Bad Entrepreneur

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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This statement is probably going to rattle a few cages but here goes:

“In my humble opinion – for all this money and energy being chucked at technology start-ups, the reality is that the pay off is miniscule on pretty much every front and maybe we should be focusing the collective energy on other sectors.”

The South African “geek” community (for lack of a better word) is relatively tight knit. There is quite a lot of back-patting and gratuitous self promotion that goes on amongst the bloggers / social media gurus / venture capitalists etc. But on the whole it is a healthy combination of innovation and support for a generation of entrepreneurs and innovators.

Amongst this crowd, there is lots of excitement today that Matthew Buckland has launched his memeburn.com site. No disrespect to Matthew but, truth be told I can’t tell you what the difference is between this and what Duncan was doing with TechCentral.

The reality is that there is more money sloshing around this sector than common sense in a lot of cases and for all the talk of “the big global idea” these are seriously few and far between.

It’s great to see some kind of angel funding network being established on the back of the Crowd Fund success, but suddenly it’s “hip” for IT entrepreneurs to start tossing money toward start-ups… why the hell can’t it all be chucked to Eve and her crowd to drive instead of drips and drabs being sprinkled around?

The fact that the technology sector has gotten some legs and is raising its profile is fantastic. It is exactly the kind of innovation community South Africa needs to be establishing… only I don’t think that the tech sector is necessarily where it should be being established.

Rather I’d argue that we would be better off to focus the money, skills and knowledge on sectors like manufacturing, food, agriculture, electronics and education which are potentially far higher impact sectors for South Africa and Africa as a whole.

Maybe I’m wrong – anybody disagree that tech is not a high impact entrepreneur sector for Africa?

Because it is Monday and we all need to start off the week in the right frame of mind, I am going to start with a quote that a friend has just e-mailed me:

“Life is short, so treaure and love those that make you happy and smile, banish those things that make you sad and angry and live every day as if it was your last, since you never know when it is your time to go.”

I have a couple of observations from this weekend which I thought I would toss out to the blogosphere and see what others are  saying.

Bread price
Until Saturday I had never bought bread from a local bakery. Sure I’ve had Fournos for breakfast or lunch but never really been one to do the bakery thing. If I need bread I run into Pick ‘n Pay or Spar and I fork out about R10.50 for a loaf of bread or two each each day depending on how many of the three kids are at home that particular day.

Purely by chance I ran into a small local bakery and a loaf of bread was R6.50… err that’s a pretty big price saving. The next day I ran into the Woolworths attached to the Engen garage and was about to buy my normal brand of Tiger Brands manufactured bread (R10.50) and I found Woolworths no name bread for R7.95 – still a sizeable difference.

It doesn’t look like the Competition Commission fines are making any real meaningful impact on the retail price of bread, but maybe you need to shop around and support some of the small business or non-traditional brands and vote with your wallet!

Nigerians and Indians
I won’t lie, I racial profile my e-mail inbox. When it involves Indian, Chinese or Nigerian businesess looking to “strike up a business venture”, I tend to hit the delete button pretty quickly.

This is kind of ironic or “dof”, considering that each week I am writing about how Nigeria, India and China are the most promising growth regions across the globe.

Yeah of course a lot of them are still 419 scams and half the time I can’t work out what their broken English is trying to say but maybe I am being a bit short-sighted.

A couple of things happened this weekend which got me thinking. I was on Afrigator on Saturday and at one point the top bloggers were from Egypt (which incidentally has been identified by Stratfor as a continental superpower within the next 10 years) and Nigeria.

Shortly after that I had reasonable business enquiries – “reasonable” being that they appeared to be legitimate companies – from both Nigeria and India.

Maybe that was a wake-up call to myself that you can no longer just talk about these countries as growth opportunities for tech and business investments – you need to live it.

I was on Loy’s StartupsNigeria site last night and I realised what a cracking offering he has. We focus a lot of attention on opportunities in South Africa but don’t spend much time looking at what these guys are doing. The venture cap guys whinge that the SA market is too small and need a “global” audience but how much time do they spend looking at Africa? It is easy to say you are designing something to be sold into the US markets but how much effort do you put into selling something into African markets?

Beyond tech
Lastly I have become a bit frustrated with non-tech entrepreneurs who don’t make use of tech for their businesses. I know a lot of people who quite happily use Facebook as a social networking (non business) tool, but don’t make any effort to use it for business networking.

Yes Twitter and blogging might be a little “geeky” but then you can’t turn around to me and say that you can’t afford advertising and marketing for your small business.

I’ve seen some really cracking local businesses out there including sports, social responsibility, engineering, e-learning and administration but the brains behind them are using very little in the way of technology to promote their brands.

Guys – technology makes you flexible to market, administer and ramp up your business much quicker than traditional business tools. Use it to your advantage!

… well sort of.

There has been some mumbling from the Gauteng quarter, that not enough has been done to involve them in the whole Silicon Cape initiative.

Having chatted to Justin Stanford last week, he seems to be of the view that it should be an all-embracing community initiative which encourages community driven events and idea sharing. That includes extending it beyond Cape Town, even to the plebs of Johannesburg.

The flip-side of that, is that some of the tech entrepreneurs in Cape Town feel that it detracts from the idea of a close-knit innovation sharing community.

Me, I’m of the humble view that the more the merrier and technology has meant that we can exchange ideas and opportunities from Gauteng, Durban, Cape Town, Limpopo (howzit Julius Malema!) or anywhere else.

