If it wasn’t for his dyslexia, Majid Aziz would not own the R80-million turnover tissue factory in Bellville, that he started with his brothers as a tiny backroom operation in Elsies River on the Cape Flats.
Instead he might have been an academic, probably a physicist or mathematician and, who knows, perhaps he’d have made a contribution to science by now, he says. He is still sad that he had to give up his academic career after attaining his master’s in applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town because of what he calls “documentation problems”.
The emphasis on publishing made it just too difficult for someone with dyslexia, even in the “hard” sciences. Academia’s loss turned out to be the economy’s gain and that of the 250 workers employed by Aziz’s Green Tissue company, a paper recycling plant producing 16 800 tonnes of paper products a year.
If overseas research is anything to go by, entrepreneurship’s indebtedness to dyslexia, a dysfunction in the brain that can render highly intelligent people unable to read, is surprisingly high.
Julie Logan, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass Business School in London, reportedly found that 35% of American entrepreneurs out of a sample of 139 suffered from some form of dyslexia. An earlier study suggested that 20% of British business owners are dyslexic. The phenomenon has a simple, plausible explanation, which Aziz’s experience bears out.
Dyslexia sufferers find it extremely difficult to get anywhere in formal organisations designed for ordinary readers and writers, schools included. Everyone above a certain level of management must be fluently literate for such organisations to work. Intelligent and ambitious dyslexics are usually faced with a stark choice — accept a job that will neglect their intellect, or create their own organisations into which they can build their coping mechanisms. And so talented dyslexia sufferers are pushed into the hard and risky world of
entrepreneurship.
Aziz doesn’t have extreme dyslexia but had to start developing coping mechanisms from his primary school days in a poor state school in Elsies River. His teachers didn’t recognise his condition, but fortunately it didn’t subject him to the Dickensian
tortures that Tony Factor, a dyslexic entrepreneur in the Seventies in Johannesburg, suffered at the hands of his teachers who assumed that he was too lazy to read.
Aziz formed one-on-one relationships with his teachers, who patiently urged him to read more
than the comic books that he naturally preferred. He absorbed a lot from verbal instruction in class and bartered with his friends, helping them with maths and science in return for their history class notes, which he would copy painstakingly after school because he wrote too slowly to take down his own.
He did well in maths and science, but failed matric after scoring an H in English. His recent admission of this to his five children, none of whom shows any signs of dyslexia, caused much mirth, but at the time it was a big blow. His school friends moved on to university and he spent a miserable year working in his uncle’s butchery.
“I had to pick myself up from there,” he says of his first major setback. He bought physics and maths textbooks and by the time he scraped into university with an F in the English supplementary exam, he already knew his first-year work. After giving up on his academic career, he joined an oil company where he did mathematical modelling.
There he met his “friend and mentor”, Rove Isaacs, who helped him with the corporate world’s relentless report-writing requirements. Aziz soon sensed that his corporate career was unsustainable. He couldn’t expect Isaacs to fix all his reports. Soon the two of them were discussing a vague idea that Aziz had formed about getting into recycled paper.
He urgently researched the idea, speaking to paper industry experts and building a financial model. It showed that a recycling plant could produce toilet paper at a much lower cost than the established giants, such as Nampak, but he would need millions of rands to build and run it. His plans were roundly rejected by the banks.
Again, he picked himself up and decided to take “a back route” into the industry, which he no longer feared because of his thorough research. He knew that with a rudimentary converter — a machine that cuts and folds paper — he could produce facial tissues more cheaply than his incumbents.
On a trip to Taiwan, where he stayed in school hostels to save money, he secured the supply of tissue paper from the United States and bought a converter for R400 000, financed with his father’s shop in Elsies River as security for a bank loan. Aziz and his brothers installed the machine in a half-empty storeroom at the back of the shop.
He remembers phoning Taiwan for instructions because he had no money to bring out a commissioning engineer. It was just before the advent of the internet. While still holding on to his corporate job, Aziz and his wife sold their facial tissues to independent shops at weekends.
His sister ran the production during the week. Their first breakthrough came when Nampak noticed their product and placed an order. When Aziz had to start spending nights sleeping on the giant reels of uncut paper in the storeroom to keep an eye on their first nightshifts, he knew he had to leave the corporate world for good. A hair-raising period of growth followed.
Green Tissue products were accepted by the big supermarket chains as sales of the low-cost toilet paper to the emerging middle class started growing fast. More machines were bought and the need for space grew urgent. The Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) agreed to finance the purchase of an old factory that the paper giant Mondi wanted to demolish. And when Aziz installed second-hand Malaysian paper-making machinery, financed by the IDC and Business Partners, he finally had his paper mill.
Today his biggest problem is finding enough scrap paper to recycle for his growing output. Green Tissue had to start importing increasing volumes of waste paper to feed the mill. By any standard, it is a remarkable story. Most entrepreneurs, dyslexic or not, who play with this volatile mixture of bootstrapping, fast growth and high gearing, fail because cash can dry up for any number of reasons.
But Aziz wonders whether his dyslexia may have equipped him somehow for such an odyssey. He has an intense impatience with anything lengthy, especially writing, which seems to have developed into a constant urgency to get to the kernel of an issue and move on. He has learned to accept help and built support networks with whom he shares generously.
He co-owns the business with his three brothers who bring an eclectic set of skills to the business — a mechanical engineer, a BCom and a hafiz [someone who has memorised the Qu’ran]. His dyslexia, combined with the trust that comes with family relationships, has allowed him to develop a skill with which many entrepreneurs struggle. “I’m a master of delegation.”
Isaacs, since retired from the oil company where they met, still acts as his soundboard, adviser and writer of important proposals. On overseas trips “I will talk and he will document,” says Aziz. “Without him, I would be lost. He understands my thoughts.” But Isaacs is not always around.
Aziz does most of his own day-to-day short correspondence by email and always reverts to bullet format and telegraph style. The keyboard frees him from having to use his “dreadful” handwriting and his spell checker is indispensable. Paradoxically, his dyslexia has turned him into a good communicator, he believes.
He listens and explains well verbally, which is good for negotiating. His planning happens without the crutch of writing. “When I come in in the mornings, I’ve already worked out what I need to do, what is important. I go through the lists in my mind,” he says.