Living in Africa has taught me to be suspicious of every email in my inbox. I am always on the lookout for the next scam, the next guy who wants to invest my money, the next prophet who can find my lost lover or the entrepreneur who can sell me one product that can cure everything from toothache to tax problems. When I got an email from Jerry Rakhoalae, I was suspicious as always. He said that he is a project manager, doing a post–grad diploma in business administration at the Gordon Institute of Business Studies (GIBS) in partnership with the University of Pretoria. He went on to say that Sunninghill Recovery Lodge has been identified as a business pivoter emanating from Covid–19 challenges. His team’s assignment for an operations management module is titled: “Operations diagnostics and improvement plan for real life organisation”.
He very politely requested permission to conduct an “operation diagnosis” for Sunninghill Recovery Lodge. Their objective would be to “identify operational performance measures” and “propose actionable improvement strategies.” Attached to this was a letter from GIBS, also using fancy other words and, to my surprise, at no stage did anyone ask me for money, a vital organ or to listen to them make a sales pitch.
I was intrigued and we set up a meeting. Jerry arrived in a fancy 4×4 and in even fancier clothes. So did three other men. They had “corporate” stamped all over them, and that they are clearly zooming up their career ladders. They explained that GIBS identified businesses that failed/pivoted/flew as a direct result of Covid. The failures they were investigating were Kuhulua/Com air and the Marriott/Protea hotels. The successes were Take-a-lot and obviously, our turquoise friends, Checkers 60/60. The pivoters were us, and a company called Udok, who started doing online consultations.
Our interview started, and despite the fact that we were sitting outside by our pool, I might as well have been in an air-conditioned boardroom on the fifth floor of a Sandton office block. Their lingo was totally unfamiliar to me. Words like strategies, design budget, synergies, tiger team, KPI’s, ROI’s, action items, alignments, deliverables, roadmaps, scalability and milestones kept flying around. They each had their tech-ecosystems out: tablets, laptops, recording devices, phones and Apple pens. I sat in my tekkies and faded scrubs and just told them our story… from the beginning.
They started relaxing, stopped taking notes and listened to how you can start a business and change a business based on instinct, passion, heaps of failures, a committed and loved team, and always remembering your core value. It was a lovely give and take. We really have done what they are learning about. They have the terms, names and academic knowledge of what we did. I have the sleepless nights, the gut-feelings, and a totally different understanding of the same thing. It’s nice to know that all the stuff we made up as we went along has nice theoretical and academic terminology. They spoke about architectural and interior design. I told them we designed room 17 on the back of a Peter Stuyvesant cigarette box. They spoke about HR and labour law. I told them about the reality of dealing with broken down taxis, black tax and ancestors. They spoke about ten–year plans, I spoke about dealing with tomorrow. They spoke about standardisation, and I spoke about how each patient, each guest, each therapist and each visitor is unique.
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, explained pivoting like this: “A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.” I like what Dolly Parton said more: “We can not direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.” Reading up on Pivoting, I learned that more companies have pivoted than I realised. Twitter used to be a podcast platform before changing to what is called “micro-blogging” (seriously, stick with me, I am teaching today!) YouTube was a dating site before it started focusing on videos. Instagram was like a check-in site until they started focusing soley on photos. Amazon was a bookstore, and I actually do not know what they DON’T sell these days. (In case you need a laugh, check out this link for some of the weirdest stuff they sell.) Play-doh used to make wallpaper cleaner until no one needed it anymore, and it pivoted its way to being a billion Dollar global toy empire.
I think here in Africa, we excel in pivoting. We do it often and well and it is in our blood to such an extent that we live the fancy words they teach in business schools without even realising we are doing it. Our informal trade in the townships is bustling. Almost every person I know has some kind of side hustle. We know that we do not have a government as a safety net and we just need to get on with it ourselves and create our own opportunities that will serve us, our people and our country.
I loved chatting to these four beautiful, clever students from GIBS. They have the education that Tsietsi Mashinini and others fought for in 1976. How lucky are they not to be on a continent where entrepreneurs and pivoters aren’t just taught – they’ve lived. Maybe business school and instinct aren’t so far apart. We speak the same language, just in a different dialect.