I have wanted to own my own business for as long as I can remember. In fact, I’ve been experimenting with various businesses from my schooldays.
My very first business was a car wash I started in matric with my friend Tafadzwa Gotha. Armed with buckets and sponges, we walked the streets of Houghton every weekend, hoping that one of the homeowners would give us a chance to deliver our sales pitch. To our surprise, a number of them not only listened; they also let us wash their cars. We earned enough to splash out on McDonald’s and, occasionally, new sneakers, but we stopped the business after six months – not by choice, but because one day we accidentally released the hand brake on a car we were washing. As the car rolled backwards, it ran over a dog’s tail and the owner’s Hoover. The dog recovered, but the Hoover didn’t – and we realised that, in the absence of personal liability cover, shutting up shop was the wisest option.
Tafadzwa and I then went on to set up a promotions business. Although we went to different universities (he studied at Wits, while I attended UJ), we both noticed that there were always people handing out pamphlets on campus, or companies running campaigns targeting students. Although we didn’t want to be promoters ourselves, we thought we might be able to run campaigns on behalf of clients. After meeting with the national marketing manager at Nashua Mobile, we secured a one-year contract to hand out T-shirts and pamphlets at our respective universities. We hired people to do the legwork, and we were in business. The company made good money (from a student’s perspective, anyway); enough to pay for tattoos and a month-long holiday. Sadly, though, our contract was not renewed.
But this wasn’t the only student job. One of the day houses at UJ, Vorendag, was notorious for its punch parties. I teamed up with some mates to get in on the action: we bought the cheapest vodka we could find, then sold it at the party. The brand in question cost only R18 for a litre; needless to say, it wasn’t triple filtered, nor was it going to win any awards. Our serving style was hardly more sophisticated: we arrived at our first party armed with two bottles of vodka each, along with white plastic cups ‘borrowed’ from McDonald’s that functioned as our shot glasses. We charged R20 for one shot; we recouped the purchase of one bottle of vodka with our very first sale. Of course, there was a trick to selling the vodka: it helped if the people at the party were already too drunk to pay attention to the brand! We each made around R2 000 profit during the year we sold shooters, but stopped because the day house eventually realised how much money we were making and shut us down – oh, and because we were never quite confident that people weren’t suffering nasty side effects from our super cheap vodka!
After selling vodka, I moved on to selling coffee. For this, I took advantage of the amazing social activities on offer for students living in residence at UJ. For example, a first-year concert was held every year, along with a singing competition between all the residences called Serrie. Teaming up with friends, we saw an opportunity to sell coffee and snacks outside the auditorium at these events. This was a great business; in our first year, we sold only coffee and hot chocolate, but over the years we added other menu items, like boerewors rolls and other snacks. We carried on for three years, until the SRC took over the business. In truth, though, we were happy to stop by then; by the time we reached our Honours year we no longer had the gees to cart urns full of boiling water around the university.
By the end of 2009, I had finished my studies and was ready for my first year of work. However, I still had to complete my academic articles. I decided to stay on at the university and spend my first year of articles lecturing rather than going to work at a firm. This turned out to be a great decision, and I had one of the best years of my life. It also gave me a chance to flex my entrepreneurial muscles: on a trip to the University of Limpopo, where I was to deliver an update class, I noticed that the students were in serious need of extra support, especially since they didn’t have access to the same resources we enjoyed at UJ. I contacted the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) to ask for permission to host extra lessons over the weekends. Initially, I wasn’t going to ask for payment, although I asked SAICA to cover transport costs for my team of tutors; however, we reached a point where we were earning more from these lessons than from our day jobs – mind you, it wasn’t difficult to beat a first-year article salary! Even so, with our accommodation and transport paid for, it felt like we were earning enough money to have fun. Sadly, it had to end when our first year of articles was over and we had to find jobs at corporates – none of which were willing to give us Fridays off.
