Tag: BusinessGrowth

For many South African businesses, spring marks the start of one of the busiest periods of the year. Retailers begin building stock ahead of the festive season. Meanwhile, manufacturers land export orders they've been chasing since autumn, and contractors pick up tenders that stalled over the colder months.

Most advice about selling a business focuses on the seller as an individual. It considers the founder, the entrepreneur, or the person whose name appears on the door. However, family businesses complicate that picture. The person sitting across the table from a buyer represents more than themselves. They represent a family. In my experience, family members rarely approach a sale with the same objectives.

Over 21 years of building a business have taught me many lessons about people, leadership, and sustainable growth. These lessons apply across industries and business environments. They also offer valuable guidance for South African business leaders navigating changing markets, evolving technologies, and complex workplaces.

Building a business from an innovative concept into a resilient, market-leading enterprise is rarely a linear journey. Over the course of my career, from pioneering South Africa’s first online salary survey in 2000 to my subsequent corporate chapters through PwC and Old Mutual, I have learned that sustainable growth requires a fundamental shift in perspective.

South Africa’s founder-led tech ecosystem is deeper than it has ever been, but it is still structurally thin at scale. The most recent data tells a clear story. The Southern African Venture Capital and Private Equity Association 2025 VC Industry Survey recorded R13.35 billion in active venture capital investments across 1,325 deals. ICT accounted for nearly two-thirds of total deal value.

Access to finance remains one of the most significant barriers facing South Africa's Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). While many entrepreneurs need additional capital to grow, securing funding can be challenging, particularly for businesses operating outside major economic centres.

If connectivity is now only a fraction of a viable Internet Service Provider (ISP)’s revenue, where does the business go from here, and what should companies be changing to ensure they remain relevant to South Africans? Over the past few years, mobile and fixed connectivity have delivered low to moderate growth for most ISPs.

In June, Meta experienced a global outage that disrupted Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp services for users worldwide. The outage left many businesses temporarily unable to connect with customers through some of their most important digital channels. While the disruption was temporary, it highlighted the risks associated with relying too heavily on a single digital platform.

Entrepreneurship often looks glamorous from the outside. However, building a business requires difficult decisions, resilience and a willingness to learn from failure. Things I Wish I Knew captures this reality through the experiences of an entrepreneur who has navigated the pressures of business and finance. The book offers a candid account of building and growing businesses. It draws on real decisions, consequences and outcomes from the author’s entrepreneurial journey.

The US-Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz weighed on the global economy in the second quarter of 2026. Higher energy prices pushed global inflation higher. Consequently, some markets adopted a more hawkish monetary policy stance. The operating environment in South Africa (SA) during the first half of 2026 was mixed. Real GDP growth in the first quarter surprised on the upside.