Liberia’s only source of electricity, which looters later stripped. The Liberian Electricity Commission started running again in 2010, but uses costly giant diesel-powered generators and charges 54 cents per kWh: the highest rate in Africa and among the highest in the world. Next month, with the backing of European partners the government will begin a four-year project to restore the dam to pre-war status that will cost an estimated $180 million.
Matt Jones is the director of a USAID-sponsored project called the Sustainable Marketplace Initiative. It works alongside the NIC and focuses on creating entrepreneurs in post-conflict countries. Jones says that energy is key to diversifying Liberia’s economy and creating opportunities for local businesses.
<div id="attachment_873" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-873" class="size-large wp-image-873" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/9-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Ebeneezer T. Williams, 34, a university graduate and young entrepreneur who owns a profitable small printing business in downtown Monrovia, faces problems because of lack of electricity</div>
“It would be so much easier and cheaper to start a business here if you had access to electricity. People often rarely break even because their fuel bills are so extraordinary,” he says.
Jones argues that the major concessionaries will not necessarily create the jobs needed to cure Liberia’s unemployment problem, but will yield opportunity.
“Right now is a golden opportunity for Liberia. All of these big multinational companies are coming in and these local businesses have the biggest opportunity they have probably ever had to get contracts. These international organizations are actually very willing to talk to these businesses, work with them, try and get contracts with them, but they are still not going to bend on their standards,” says Jones.
Vaanii Baker, Program Officer for Investment Climate with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), says it is essential that Liberian businesses find a way to link up.
“If the country cannot figure out how to plug those small and medium enterprises (SMEs) into the growth that’s happening with the large concessions, they’re not going to realize the job growth that’s desperately needed in Liberia. The job growth is more than an economic issue in this country. With our recent history, I think it is more of a security issue as well,” says Baker.
Jones and those in government hope that increased levels of foreign investment will help fuel the rise of an entrepreneurial culture in Liberia, and in turn, economic growth. He sees signs of a more stable business climate emerging.
“The post-conflict situation has also played a role in this [lack of an entrepreneurial culture],” says Jones. “I think that people didn’t really have the opportunity to be an entrepreneur even if they wanted to and I think that people here are starting off on a basic level. But I believe that every single month and year after the conflict is just that much more positive for entrepreneurs and the commercial sector.”
<div id="attachment_875" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-875" class="size-large wp-image-875" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/3-1024x698.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="323" />Students gather on the University of Liberia campus. University graduates are faced with a high rate of unemployment in Liberia</div>
Chid Liberty is a successful Liberian entrepreneur who co-founded a garment business called Liberty and Justice that exports its products to the States. He argues that entrepreneurship has a fundamentally important role to play in addressing poverty and rebuilding Liberia’s economy. Liberty’s father was the former ambassador to Germany under Samuel Doe, remembered by many as a brutal dictator. During the 1980s, Liberty and his family went into exile, but he returned to set up a business. The business employs 250 women in Liberia and Ghana, and is looking to expand. He says in order to meet his current demand, he would need to employ 2,500 workers.
“One of the core reasons we started our company is because we thought that what every developed economy has done so well is started really large industries that employ masses of people with low skills and education. There is no way that we are going to send all of these people back to university to get degrees to become journalists—give that up; the farm and the factory are the two places I think we need to place this lost generation of people,” he says.
Liberty says that Liberia needs to create an entrepreneurial class to generate jobs and bridge the deep economic divide in Liberia.
“Income inequality and people not having jobs are the biggest threats to Liberia’s security and all of our livelihoods.”
Building this class has become a focus for the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Last year, the ministry officially launched its first micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) policy called “Poverty Alleviation and Wealth Creation through Small Enterprise and Development” and is working with the NIC and its NGO partners to help entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground.
Yuri Sobolev, the resident representative of the IMF, says that creating value-adding industries is the way forward for Liberia.
