Do Business Well

• You may want to donate a portion of the proceeds of your business to a good cause like the church, medical research, a university or a charity. Money and knowledge are the same. They mean little if you simply collect them, but mean everything when you employ them, share them and put them to work.

The late Tony Factor started the Remedial Teaching Foundation for children with learning problems and donated $400 000 a year to it. Liberty Life has undertaken to spend $100-million over five years to assist rural and disadvantaged communities.

Andrew Carnegie used his great wealth to set up free libraries all around the globe while the Rockefeller Foundation is the largest philanthropic organisation in the world.

• You don’t get along with your boss. Many references quote this as one of the important reasons for people starting own businesses. They say that you should go it alone if your boss has finetuned the art of red tape, changing his or her mind, giving contradictory orders, not reaching quick and sound decisions, rolling obstacles in your way to prevent you from achieving, giving help and then taking it away.

Is your boss an administrator looking for robots who work by the “book” and not tolerating initiative? Does he or she recognise and reward superior performance or does he or she get nightmares when you achieve? If your work is not rewarded you should not waste pre- ₁₀cious months of your life trying to change their attitudes. The chances against changing them are tremendous. Start your own business and use your skills, knowledge and energy to your own advancement.

• Your salary has been reduced. This is exactly what happened to Clive Weil, the ex-managing director of Checkers. He turned Checkers from a company losing $6-million a year to one showing a profit of $22-million a year. Despite this phenomenal achievement, his salary was reduced when Checkers was sold to new owners.

Have you been doing more lately but found that your salary has stagnated or has been reduced? Get your own business going!

• You have been fired. You might find it hard to believe that getting fired may be the best thing to happen to you. Yvonne Lottering was fired twice when she swore that she would never work for someone else again. She went out and co-founded Coin Security, which is now the largest security company. Getting fired was something worth celebrating for her!
• You have no job at present. It may be a blessing in disguise. A study by the US National Federation for Independent Business revealed that one in four entrepreneurs were unemployed before starting their businesses!

A beautiful local example is mechanic Mervyn Niland of Benoni, who was unemployed when he and his wife started concocting a handcleaner in their backyard to clean Mervyn’s hands after working on cars. Petrol was usually used to do the job, but they realised the gap in the market for something midway between a cosmetic cleansing cream and a more powerful cleanser.

They came up with a formula which they called Flight Handcleaner and became millionaires! According to market research the formula has a potential annual turnover of $330-million!

We have now discussed the many reasons why people start businesses. Some of them may be applicable to you. Let’s look at more advantages of starting your own business.

There are few things as satisfying as starting a business. For me, part of the fun lies in starting, taking a seed and watching it grow into something good. You must enjoy the growth process in a business. Those who only focus on the final success, and who don’t enjoy the journey towards it, are often unhappy.

Husbands and wives can start a business together.

Alf and Elma Scullard bought a small garden maintenance company, Classic Gardens, and developed it into a highly professional company servicing 200 private clients and a major national property company. The gains from their business include an attractive house in an upmarket suburb of Sandton, one of the most affluent areas.

• You can start your business in your spare time. There is no need to leave the security of your present job. Many successful business people started out this way. Dr Anton Rupert started his empire while he was a lecturer at the University of Pretoria.

A business in your spare time should also be to the advantage of your present employer even if it is only at a later stage. Dr Anton Rupert is now worth much more to the University of Pretoria as its Chancellor and a donor than he would have been as a lecturer had he stayed at the University.

I believe that this will also benefit the University as it will show that engineering students at the University of Pretoria are given a broader education than only the usual technical training.

These “Renaissance engineers”, who will have good business sense in addition to their technical knowledge, should be more successful than ones without the broader outlook. It should reflect positively on their alma mater.

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