For a country not sold unanimously on the idea of celebrating the unbridled pursuit of profit , South Africa seems to have no shortage of awards for businessperson of the year.
And now an über entrepreneur of the year award is in the making with the small-business finance house, Business Partners, throwing open its annual competition.
Soon the businesswoman of the year, exporter of the year, SME of the year, franchisee of the year, farmer of the year, potato farmer of the year and every conceivable sector’s champion could go through to Business Partners’ Entrepreneur of the Year competition if Christo Botes, a director at the risk-financing company, has his way.
Already this year the winners of three business-owner awards will automatically become finalists in Business Partners’competition — the Afrikaanse Handelsintituut’s enterprise of the year and the winner in its emerging-enterprise category, and the winner of the South African Council for Business Women award.
The organisers of three other annual competitions are considering sending their winners to participate in Business Partner’s award ceremony on October 28. But this year by far the bulk of the entrants come straight off the street.
Botes says he already has more than 200 entries, 90% of whom have never been Business Partners’ clients. He expects more before the competition closes on August 31. There are three categories — one for emerging entrepreneurs who run businesses younger than three years, another for owners of businesses with a turnover of less than R20-million and a third for businesses above the R20-million threshold.
Botes says the opening of the competition, even with Sanlam as partner, demands considerably more “budget and sweat” from Business Partners than the in-house version of the competition, which the company has been running for the past 22 years. He says the reason for Business Partners’ increased investment in the competition is to “awaken a culture of entrepreneurship, to bring forward entrepreneurship excellence, to raise up the heroes and say ‘here are the role models’ and basically to inspire people to become entrepreneurs and not to see entrepreneurship as a last option”.
Unofficially, of course, there is nothing like an annual glitzy bash to raise your profile, especially if you make your award the most sought-after in your target market. Business Partners is well placed to capitalise on raising the profile of its award. Unlike other lenders, it serves only entrepreneurs and it has sole rights to the use of the phrase Entrepreneur of the Year in South Africa, which forced the auditing firm Ernst & Young to change the name of its own heavyweight award to World Entrepreneur of the Year locally.
Ernst & Young plays in a diff erent space, with its main annual prize going to an entrepreneur who runs a business with a turnover of more than R500-million a year. The judges also look for high growth and global impact, says Zanele Xaba, country manager for the World Entrepreneur of the Year award.
The result is that Ernst & Young’s award tends to be a lifetime-achievement prize of sorts, whereas Business Partners’ Entrepreneur of the Year tends to honour high-growth entrepreneurs who still have some way to go or those who run excellent businesses without necessarily wanting to build a global empire.
Research from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), an annual comparative study of entrepreneurship levels and attitudes across the globe, suggests that there is a greater need in South Africa to celebrate the lifestyle-type entrepreneur than the empire builder. Figures from last year’s survey show that 64% of South Africans view owning and managing a business as a good career option — not too far off the average of 71% among countries with similar economies.
But when it comes to the self-confidence needed to start businesses, South Africans lag considerably. Only 35% of South Africans believe they have the skills and knowledge to run a business of their own, compared with an average of 53% in countries of similar economies. Perhaps South Africans are simply being realistic.
The education system is widely known to be dysfunctional and low levels of skills may well be the country’s greatest impediment to successful entrepreneurship. But Penny Kew, a researcher at the UCT Graduate School of Business in charge of the South African part of the GEM study, points to the idea that South Africa’s celebration of entrepreneurship is too focused on high-tech and rags-to-incredibleriches stories.
South Africa should “put more effort into highlighting the everyday entrepreneur, people who just had a belief and a lot of persistence and didn’t make it big really quickly but managed to build their businesses bit by bit”. “I think those are perhaps the role models we maybe need to see a little bit more of,” says Kew.