Tafelberg Short: Your Small Business Nightmare: And how to wake up

By Bertie du Plessis

Do you work yourself to death without making enough money? Are you are at the crossroads and don't know where to turn next? If your small business dream has turned into a nightmare, then this book is for you. Business consultant and popular blogger Bertie du Plessis provides you with sensible, realistic ways of getting yourself out of the mess - and into the black. Packed with hard-won, straight-talking advice along with the home truths you need to know in order to survive and thrive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Jan 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780624057123

Book preview

Chapter 01

Is this book for you?

Dotted-Line

Is this book for you? Here is a quick way to find out: when asked to fill in your occupation on a form for a bank loan, you write ‘self-employed’.

In your own mind you are an entrepreneur. After all, don’t you have a business? And what’s more, you can call yourself a survivor. You survived the dreaded first year when, according to whom you believe (figures differ widely), at least 25% of new businesses fail. And you are now on the brink or beyond the nemesis of year three in business. By now some 50% of those who took the big step with you back then have failed.

You probably started your own business because you lost your job or hated your job. It became unbearable and you simply couldn’t go on. As Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth, so vividly describes it: by far the majority of entrepreneurial stories begin with one man or one woman hunched over a table, pounding it with both fists and groaning, ‘My God, I can’t go on like this!’

Or you may be one of a tiny minority who had a secure position but wanted to ‘do your own thing’. Someone who said ‘I can’t work for someone else’ and wanted to be your own boss. You might since have discovered that clients and customers are more demanding than any boss could ever be ...

Whatever the case, you are now one of some 5.6 million business owners in South Africa with a business that employs 200 people or fewer. You work on average 63 hours a week (compared to the average working week for employees, which is just 40 hours). About 35% of you confess that you would go back to fulltime employment if you could find any.

In 2011,  21% of the almost six million small businesses in South Africa were service providers while the remaining 79% sold products. Alarmingly, by far the majority of those selling products did so without adding any value to the products the sold (according to FinScope 2010 a survey sponsored by FinMark Trust, reported in SakeBeeld, 11 September 2010). This book is not aimed at those businesses selling products without adding any value.  (If you are perhaps one of those and you are reading this, let me warn you that you may shortly fail unless you find a way to add value. But read on, you may see the light.)

No, this book is for entrepreneurs and small business owners who are in what is called the service industry. This includes all kinds of fast-food franchises, coffee shops, guest houses, restaurants, graphic design studios, cleaning services, car washes, accountant practices, engineering services, workshops, maintenance services, financial services, and consultants of different shapes and sizes.

We – I include myself among those – are entrepreneurs of the second order. We are not (or perhaps not yet) among the first-class entrepreneurs who start organisations that eventually become public companies, those who are the real creators of jobs and the true engines of the economy. Maybe you are on your way there, but there are only about 3 000 of them in South Africa, according to economist Mike Schüssler. Most of the six million small businesses in South Africa will remain small. They will provide for the owners and their families, and help sustain an ecosystem of other small business owners. They may also render indispensable services to large corporations or the public.

I have been in business for eighteen years now and every agony I write about, I have suffered myself. What follows is not advice from the ivory tower, but from the blood and gore in the business trenches.

I never studied for a business degree and I was about as unprepared for running a business as you could imagine. I studied literature, philosophy and theology and was also a professional artist. I showed no interest in business until the age of 40. And when I began my business I had zero capital, no golden handshake or ‘package’. I had a car that belonged to the bank and maxed out the bond on my house. I couldn’t pour all incoming cash back into the business. I opened my doors in the same month that my daughter started studying medicine at the University of Pretoria. From the very first month I had to reach my targets, month after month. SakeBeeld profiled me in April 2005 as an entrepreneurial success story precisely because I had no margin of error right from day one.

What I write about