“Only the formal sector can create gainful employment opportunities, and value addition is the only way employment is going to be generated. For that you need better infrastructure,” says Sobolev.
“The government needs to create and enable environment [for the growth of businesses], physical infrastructure such as roads and electricity, to strengthen the rule of law with regard to business, contract enforcement and property rights.”
The government has made efforts to improve the business climate. With the help of the IFC it has set up a Business Reform Committee, with five committees focused on areas of the business environment that need to be reformed: electricity, finance, tax rates and procedures, customs and corruption. Liberia is also expected to connect to the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) undersea cable system in October, which will bring its slow internet speeds up.
“While Liberia has many challenges ahead of it,” Baker says, “there is no reason it cannot become a middle-income country by 2030 and rival the booming economies of its West African neighbors.
“There is awesome potential for Liberia—it’s limitless. We’ve seen the development Ghana has had over the last few years… Within the next 10 years, if the government does the right things and puts in the right infrastructure, both soft and hard, in place, there is no reason why this country cannot surpass Ghana in terms of economic development and growth.”
Clair MacDougall is a journalist currently based in Monrovia, Liberia.
<div id="attachment_874" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-874" class="size-large wp-image-874" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Monrovia_1-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Monrovia, Liberia</div>
<h3>Liberia’s Gold Rush</h3>
In Sinoe County, in south-eastern Liberia, a handful of companies are
exploring land which is known to have large gold deposits; but which, due to the 14-year civil war, has remained untouched except by artisanal miners. The exploration area falls within the Biriman Craton, which holds gold and diamond deposits and extends through Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Mali and Burkina Faso. While exploration is in its early stages, companies believe they could strike upon larger deposits in coming years. 
“We believe the gold potential here is enormous—just look at other countries that fall in the Biriman Craton. Our target is to be mining by the end of 2015,” says Tim Illingworth, manager of Hummingbird Resources, a company operating in the region. 
Hummingbird Resources was founded in November 2005 and was listed on AIM in December 2010, raising $40 million. Hummingbird has a land package of 7,000km2 in Liberia and has currently only explored around 1% of that. The company reported finding 1.765m oz gold in September 2011, which they say dramatically increased on February 1 after a find of 2.052m oz, bringing the current total up to 3.817m oz. The company, founded by Dan Betts, claims it has made the largest gold discovery in Western Africa in the last year. Hummingbird currently holds a three-year exploration license and is in the process of negotiating a 25-year mineral development agreement with the government.

Liberia:  It Could Be Awesome But…

Eleven years ago, a 25-year-old Indian from Gujarat came to Kenya seeking greener pastures. He found a job as an accounting clerk in an Indian-owned polythene manufacturing company for Ksh18,000 ($230) a month. In his spare time, he decided to write software for an extra buck; but his employer discovered his private project. The penalty was costly. He reported to work one morning and was handed a one-way air ticket back to India. His former employer drove him to his house, ordered him to pack, drove to the airport and made sure he boarded the plane. As the plane roared above the suburbs of Nairobi, Kamal Budhabhatti looked wistfully through the window and made a silent pledge. He came, he thought, had seen and he was going to conquer Kenya.
Eleven years later, Budhabhatti can claim to have conquered, as he is one of Kenya’s youngest multi-millionaires. He pioneered the business of software development in East Africa and plans to create a Silicon Valley in Africa. Budhabhatti runs one of East Africa’s fastest growing software development companies—Craft Silicon—with its head office in Nairobi.
Budhabhatti is a techie through and through. He graduated with a BSc degree in Physics and describes himself as a hands-on programmer who makes money out of what he enjoys. “Nobody in my family is a business person and it was not really in my cards to get into business. However, the only link I may have to entrepreneurship is that I come from a region in India that is considered very entrepreneurial,” he explains.
India’s Gujarat state is the home of famous entrepreneurs—among them, Dhirubhai Ambani, the founder of Reliance Industries, that was ranked 134 in the 2011 Fortune 500 list.
