Tag: SmallBusiness

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.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) cannot grow without access to funding, and South Africa needs its SMEs to grow. What needs to change in the middle? The frame for South Africa’s economic growth in 2026 is one of modest recovery. The National Treasury’s 2026 Budget Review projects real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth of around 1.6%. The World Bank echoes these figures, at 1.4%, and expects growth to increase to 1.5% by 2027.

Small and Media Enterprises (SMEs) are regularly rejected for funding, even when their businesses are profitable, because the system was not designed with their business reality in mind. SMEs contribute around 40% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) and 60% of employment. Yet they face the SME funding gap, which is estimated at R350 billion. There is no shortage of funding in the system.

I have spent my career watching South African Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) owners achieve extraordinary results with limited resources. Their resilience is well known. However, this does not remove the difficult path that entrepreneurship often entails. According to our recent Emotional Tax Return report, 95% of South African SME owners make personal sacrifices to sustain their businesses.

We have shared new research findings on how to achieve responsible entrepreneurship in South Africa. This work strengthens national conversations on achieving responsible entrepreneurship at a time when sustainability sits at the centre of global economic priorities.