No reason to limit networking under the Silicon Cape banner if it benefits the industry.

With that in mind I bounced it off Justin last week and we’re going to try and test the waters in Gauteng to see what people are saying and doing and maybe some feedback about what their expectations of Silicon Cape is.

But this is where I need some input:

• What’s the expectation of an event in Gauteng? Is it to share a couple of drinks and network a bit?
• Do you want a speaker from the Silicon Cape steering committee to give you their take on life and where the initiative is headed?
• Do we need a minimum dress code to keep the bankers (cold shiver) out of the room?
• Any objections to somewhere in Sandton?

Catherine Luckhoff and I opened our big mouths and have decided to make a run with a Gauteng event some time in the next few weeks but we’re kinda shooting in the dark in terms of expectations and what people want. Plus we’re always keen to have people volunteer to commit some time / ideas to making it run smoothly.

PS if anybody feels like sponsoring a couple of crates of Spiced Gold for the organisers I won’t complain… I promise to disclose them to Julius’ satisfaction and will be totally transparent with the gift register.

Ok jokes aside – a couple of us are prepared to run with this, but we need guidance from the Gauteng community. All input would be appreciated!

I hate to gush about a product – especially when its from a bank (cold shiver) – but FNB’s Instant Accounting package is simply awesome and will (in my humble and probably worthless) opinion be one of the most revolutionary products for the small business environment in 2010.

I’ve mumbled about it in a couple of previous articles but today I got to try it out firsthand. Suffice to say that I may not be a huge fan of FNB but I’m but I’m opening an account with them to get my grubby little paws on this tool.

If you are one of those SME owners who hates doing their admin and tends to collect all their paperwork in a shoebox somewhere then this program will change the way you work completely – and its not even complicated to use!

Plus it’s FREE which makes it frikkin awesome.

In a nutshell it is a rules based book-keeping package which runs off of your bank statement. According to the guys over at FNB 98% of the transactions that you will need to capture into your book-keeping package will be on your bank statement anyway so all the system needs to be told is where to allocate the income and expenses.

I’m just a lowly journalist but I couldn’t find any faults with it – the system does anything that I would need as an SME owner and a few more things than I expected it to be able to do.

And it’s not just aimed at small and micro businesses. The guys over at Cash Converters use it to track and do reporting on their other various stores and helps management pull up reports to compare different operating units.

Apart from the usual book-keeping up to trial balance functionality there is some nice reporting features on it including:

- Budgeting and budgeting variance
- Financial performance against previous financial year
- Cash-flow forecasts
- VAT reporting

The product is also very flexible. I had expected a “rules based” product to be very much an ‘out the box’ offering which could not adapt to different industries. The demonstration I saw included the services industry and a retail company. By FNB’s own admission it’s not ideal for manufacturing type businesses but for the rest you can configure this thing to your hearts content.

Nice product, I tip my hat to FNB and its developers – I’m sold on it.

I have to say that I was a little surprised that my column on Fin24.com this morning did not generate a bit more debate in amongst the comments section.

Anyway for those who don’t have the inclination, the gist of the column was about how technology had been a fantastic leveller of the playing fields, specifically when it came to financial tools to empower small businesses.

The problem with technology is that alot of entrepreneurs with that mystic thing called “budget” assume that SME’s can make investments while there are those out there who are scratching their heads and wondering how the next salary bill is going to be paid. If you don’t have money you often don’t look at investing in technology which might make you more competitive.

I thought it might be a bit of fun to create a post and try and list some of the
(South African) tools that are available for entrepreneurs. I’ve tried to limit them to South African companies so that we can support local businesses.

Feel free to post / add to them in the comments below:

Free blogging platforms

A lot of tech-savvy entrepreneurs take for granted that they will have a “web presence”. But for many smaller businesses this is something they have no clue about. Free blogging platforms such as Bundublog.com, Blat, iBlog and 24.com are all ideal places to get yourself some kind of presence at no cost in an existing community.

Website and marketing tools

Blog aggregators such as Afrigator, Myscoop, Amatomu are all great ways to build traffic to your site. They’re free, mahala, cost you zilch and used correctly they can help build awareness of your company or brand.

Can’t afford a professional designer but have a few bucks to spend on some webdesign tools? What about things like Yola and WooThemes?

Want to market your company but can only afford to pay for marketing which results in sales or leads? What about using things like TrafficSynergy or OfferForge to promote your business?

Don’t forget Sean Rileys AD:Dynamo business which is a very affordable marketing solution (heck we can afford to use it!).  Nice way to advertise your business on web, TV or mobile.

Looking for a clever piece of communication, networking and database tool for SMEs to manage their contacts? Have you tried Scott Cundills MajesticWay?

They’re not local technology but if you are loooking to zero in on building contacts or a local  professional network – have you tried Twitter,  Facebook, LinkedIn?

Financial

Book-keeping packages, credit assessments, basic financial management tools – these cost a small fortune and often need some skills to use them properly.

One of the funkiest things I discovered yesterday was Instant Accounting from FNB. I’m going for a demo on this tech next week but I have to say that this has to be one of the most innovative packages I’ve heard about in a while.

Other local suppliers and tech which jump out at me include Netcash, MaristIT and iTrust.

I’m sure there are plenty of others with some really neat solutions so please post ‘em below. Don’t make it an out and out plug for your business but I think it could turn into a really fantastic post and something which could empower up and coming South Africa entrepreneurs.