Wealth is a far cry from Budhabhatti’s lean first days in Kenya in a clerical job.
“All I used to do was input invoices in the system. It was not what I had expected, and I developed a great dislike for the job. Every day I used to say I needed to do something better. I had a friend where I used to stay who was the IT manager of a local bank. He was looking for someone to come up with a system that would automate the check clearing system. I asked him if I could write something and he said, ‘why not?’”
Budhabhatti had landed his first job as an entrepreneur.
A decade ago, Kenya’s ICT sector was in its infancy. Internet and computers were a luxury few could afford. There was little investment or infrastructure and companies like mobile operator Safaricom were just setting up shop. When it came to technology, Africa was not taken seriously—the US, home of Microsoft, HP, IBM, Symantec and Oracle, largely ignored Africa.
Budhabhatti knew he was onto something.
“These problems that Africa has are the greatest opportunity because if you go to some of the developed economies, they have lesser problems. Because of all these problems that we have here, they present a lot of opportunities to come up with solutions. It’s like playing computer games: if there are no challenges in the game, then it becomes boring. Challenges push you to the limit in terms of thinking and innovation,” he says.
After his forced return to India, Budhabhatti spent 72 hours brooding at home before flying back to Kenya.
“I asked my sister to pay for my ticket back because I felt there was an opportunity here and just had to come back. I had Ksh23,000 ($295) in savings which I survived on for one-and-a-half years!”
Budhabhatti returned to where he was staying as a paying guest, explained his situation to the landlady and she allowed him to stay without paying rent. He says he survived on the good humour of his friends, who often paid for his meals.
“I went back to the bank, but the bank realized I was desperate and took advantage of me by renegotiating the price we had agreed on. Every time I went to follow up on the status, they would say come back tomorrow. I finished making the software after one-and-a-half years and was paid Ksh200,000 ($2,550).”
Budhabhatti used the money to settle his debts and set up Craft Silicon. From there, he embarked on an entrepreneurial journey that saw his company win $100,000 at the 2010 Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship.
Craft Silicon sells software to banks and micro-finance organisations in 40 countries around the world, including China and India.
“Banks talk to each other and since I was cheap, a lot of the small banks thought there was no point investing a lot of money in buying an expensive product.”
As word got round, banks like Equatorial Commercial Bank, KRep and Equity Bank asked Craft Silicon to develop software for them. That led to the making of Craft Silicon’s first solution—Bankers Realm—an automated banking operating system.
Like Steve Jobs at Apple, Budhabhatti rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty. In 2011, he launched his brainchild, Elma, an online way to move cash and transact.
After a decade of doing business, Budhabhatti has created a multimillion-dollar empire.
“To calculate software valuation, you look at a company’s annual turnover in terms of how many licensed softwares you are selling, then multiply by 20,” he says.
In 2010, Craft Silicon’s turnover was $6 million, which translates to $120 million. Budhabhatti’s bet on technology has paid off.
&nbsp;
<h3>Kamal Budhabhatti’s Investment Tips</h3>
Planning to invest in a technology business in Kenya? This is what to keep in mind: 
• Understand the emerging economy, especially if you are coming from a developed economy, as you may not understand solutions required in these countries. Understand local solutions and provide them. 
• Keep in mind the governance structures, especially legislation about intellectual property (IP). These are things you will have to keep fighting every day. Laws here are still not strong in terms of IP. 
• Don’t expect a very high return. Most people think since they are investing in a high risk environment, they will get a high return—manage your expectations from day one. 
• Currency fluctuation is a major risk. Ensure you have a way to manage that.

He Came, He Saw,  He Got Thrown Out

For someone who has been a bona fide superstar on the African continent for well over two decades, Yvonne Chaka Chaka is strangely the most approachable person I have ever met, with few airs and graces.
She is the opposite of a spoilt superstar; instead, she has this quality of mothering everyone around her. A couple of times during my one-on-one interview with her, she picks the most inopportune moment to ask whether I’m hungry and proceeds to offer me some pasta and mince.
