Bad Entrepreneur

I received two interesting e-mails today which I thought might be of interest to local entrepreneurs.

The first was from Scott Cundill of Majestic and boy is he seething!

As you may know Marc, CIPRO has been in plenty hot water regarding accusations of fraud. However, there is something else that you personally need to check up on urgently.

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There are very few people in South Africa who were quite as colourful as Teazers boss Lolly Jackson.

Love him or hate him he was in many cases larger than life and there are very few other entrepreneurs whose death would make it on to the front pages of most of the major newspapers locally.

My humble little blog post on “A small business lesson from Lolly Jackson” which I wrote back in December 2009 has driven more traffic to my blog in the last 12 hours than  I received in all of April. It has been phenomenal to watch and it says a little bit about how intrigued South Africa was with him.

Jackson took a lot of time to protect and promote the Teazers brand. I was gob-smacked when he came across the above blog post and ended up sponsoring part of my brothers bachelor party earlier this year.

After that he took the time to follow-up on our experience which I thought was impressive considering we were one tiny little party of many that have graced Teazers across the country.

I didn’t know Lolly Jackson (as a person) from a bar of soap, but I reckon I picked up one or two lessons from him as an entrepreneur!

I’ve been reading some quite interesting blog posts – including this one on the Business Insider – about the US and its so-called “Generation Y”.

The article asks the question about whether or not this generation of Americans is the brokest in history. More interesting to me though is the comment section. People talk about how young Americans are “enriched” because they can tweet and blog and update their Facebook statuses all day long, but aren’t really prepared to put in an honest full days work… and they definately can’t be told when they have done something wrong!

I don’t think America is a direct proxy for the rest of the world but it does have some bearing on the attitudes that young adults in other countries do follow simply because that is where a lot of the media content is generated.

This to me was a very interesting line in the comments though:

Anyone born in the 1990’s hails from the most spoiled generation full of entitlement we have ever seen.
Most never learned to save
Never learned to do a chore
Never learned to do anything but stare at the computer, PlayStation and watch tv all day

I hate to say it, but that is not far off what I am starting to see in my kids and that gave me pause for thought.

Having said that I noticed something on my drive home today which I thought was quite interesting. For those who don’t know we have had a muncipal strike over the the last two weeks where things like garbage collection has not done as unions slug it out with useless muncipalities for semi decent pay.

Driving past the access gate of one of the trendier young gated suburbs, two weeks worth of rubbish was piled up outside the gate from the 15 to 20 houses inside this gated community. Are you really telling me that 30 to 40 adults with access to a variety of different tools, cannot work out how to get their garbage from point A to the rubbish dump after two weeks of it sitting outside their property?

In hindsight I should have found one of my mates who has a 4X4 but can’t get a job (the Generation of Excess remember!) and hired a trailer. Charged each house R200 and taken their rubbish to the dump. I could probably made a handy R4000 – R8000 for us to split.

Are we as a society really becoming that useless that we sit back watching a mountain of rubbish piling up and our only answer is to bemoan the fact that the “lazy” municipal workers are on strike? Or even worse blog about it or start hashtag “petitions” on Twitter?

When you ask South African’s what saying symbolises us as a culture I can bet that a fair number will jump out and say: “A boer maak ‘n plan” (”A farmer makes a plan” for our international readers).

Are we kidding ourselves that we are really that innovative if we can’t even dispose of our rubbish? Makes you think a bit….

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I don’t mean to be nasty to an entrepreneur who is just trying to make ends meet, but every now and then you just get a mail that can’t go unpunished.

It comes from a guy by the name of Bertus representing a company called B&S Marketing. His registered domain name is bsmarketing.co.za…

…. I won’t lie, I laughed for days after seeing that domain name. Who in their right mind would direct people to a website called BSMARKETING!?

Anyway I checked out the site and its a platform for some affiliate opportunities including OfferForge and Bemotivated Today.

I’ve got no problems with people using these programs to make a few bucks. Heck I use OfferForge (See!) and get a payment from them from time to time. But don’t spam me promising me untold riches.

On top of that Bertus - don’t include your spam disclaimer in the footer of your e-mail referencing the “CAN-SPAM Act of 2003″ and saying that gives you the right to send an e-mail because you are not using an automated process nor a misleading subject line.

The CAN-SPAM Act does not give you freedom to bash off affiliate marketing pitches left, right and centre. Nor does it allow / encourage the trawling of internet for e-mail addresses to pitch to.

Maybe I’m just in a facetious mood but sorry that’s not the way for an entrepreneur to engage potential partners or customers.

