I am quite inspired by seeing high volumes of young people taking the entrepreneurial route recently in South Africa, especially black young individuals. This just had me thinking of what motivates and drives entrepreneurship in our country. However, as a business individual I got to interact with various business personnel over the past two years and I was quite surprised by my findings of why it is they took the business route as opposed to the huge majority that opted to go corporate.

This new entrepreneurs are mostly motivated and driven by the following word “Tender”. Which I sometimes benefit from but this tendering is not why I got into business and this leads to the point I want to make. As a business starter you should seek, find an opportunity that will be sustainable and value adding then pursue it. Make it about something, choose to go with what you love as opposed to what gets offered to you. In the long term you will see why this was much of a Genius business move as opposed to going Tender Tender Tender.

In my opinion”tenders” distort entrepreneurship and sadly in most instances they result in failure, unsustainable businesses and so forth. Since they are mostly politically driven and also a way for enriching executive member’s families. This has lead me to the following questions; are tenders money making schemes? Does knowing someone in procurement make you a business man/woman? I ask these questions not to discredit anyone but to question the integrity, values of all individuals doing them at times. I believe businesses should be built to be sustainable and add value to the society in general. Sadly, this is not happening as a result of tenders or should I say due to the incompetence of certain service providers, this leads a lot of clients to terminating contracts they have with those specific service providers underperforming and also making communities go on protests. This trend of entrepreneurs (AKA tenderpreneurs) distorts the most important thing that every business person must have with various shareholders (clients, communities, etc.) which is TRUST.

Over the past three months I approached a couple of potential clients with proposals they liked and were interested in. However, the trust issues they had with previous service providers they did business with kept on coming up in our interactions and which makes me wonder what our business objectives are. For every business to survive it has to sell the product or service its offering in order to make a profit. In addition, clients buy a product or service offered to them because of these two things; trust they have in the service provider and the value it adds. The trust lost by clients as a result of tenderer’s underperforming creates a bad impression about new upcoming entrepreneurs. However, I’m raising all these issues to make every person who wants to start a business aware of the challenges they should expect regarding trust which prevents financial assistance and investors from investing in your business idea.

Lastly, I hope this article is informative as opposed to being negative or discouraging to you fellow business starter. Furthermore, I incourage you as a business person to pay attention to your founding statement and try to build a track-record, have the reputation of your business create that TRUST you’ll need to make those crucial sales. Sustainability is the new green in business, short term thinking will most definitely run-down your entity, when you start being proactive, foward-looking and investing wisely with a long term view, that’s limitless; customers will move mountains just to get you to do business with them . The bottom-line should not be all that matters, rather focus on a SUSTAINABLE bottom-line, that will get you ahead and set your business apart from others .

Thanks to Genius Level for the platform (See my next article how to build trust to close a deal).

And oh Hi, I’m Thabo and I believe loyalty in business will get you ahead.

Article by Thabo Promise Sepudumo edited and added on by Kagiso Maloma

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