<div id="attachment_337" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-337" class="size-large wp-image-337" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/chaka2_1-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Yvonne Chaka Chaka at her home, Bryanston, north of Johannesburg</div>
We meet Chaka Chaka at her home in the wealthy suburb of Bryanston in the north of Johannesburg. We are not the only crew here; there is a team from a popular showbiz magazine wrapping up a shoot with her. One of her many assistants tells us that she has another two more interviews later. So how is it that this 46-year-old mother of four boys has managed to remain relevant, in demand and adored in this very fickle entertainment industry?
“I have just never bought into this notion that the music and entertainment industry are all ‘sex, drugs and rock-’n-roll’. I was raised to always maintain a sense of pride and to be responsible at all times. From the first moment after I was discovered, all I ever wanted to do was to make it big so I could uproot my family out of poverty. My mother, who was a domestic worker at that point, wanted me to get a law degree and be very successful. She didn’t approve of me being a singer. She had higher expectations,” she says.
Chaka Chaka’s debut album, I’m in Love with a DJ, sold more than 35,000 copies in two weeks back in 1985. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Chaka Chaka was to belt out iconic hits such as Umqombothi (African beer), Burning Up, Thank You, Mister DJ and Who’s the Boss?, among many other hits. Her songs are a soundtrack to many an African childhood, and she has performed in all corners of the African continent.
“I knew I was becoming really successful when everyone started comparing me to Brenda Fassie, who had started singing in 1981 and was the epitome of success at that time. Everybody started noticing me. My gig calendar went crazy and I could finally build my mother the three-bedroom house she wanted. I also started singing for serious company like former President Nelson Mandela, kings, queens and the world’s most important people,” she says proudly.
On the walls of her home, there are countless gongs, awards, trophies, certificates and picture portraits of her flanked by people straight from a name-dropper’s fantasy. Alongside them are many magazine covers and framed platinum-certified discs. The most refreshing aspect about Chaka Chaka’s career, though, is that it has been far from one-dimensional. She has managed to balance performing with getting an impressive higher education, being an entrepreneur and doing high-level philanthropy. It is her entrepreneurship that I am interested in, mainly because we have all heard the painful tale of beloved musicians dying as paupers.
“I started my first business in 1987. It was a hair salon based at the Carlton Centre shopping mall in the CBD of Johannesburg. It was called Le Classique and it was ahead of its time in the way it offered services. The salon had a separate wing where our VIP and celebrity clientele could come in and have private consultations, be pampered without the glare of the public, without delay or having to wait in queues. Le Classique was also one of the few salons at that time that had a multiracial client base,” she explains. The success of Le Classique led to Chaka Chaka opening another beauty salon on Kruis Street—just down the road from the Carlton Centre. “I opened my second salon in 1989. It was called Vonny’s 7th Heaven and it too was wildly successful. The two salons had a very good run until the steep escalation of crime in the CBD forced us to close shop,” she says.
These mishaps may have pushed Chaka Chaka away from the hair and beauty industry, but the business bug had bitten. In 1992, Chaka Chaka opened a limousine business.
“My husband and I bought a few limos and a couple of luxury American cars and started Byandlani Limousine Services. We realised that there was an influx of tourists coming to our shores as the political climate changed, so we jumped on the bandwagon. We hired drivers who would be based at the airport ready to pick up tourists and take them sightseeing, on tours or to wherever their destinations were,” she says.
Chaka Chaka also used her industry connections to boost her limo business’ image and they were chosen to transport Michael Jackson during his South African tour.
A few years later, legislation around how public transportation entities operate was changed, so Chaka Chaka decided to sell the cars and cut her losses.
“The cars were American, so they were a left-hand drive and we were always given grief about that. The business had also started doing badly at that point, so it made sense to just move on to something else,” she says.
Soon after the dissolution of Byandlani Limousine Services, Chaka Chaka then bought a house in Berea, downtown Johannesburg that she converted into offices for hire and a rehearsal venue for herself and other musicians.