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I am always astounded by some of the ways that people make money. One of my colleagues recently brought me a news article about a husband and wife team who were making money selling a form of insurance to people who believed that Christ was coming back to earth to collect all the good souls. In return the non-believers would be left behind … as would the pets of the believers (don’t ask me!) and they’d obviously need somebody to look after them.

Why a believer would leave their adorable Fluffy with the heathens that are left behind, I’m also not totally sure but anyway these guys seem to have put together a business of sorts selling this insurance.

Anyway that is a bit of an aside, the main reason I wanted to blog today was on the subject of information and analytics.

The information that is out there for people is amazing.

If you run a website you can find out:

• Who is is visiting your website – often right down to the company IP address. A couple of times I’ve used this as astarting point to find open a sales discussion with a business. I see who is visiting the site and then approach them foradvertising or even just drop them a mail to find out what kind of content they like or are looking for
• What keywords did they use to get there? Chances are that if people are looking for a “lesser spotted, reticulated valve” then maybe this is what you need to keep in stock and highlight to potential visitors.

Analytics makes for interesting reading
We are quite lucky in that we can call on the analytics from various industry specific websites and our recently launched financial services product aggregator.

We know what brands people are clicking on, we know what type of product people are interested in and from that we can make some interesting deductions about the state of the SA consumer which we wouldn’t necessarily pick up from the mainstream media or “economist comment”.

So I guess my question for today is whether you as the entrepreneur are using the information that customers are giving you by their surfing habits to make informed decisions around the health of your business?

With cashless transacting still very fresh in my mind I came across another service provider in South Africa and thought I would not only try them out but give them a bit of a plug.

The company is called AMMO mobile and seems to offer a really handy little offering… even if they mainly seem to support Cape based merchants. nobody is perfect.

So what can you do with AMMO mobile:

• Pay for the things you love at all your fave stores
• Buy pre-paid electricity from home
• Pay for your traffic fines and bills without having to stand in nasty queues

Some of the merchants which they have partnered with include

• vida Nationwide
• Nando’s Upper Long Street, Camps Bay, Sea Point and Lower Long Street
• Osumo, Western Cape
• Primi Piatti, V&A Waterfront
• Kauai in Virgin Active gyms
• Mugg and Bean Cavendish
• Soupa Café
• Saul’s Taverna, Sushi, Grill and Taverna
• Arnolds

 Having previously run into some “technical head-aches” signing up for Mowaly / MiMoney, it was a pleasure to try out a service provider with such a smooth registration process and installation. Worked first time with no problem!

So I’m now set up on both AMMO mobile and Mowaly / MiMoney – now I just gotta get spending!

There was an article on the memeburn.com site by Sue Rutherford which caught my eye. It was entitled: “10 easy ways to fail as an entrepreneur”

According to the article these are 10 of the easiest ways to fail as an entrepreneur:

1. Poor market research
2. Inadequate planning
3. Lack of experience
4. Insufficient capital

At this point I’m a little puzzled – I have read to point four and the word “sales” has not yet appeared in the article.

Fortunately point 5 came along and it mentioned the “s” word.

5. Over projecting sales volumes…

… ok but that’s a given for pretty much any start-up I’ve seen. Points 6 – 10 you can read on the Memeburn article – Sue doesn’t mention the word “sales” again in the article.

Sales is EVERYTHING for the start-up
The real beaut for me in the article was number 10: “Fear of failure”.

Even better was something in the comments section which said: “Fear of Success, many entrepreneurs don’t take the decisions that would bring them success because they’re afraid of not being able to cope with increased demand”…

… SAY WHAT?!

With all due respect an entrepreneur does not fail because he or she is scared of failing – or for that matter scared of being too successful.

They fail because there is no enough money in the bank at the end of each month!

There are very few “new” ideas out there, so most entrepreneurs are doing something which has been done before in one format or another. The challenge for them is to make their brand stand out and get customer buy-in.
Irrespective of whether you start a publishing business, an engineering firm, a social media consultancy or a pizza parlour the idea has been proven to work in quite a few markets. Will it work in the one you are trying to target? Who knows … how

well can you sell the concept?

Sales is too much of an afterthought for many entrepreneurs. It’s too easy to pencil in a line item which says: “Sales rep” in the budget and then treat it as an afterthought.

My humble conclusion – the number 1 reason why entrepreneurs fail – they don’t sell enough.

Nothing complicated about that…. if you are busy now looking at your business plan and looking at this 10 reason list trying to work out whether you are going to sink or swim then I would suggest looking at point 11 which says: “How the $$@Fck am I going to sell my product or service to a client?!”

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As far as South African entrepreneurs go, I like Seth Rotherham – the brains behind the 2oceansvibe brand.