That year, I also got involved in promotions during the FIFA 2010 World Cup™ after one of my lecturers introduced me to a relative who had been awarded the national contract to manage the MTN fan parks around the country. It was a great achievement, but he had a major problem: he didn’t know a single person who could either run the fan park or manage promotions in Limpopo. Since I was spending every second weekend in the province and had developed relationships with hundreds of students, I realised that there was a massive opportunity for me here. My prior experience in promotions also helped. So I ended up running the MTN Fan Park in Limpopo. Yes, it was just as amazing as you would imagine: I remember that there was so much money going through my bank account that the bank called me in to explain what was going on, actually freezing my account until I could prove to them that I wasn’t involved in money laundering! To put things in perspective, the lowest earning of the 28 promoters I employed to run the fan park took home R40 000 during the month they worked for me.
Towards the end of that year, I teamed up with a friend to launch a business marking test papers at UJ. Students who had just written tests usually had to wait quite a while for their results, and this was where we saw our opportunity. We hired the top 50 Honours students from the previous year as markers, fast tracking all marking so that students who had written tests on Friday were able to receive their marks the following Monday. The university supported our idea, and we ran the business for six months – well into our second year of work. We made a tactical error here: we agreed that UJ would pay us a salary, whereas it would have been more lucrative if we had invoiced for every batch of tests marked. This meant that, although the demand for our services grew and, with it, our workload, we continued to earn the same salary. The model just couldn’t be scaled. Eventually, unable to handle the workload, we resigned.
My final, and favourite, venture was Pop-It, a business that tapped into the craze for gourmet flavoured popcorn. I ran this business with a friend and our ‘venture capitalist’, who had lent us money for equipment. Our little business offered butter, sour cream, salt and vinegar and chutney flavours; we employed five youngsters from KwaThema, Springs, and operated out of a garage with no windows or ventilation belonging to my friend’s grandmother. This was an insane period in our lives: we churned out 2 000 to 4 000 packets of popcorn every week and found our way into 23 retailers, mostly forecourt shops and convenience stores. Our product was flying off the shelves, but that brought its own set of problems: we never had enough stock, our cheap machines kept breaking, and I constantly had to dodge calls from retailers who wanted to order more product that we just didn’t have.
Our business was so successful that UJ’s finance department even based a question in an Honours exam paper on it! All this happened while my friend and I were serving our articles. He’d arrive at my house with the stock packed into black refuse bags at 4am; I’d rush to deliver the popcorn to stockists before heading out to visit my audit clients. We eventually collected used boxes outside Game and Makro to use as packaging for the product, and finally made enough money to buy a van and do deliveries properly. It was a great business that we kept alive for two years, until the realities of our situation forced us to stop: We could never keep up with the demands of the retailers; our labour force was always on strike because of wages, and – unsurprisingly – we never got a health and safety certificate for our garage factory.
So, why have I told you about all of these businesses? To let you know that the first door you knock on will almost certainly remain closed – and, even if it opens, it might not be the right door for you. As an entrepreneur, you have to try many things, pivot, fail and start again. You’ll find that the one thing most entrepreneurs have in common is that they’ve started, and failed, several times.
But you shouldn’t let that deter you. Granted, the situation changes as you accumulate responsibilities, but if you’re not married and don’t have kids, pets or a mortgage, it really doesn’t matter if you live at home with your parents and eat tinned fish or noodles every night. You can chase all your desires and dreams, trying different businesses. As you’ll learn later in life, time is the truest form of wealth – and if you’re young and unfettered, you should make the most of where you are right now. Try everything you want to, business-wise, and who knows – you might end up founding a business that means you never have to find a job.
There will come a time in your life when you’re bound by school fees, car payments and bonds, and it will become much harder to explore your entrepreneurial side. If you don’t do it while you still can, you’ll probably spend the rest of your life asking ‘What if?’
There’s a lesson here, and it’s a tough one: it’s easier to find success as an entrepreneur if you make do without life’s comforts. In many ways, comfort is the enemy of entrepreneurial success.