“The house was a very popular rehearsal venue. You name any artist that was big during that period, and they were most likely also rehearsing with us. Bands like Sankomota and Stimela, as well as solo artists like Tshepo Tshola, Sibongile Khumalo and Hugh Masekela were among our clients,” she says.
Once again, crime became the thorn in her side and forced Chaka Chaka to think twice about the location of her business. “We got burgled way too many times. Our clients’ cars got hijacked and it quite simply became unpleasant. So we donated the house to a local church and once again shifted focus,” she says. This is the point where Chaka Chaka set her sights on the corporate world.
Her first major move was to buy into Gestetner—a company that produces printing machines.
“Buying into Gestetner surprised a lot of people. It was during the period where BEE (black economic empowerment) was the buzzword, so some even thought I was brought in to be ‘the token black’. People just didn’t understand why or how a singer could also feature in the corporate space,” she says.
Her move into corporate South Africa has flourished. Right now, she owns shares and sits on the board of JSE-listed Morvest Business Group, an IT company, as well as on the boards of many Section 21 companies like the African Women’s Development Board, Shalamuka Board, Sonke Skills Development and Women in Energy. Chaka Chaka also owns shares in major companies such as Media 24, Sasol and Telkom.
Even with such an impressive business portfolio, it is practically impossible to sit with Chaka Chaka and not notice that the thing that’s closest to her heart is her charity work. “I have just come back from Vietnam and Kenya, where I have been involved in a campaign started by the World Health Organization (WHO) along with The Global Fund and (international police agency) Interpol. The campaign aims to create awareness around fake medication, counterfeit ARVs and other drugs meant to treat dreaded diseases such as tuberculosis. I am the face of that campaign alongside fellow musician Youssou N’dour,” she says.
Chaka Chaka is also a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, and hints at the fact that unlike her other UN ambassador colleagues, such as movie star Angelina Jolie, she goes further than attending a UN press conference to just smile and wave.
“I have a passion for going to the grassroots and helping people who literally have nothing. I recently travelled to the most remote villages of Africa and shot a documentary highlighting the extreme plight of the people who live there in the hope that once it gets flighted on television, someone somewhere will do something to help these people who are so extremely disadvantaged.”
Chaka Chaka has also adopted Lethare High School in Jabulani Township in Soweto, where she has a program that supports the needy and sponsors a number of them through university.
“Lethare is the same school that I attended growing up. So knowing that community as intimately as I do, I knew that I had to do something to help, something to give back as they are behind my musical success. There are a few kids there whom we have taken to university, and in the next five years, I am making plans with Lethare’s principal to broaden this program so that there isn’t a child we cannot help,” she says.
With so much on Chaka Chaka’s plate, it is amazing that she finds time for everyone else in her life. But as I sit in her home, I realize that somehow it has been possible for this remarkable woman to raise great kids, keep her music career afloat and go from strength to strength in her business life. She is not about to slow down—she is currently shooting a musical with Leleti Khumalo (of Sarafina! fame) and Luthuli Dlamini, and going into studio to record a new album that will be released in 2012 through her own company, Chaka Chaka Promotions.
As I drive out of her home, I see a Lifebuoy soap billboard with her face on it—she is there too.

Doing Business To The Chaka Chaka Beat

In an increasingly on-demand world, how do you get people to tune in and stay tuned? Take a cue from Ian Sander and Kim Moses. Six years ago the husband-and-wife duo produced a television show called Ghost Whisperer, about a 25-year-old girl (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) who can talk to ghosts. CBS picked it up and scheduled it to run on Fridays at 8 p.m., a ratings dead zone. Survival meant generating some serious buzz—and not waiting for the network’s help.
