COVER FEATURE

My career started very early, I was born into a family business and that’s when I started working. My first job was as a mechanic assistant because my father had a car fixing business. My parents also ran a wood cutting business, where they would source wood and then sell it for commercial catering, butchers, funeral houses and domestic consumption as well. In a way, they ran as a social enterprise, because it was during the time where there was a mass migration of people from villages and other areas into mining towns like Johannesburg and other areas to go and work, leaving no manpower in the village. You’d have those houses where there’s an elderly woman or a young bride who’s just had a child, and they can’t go out to source wood, so my parents would give them wood for free. There was an apprenticeship program as well, where boys on the street would come and work with my dad and gain employable skills. So both that social way of doing things and business form a very solid foundation into my entrepreneurship journey. I worked in male dominated industries from a young age and I was always in overalls so everyone in my village thought I was a boy and that influenced me later to go and study fashion. I then studied PR and then from there I went and worked for social corporate investments, something that has nothing to do with what I actually studied. But it is connected to the heart and soul of the businesses I was exposed to from a very young age.

I figured out what I want to do very early, I knew that I want to be in business, I didn’t really know what business that was going to be. I knew I wanted to work in a family business, because I wanted to be married to somebody I can be in business with because I knew I’m a workaholic. I

also wanted to be in a kind of business where I can create impact not just for me, but for the people that are around me. I didn’t want something that was going to finance my lifestyle.

I started working with my now husband in a consulting firm, whenever there was people launching new things we would assist with what’s called mass adoption of those products into the market. While in that space one of our colleagues sold beauty products on the side, which became her main business after she got retrenched. She’d built a community of about 6000 followers across social media and people were actually buying hair extensions consistently. There was more demand than there were suppliers of her product and she then came to us asking that we help her put systems in place. Fast forward 36 months after we have taken the brand that was started with R 5 000, it was now bringing R 30 million every year, employing 14 people and with branches in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, and two of them were inside five star hotels because we wanted to increase brand equity in order to franchise or sell it to investors. Around this time we had enquiries from brands across Africa who wanted more sustainability in their business, including large retail stores that wanted to carry reputable beauty products. At this time growth questions and mainstream questions started coming in as they wanted to know how we can prove the authenticity of the hair as 100% Peruvian or Brazilian. In the same way they can put a tag on something to say it’s genuine leather, because there’s a certification process, same with items that are 100% cotton, Kosher or Halal, we can prove it.

It used to be that retailers would have to fly to China every two weeks and be there themselves to guarantee that what they were buying was legit. We realized we’d be solving a problem for not just small businesses, but big retailers as well. That’s how we ended up with the blockchain technology because the company that financed us happened to have done a similar thing in the food sector to speed up compliance, safety and quality of food going onto mainstream markets. Technologies like blockchain allow one to authenticate production from the source, locate batches, recall poor stock, track stock across the supply chain and report what’s happening at every stage.

Blockchain and most technologies are really understood in its implementation and the impact is able to make to make. It is a set of digital records of transactions or data that has

been captured in the process. So, any beauty product or makeup, for example, where the ingredients come from or when they are out in, that information will be recorded there and then and there will be a digital paper trail of everything that happened before that makeup actually reaches me. The second thing about blockchain is that because it’s decentralised, meaning that we’re all on the same page or singing from the same hymn, looking at the same information. The supply chain is more transparent when running on blockchain, all the participants are able to see exactly what you put on, what you are doing, every activity. And it’s immutable, it remains permanent, so what I wrote that I put in there, I can’t go back and change it and I can’t lie on an audit or only present “the good stuff”. It also has the benefit that when things go wrong and nobody wants to take the blame, if it happens over the blockchain, we would know exactly what happened when and where, what condition the product was in at what stage and have accountability.

I think most of the problems were not even about the technology, but they were more on human behavior. The people who are supposed to buy the technology, the buying center - which is the people that make the decision as to whether or not they need this technology, is it going to help us – didn’t understand it. We had to explain the why and how it impacts the bottomline and help them see how it could be linked to their KPIs. It’s also important that we can communicate to entrepreneurs in terms of what they value. People start businesses because they want their lifestyle to change, they’ve got business goals they want to achieve. So that for me was a wakeup call to say there was different KPIs at play and we were achieving the same thing, but it was more important to her that she create the kind of jobs where her employees can buy houses and have a medical aid and have a car insurance than to say “oh look, we are now an eight figure business”. So when we take technologies into market, we need an understanding of why. What kind of business goals is this technology going to help me achieve? Is it going to increase? My revenue is going to help? Is it going to help me cut the costs? Is it going to help me achieve investor requirement? Is it going to help me achieve a ridiculous requirement? When you don’t know that, then you could have a very good technology, but you don’t sell. It proved beneficial for us as business and not technical founders, to show that we understand the business problems. We have started businesses ourselves. So whenever we spoke to business people, they felt like we are one of them and then whatever technology we bring, they knew that we are not selling it from a technical perspective. We are selling it from the business perspective to achieve certain business goals that we have a superior understanding compared to people that only have a technical background.

First and foremost, people need to understand that everything starts with education. Secondly, one of my favorite concepts is reverse engineering. Finding out when people that have already succeeded where they did and then begin with the end in mind as to where you actually want to go. So those are one of the things that they must educate themselves.

Get into an ecosystem of people that are actually doing big things that make you think like, Oh, I thought that if I have a business that is a $1 million, it’s like a big thing. And then there’s a lady who come from some village in India. She’s running a unicorn. Like you have no idea how helpful it is to actually be in ecosystems like that of people that are doing great things.