/ 26 October 2001

Entrepreneurs go back to school

Niki Moore

Imagine a school where you learn how to set up a business, are taught how to please your customers, how to manage your money and how to market your product.

Just to take it one step further, your teacher then introduces you to potential clients, lends you money, organises storage for your goods, finds you an office and shows you how to do your tax returns.

And finally the school governing body gives you contracts, sends you business and checks on your progress. Nice school.

Such a school exists: it’s called the Small Business Advice Centre (SBAC) and it is funded by Richard’s Bay Minerals in the Umhlatuze district of Zululand. Established in 1986, the SBAC has been sending aspirant entrepreneurs back to school for the past 15 years. It has conducted 11 000 business consultations, helped 12 600 advice seekers, put 4 500 people through skills training and created 4000 jobs in the micro-economic sector such as hawkers and vendors, small stores, mini-industries and mini-tourism.

It is estimated that about 28 000 people have benefited directly from the SBAC’s activities.

So what is the curriculum of this remarkable school? Firstly, there is training and business advice through courses and workshops. A resource centre gives the pupils access to information and pointers to organisations that could help them further.

Secondly, informal traders are helped through consultations, training and facilitation of contact between informal vendors, formal vendors and the authorities. The SBAC even established a community bank in a shipping container to provide on-the-spot, affordable financing for hawkers. The concept is so successful that it is being replicated in other parts of the country.

The school’s governing body, Richard’s Bay Minerals, has undertaken an active programme to employ these small businesses and in 1998 created a post in its buying department to provide business opportunities so that the SBAC trainees could supply goods and services to the company.

Last year Richard’s Bay Minerals spent R25-million on this sector. It bought items such as tools, motor spares, paint and electrical goods. It bought services such as dune replanting, waste recycling, office upgrading and informal teaching.

A typical example of Richard’s Bay Minerals’s approach is a groundbreaking contract with several local taxi cooperatives for the transportation of shift and overtime staff an arrangement that has created 16 new jobs and has broadened the taxi operators’ consumer base.

Richard’s Bay Minerals also identifies outstanding employees from disadvantaged groups who work for its suppliers and helps them to start their own businesses (with the cooperation of their employers, who benefit either as franchise holders or from the sale of their business) by helping them to set up their operations and by guaranteeing them sufficient work at first to establish themselves.

An example of this was an empowerment deal brokered by the company in 1997 in which 160 black employees of a white family-owned business supplying labour services to Richard’s Bay Minerals all labourers and semi-skilled men and women from nearby rural communities bought out their employer. Each person received one equal share of the new company.

The new company generated more than R4-million in its first year and the former owner is employed by the company.

A further innovation is the establishment of the Business Linkage Centre. It involves all the major companies in the Umhlatuze region and aims to forge links between black and white business by matching the requirements of large companies with the products and services of emerging entrepreneurs. Since its inception in 1993 the centre has struck deals worth more than R300-million.

Through the SBAC, Richard’s Bay Minerals has constructed a beehive of rural factory units supplied with electricity and lock-up facilities. This has created affordable and functional premises for mechanics, welders, hairdressers, auto-electricians and seamstresses. The skills for these small businesses will have invariably been learned at Richard’s Bay Minerals’s adult-skills classes and development centres.

The reason for the stress on entrepreneurship has come from the realisation that jobs in the formal sector are becoming increasingly scarce. The only economic alternative for thousands of people is to create their own businesses.

Richard’s Bay Minerals has established the entrepreneurship education initiative to lobby for entrepreneurial training in schools. This initiative has produced a manual for teachers to use in class and the programme has also proved successful for retrenched adults, marginalised youths, school dropouts and prisoners.

The entrepreneurship education initiative runs a yearly forum, produces a quarterly newsletter and runs a yearly provincial schools competition in conjunction with the Mercury newspaper. These are all designed to urge teachers to start entrepreneurship programmes in their schools. Learners are encouraged to start their own businesses so that when they leave school they have viable enterprises up and running that can be developed into full-time self-employment.

Entrepreneurship is now included in the school curriculum and there are countless success stories of pupils who juggle school-time with work-time. Sometimes these pupils employ their parents or other family members to help with their businesses.

It has been said that real life is the school of hard knocks and that most people who are successful went to the university of life. Richard’s Bay Minerals, through its Small Business Advice Centre, is trying to cushion some of those hard knocks and make the university of life into a campus of successful entrepreneurs.