The pair organized a conference where paranormal-fanatic bloggers could meet the stars of the show before it aired. They also created a crystal ball game for ghost-fan forums online. Expenses ran short of $100,000, cheap by TV standards. Result: Ghost Whisperer averaged 10 million viewers during its first season—the highest-rated Friday night show that year. Over the next few years (it ran for five) Sander and Moses made a Web series from a ghost’s point of view, called The Other Side. When Comic-Con, a film and TV convention, came around they produced a Ghost Whisperer graphic novel. In some cases sponsors like General Motors covered most of the costs.
Sander and Moses got so good at building buzz they decided to make a business out of it. Today the couple runs two outfits headquartered in the old Animation Building on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif.: Sander Moses, their production arm, and Slam, a marketing agency that helps TV and movie producers use the Web to snare viewers. According to SNL Kagan, a media research firm, even if a show makes it through its first season, it has only a 30% chance of being renewed the next year. “We have to create an interactive playground,” says Moses, 50.
Sander, 56, and Moses started flirting with online marketing in 1996 while working on the show Profiler. Their lead character, FBI agent Samantha Waters, was tracking down a serial killer who called himself “Jack of All Trades.” One episode took place in Jack’s lair, where the killer typed on his computer. The camera peeked over his shoulder to reveal the URL he was looking at—JackOTrades.com. Viewers who went to that website could chat with the creep and tour his loft. The site was such a hit that NBC executives, worried about the message they were sending, asked to have it taken down.
These days Sander and Moses never make a show without a marketing plan. Last year they pitched a reality show, Psychic in Suburbia (about psychic Maureen Hancock and her family), to the Style Network. The attack included a mobile application that allows users to shake their phones like a magic eight ball and get Hancock’s answer to any question. The show premiered as a onehour documentary in July; Style will decide whether to pick it up as a series in October.
In another project, meant to highlight the show Ugly Betty as it went into syndication earlier this year, Slam created an app that lets viewers “Be Bettyer” by decorating a photo of themselves with Betty traits like thick eyebrows and braces. For Regis and Kelly they created an app allowing fans to run a virtual race in high heels, winning coupons along the way.
“We love what they’re doing,” says Eric Berger, head of Sony Pictures’ Crackle, which hired the couple to create a Web series called Monster Heist, about monsters planning to steal jewels. “They think about the 360-degree experience.”
<div id="attachment_65" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-65" class="wp-image-65 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_021-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Husban and wife Ian Sander and Kim Moses</div>

Buzz Builders

They both live in Cape Town, but are poles apart. Wendy Ackerman is on everyone’s rich list; Rapelang Rabana wants to be, but for now is content with being on the FORBES ‘30 Under 30: Africa’s Best Young Entrepreneurs’ list.
Ackerman is polished, prim and proper; Rabana is young, spunky and bright. Both have struggled against what the business world thinks women should be. Between them, they weave a fascinating story of how women can become successful entrepreneurs.
Be warned, anyone who refers to Ackerman as the chairman’s wife. Legend has it that she once received a lunch invitation bearing the words “wife of Pick ‘n Pay mogul”. This did not go down well.
“This makes me cross. Don’t introduce me as the chairman’s wife. I have had to work very hard. I want to be recognized as a person in my own right,” she told Independent on Saturday.
Decades in business have made her a force to be reckoned with and a source of great knowledge, opinions and advice for up-and-coming entrepreneurs.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Ackerman attended convent schools during the Second World War. Despite being destined for the retail industry, she majored in history of art, English and psychology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In her second year at university, she married future retail magnate Raymond Ackerman and moved to Johannesburg, where she lived for 12 years and completed her degree. Taking care of three children at home frustrated her.
In 1964, the year Nelson Mandela went to prison for life and amidst the biggest political crack down in the country’s history, Ackerman was part of the team that put on a Shakespeare festival in South Africa’s townships, with actors from the University of Cambridge. This led to Ackerman giving English lessons in the townships.
When it came to learning economics at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Ackerman dropped out because she didn’t understand the “airy fairy” subject. Outside the classroom, her husband became her teacher and she picked up her business knowledge through osmosis, when they attended business lectures. The couple went to the United States to study supermarketing and worked at supermarkets together—the business that was to make their fortune.