Love him or hate him, he is the classic definition of an entrepreneur – he disrupts markets, he sees opportunities where others see challenges and he just gets the concepts of branding and sales.

On top of that he would appear to graft bloody long and hard to “live the holiday”.

For that reason I was very keen to check his 2Oceansvibe radio offering which he rolled out this morning, supported by the team from local music act Goldfish.

We’ve also been kicking around the idea of some kind of internet radio offering through Bundublog.com so I was curious to see how the format would work.

As far as content, show length, music quality (which was friggin awesome) – the show was really good and I listened from start to finish.

On the music front their was the Beattles, Amy Winehouse, Jack Parow, Goldfish etc – it was a really nice laid back mix.

Based on this mornings show, I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll be back to check it out again.

For a little piece of trivia I can officially say I was the first tweeter (twit?!) to have my question read out on the 2oceansvibe radio show. It was pretty cool and interactive listener experience.

In terms of content relevance – if you are a Cape Town resident and you regularly check out the 2oceansvibe blog, then this was a perfect extension to the concept and the show felt very local and relevant.

Is it sustainable? Who knows … it takes a helluva lot of energy and creative juice for one person to keep it going.

But that’s not the point. Seth has tried something a little different, he’s taken the blogger concept forward and these kind of things have the potential to provide another real shake-up for the media community. While everybody is jumping up and down debating the pros and cons of the broadband price cuts, here is somebody who is actually putting the technology to work.

10 points Seth, well done.

For those who missed the follow-up column to my cashless transacting challenge from last week, you can find it here.

Suffice to say – Underwhelmed would be an understatement.

The main headache for me was that I couldn’t even sign up for the bloody technology and I was pretty sure it wasn’t a problem with my phone.

To their credit the team from Mowaly / MiMoney did contact me this afternoon indicating that the URL on their website was sending me to the wrong place which was why I couldn’t sign up or read the screen.

They’ve subsequently sent me a new link which I can follow from either the cellphone or PC so we will see how that works.

As an online publisher I’d really love to see this technology take off and more adoption of “E-currency” type services but the basics like signing up have to work.

Let’s see how this goes.

PS as an after-note – I did get some positive feedback around MPesa so will maybe look at opening a Nedbank account and giving it a crack.

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There is an interesting thing happening in the paper industry at the moment (from an investment perspective) and it lead to an interesting enough debate with one of the asset managers I know on the subject of a paperless or (paper less) world.

Since January a number of the investment banks have been upgrading their expectations for the paper sector – both glossy and non-glossy. They’ve talked about consolidation of the sector, price increase being pushed through and a generally more rosy economic outlook.

I kicked off the debate arguing that the iPad and a number of these tablet equivalents being rolled out by Apple, HP, Google etc was likely to be the death knell for the sector. Why would you buy a newspaper or magazine if you can get it in high quality, digital format on the tablet?

The asset manager I was talking to countered that the world had said the same thing about the “paperless office” a decade ago and in fact there is now more paper being used in the office environment than there was when people made the prediction.

On top of that he felt it was unlikely that people would ever choose to read something like a textbook on a slate or iPad type device.

Both are fair points – humans never quite do what people expect them to!

However I thought about it a bit more and I realised that we’ve become an increasingly “regulated” world. Take FICA as an example – I’m in the process of buying a house at the moment and every party along the way is adamant they must have a certified copy of my ID, rates and water account, salary slips, a menu of what I ate for breakfast etc.

The fact that I couldn’t have gotten the contract – which the lawyer is now explaining to me – without having given all the documentation to the previous person in the chain seems to have been forgotten.

These days we have FICA, RICA, King III, Sarbanes-Oxley etc – as an aside how many bloody forests have been cut down to teach people to care about the environment as guided in King III?

But I digress…

… My question is this – with tech like the iPad coming online with such rich visual functionality and browsing why would anybody spend money printing out newspapers and magazines anymore?

Sure it’s not a short-term change but surely tech is going to continue to change the way people consume these kinds of media?

On his second point I’d argue:

• I work for one of the largest magazine and newspaper printing groups in the country. I’m 28, a professional (snigger you know what I mean), own my own business as well – I haven’t read a magazine or newspaper from cover to cover except perhaps FHM.
• The last 20 books I have read have all been on my kindle
• If I want to read an analyst or annual report I download it off the internet but I don’t print it. If I get a hard-copy of the report it goes in the bin unopened.
• My work and home PC’s aren’t even attached to printers anymore and in fact I had a blank moment remembering how the printer worked when I had to use it last night to print the data for the juniors science project

I dunno – what are the thoughts out there? Paperless world or paper-less world?

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