Ackerman says working with her husband has been good, as he’s an understanding person. Their biggest fights were about company policy. They fought over the building of a hypermarket in picturesque Constantia, Cape Town.
She walked into his office, wearing a pinstripe suit, to hand in her resignation letter. She would stay until the day the company broke ground in Constantia. Ackerman says many of the company executives tried to change her mind, warning her that it could be detrimental to her marriage. As far as she was concerned, this was all business and had nothing to do with her marriage. The hypermarket was not built—the pinstripe suit had won.
The journey that led to South African supermarket chain Pick ‘n Pay (PnP) began in 1966 when Checkers, still a grocery store at the time, fired Raymond Ackerman.
“I’ve always had enormous faith in my husband; I was delighted when he was fired,” says Ackerman, adding that he hadn’t been happy at work for a long time.
When the Ackermans moved back to Cape Town to establish PnP, Raymond would call her, whenever he was snowed under, to do anything from human resources to balancing the books and building homes for black managers. The housing project was one of the ways they took a stance against apartheid and says she was never worried she’d push too far.
“It never occurred to him that I might not be able to do something. So I did it. It didn’t occur to me to think that I couldn’t do it,” says Ackerman.
Equally ready for the fight is Rabana. Born in Botswana and called Africa’s Marissa Mayer—the CEO and president of Yahoo—Rabana is the co-founding CEO of Yeigo Communications. The daughter of an architect and electrical engineer, both of whom had moved out of corporate to start their own architectural firm, she spent her first eight to 10 years in Gaborone and left to board at Roedean School—a private school in Johannesburg.
Rabana wasn’t keen on university, but her strict African parents would have none of that. Unsure of what to study, she asked her brother to pick something for her, as long as it wasn’t accounting or actuarial science. She was so uninterested that she only realized she had been enrolled for a business and computer science degree, when she attended the first lecture at UCT. Her brother defended his choice by saying that she needed a challenge.
In an interview last year with Ventures Africa, Rabana said: “Most of us will be familiar with the Chinese proverb about teaching a man to fish as opposed to giving him a fish. My proposition is: teach a man to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime. Expose a man to the internet and he will change his life.”
It led to a Bachelor of Business Science in computer science and finance. Rabana was faced with the question that plagues most graduates: “What now?”
She was tired of starting at the bottom of the food chain. Entrepreneurship was a way for her to make her own way.  Her parents took some convincing—they felt that going into an established company was the way.
Rabana and two of her classmates wanted a solution to the high cost of communication. They spent months prototyping and by September 2006 had a working demo. Lungisa Matshoba was chief technology officer, while Andrew Snowden was head of engineering. The pair ran the development side of the business, while Rabana focused on financing and a business plan. She gave up on banks and went looking for mentors and connections.
“Everything we were doing was cutting edge,” says Rabana.
Yeigo launched in February 2007, promising Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which had just been made available in South Africa. Two other foreign companies released the same program at around the same time. As far as Rabana is concerned, people need to conquer the fear of someone stealing their ideas to become the next Mark Zuckerberg.
The partnership with Tellfree began with the Swiss company licensing software from Yeigo. Tellfree bought a majority stake in 2008 and provided the young start-up with the infrastructure it needed. In return, Rabana become Tellfree’s global head of research. Prior to this there was a multi-million-dollar investment deal with American company, Quality One Wireless, a mobile handset distribution firm. It fell through after the preliminary agreement.
Rabana says that things were very bad for a long time and that the industry still has a long way to go. The problem seems to be a risk culture that scares most from venturing out on their own in a country where joining a corporate is considered safe. There is also a shortage of accessible networks, and a lack of financing from traditional institutions that think this business is too risky.
It seems that more can be done on this front. Rabana has joined the advisory board for Grindstone Accelerator to assist high-growth technology SMEs. She says that South Africa has lost its competitive edge on the continent, in communications and technology, because of delayed responses to regulatory issues. She cites Kenya’s success as the result of having technology and communications ministers that are in tune with the industry.
Take Israel. In 1993, venture capitalism was kick started by the launch of a prototype government-owned fund called Yozma. In three years, 10 drop-down funds were established and each given $20 million. The country now has 70 venture capital funds, raising around $607 million last year.
Rabana doesn’t feel that she lived under a glass ceiling as she skirted the corporate world. Both hope that women in business will soon find their rightful place. Ackerman has traveled the longest road as her parents didn’t even want her to work.
“They didn’t understand the hunger in me to work,” says Ackerman.
Ackerman once asked her female staff members if they wanted careers or jobs—around 80% said that they wanted a job. She believes that this is because of the many responsibilities these women have at home.
For years, Ackerman didn’t draw a salary, but has always considered her financial independence extremely important.
As for her role in the company, Ackerman says she does the jobs that no one else wants. She recalls how she once went away and handed over some of her work to her daughter, Suzanne Ackerman-Berman. When she got back Ackerman-Berman walked into her office, threw the files on the table and said: “You have a shit job.”
If Ackerman were 20 years younger, she would do it all again and doesn’t believe that it’s easier to start a business today than it was for PnP in the 1960s.
“You’ve got to eat, sleep and drink it 24/7,” she warns.
According to the rising star, Rabana, having a bright idea is not good enough because success is more about execution than anything else.
“Entrepreneurship is a much more personal journey than it is a business journey,” says Rabana.
“Entitlement is a disease in South Africa. I say nobody is entitled to anything. I’m afraid there are no short cuts, you’ve just jolly well got to work—that’s all there is to it,” says Ackerman.
Ackerman says BEE—South Africa’s affirmative action policy—is rubbish and that she didn’t have a glass ceiling to break through, but a glass box, as she even had to fight her husband. She wanted recognition in the company for what she had offered and not just to be the chairman’s wife. It took her 15 years to become a director at PnP.
Although Rabana feels that policies such as BEE have a role in achieving some balance, she too has a problem with entitlement.
“The culture of entitlement fostered by policies like BEE has also undermined the drive of young black professionals and this will cost South Africa dearly,” according to Rabana.
Then there is discrimination. Both women agree that double standards exist. They say, in business, if a man is being kind and gentle he’s complimented, but if a woman does it she’s just being a typical woman.
A born teacher, Ackerman saw the lack in her country’s schools. In 1973, she set up the Ackerman Family Education Trust with the 2% of PnP shares her husband gave her. The trust gives bursaries, worth $353,000 a year, to deserving individuals and has more than 800 graduates.
“I’m not a name at the bottom of a check,” she says.
One of the recipients is Isaac Motaung, the company’s human resources director, who started at PnP as a trolley pusher. He received a bursary to study through the University of South Africa.
Rabana is the chairperson of Ubuntu Africa, a children’s HIV/Aids NGO that provides healthcare and support services to HIV positive youth in Khayelitsha, a township in the Western Cape.
Ackerman, who was recognized as one of 60 women on the 2013 Women, Inspiration and Enterprise Network ‘Africa Power Influencer’ list, once said that retirement was not in her and her husband’s DNA. She still feels that way.
At the other end of the life scale, seven years after the start of Yeigo, Rabana is just beginning.
“Our hearts remain in start-up mode… I don’t imagine I’m anywhere near my peak,” she says.
Rabana sees herself starting a number of businesses in different industries, but still linked to technology. Her latest ventures are a web and mobile entertainment platform for the American market and a local technology-driven education company called Rekindle Learning. The start-up provides a mobile learning application aimed at schools and corporates. The KnowledgePulse uses micro-learning to make the content easier to retain.
With a number of achievements under their belts these women prove that making it in business has nothing to do with your background, generation or environment in 21st century Africa. It’s all about knowing what you want and getting it.

Tag: Entrepreneurs

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