Businessman to help ‘shape’ SA’s economy with entrepreneurship programme

South African rapid business growth specialist Kobus Smith, who emigrated to the UK 10 years ago, aims to start an entrepreneurship programme in South Africa.

It would teach people to become entrepreneurs and help shape the economy of the country.

Smith said entrepreneurs needed to be educated on how to start businesses.

SA was recently downgraded to “junk” status by two international ratings agencies after President Jacob Zuma’s Cabinet reshuffle last month but Smith said that despite that, SA was still a good country to invest in.

“South Africa is not like other countries, the competition is not high within the country, unlike other countries,” he said.

He added that people don’t do business in South Africa because they don’t know the ramifications of  the policy of broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE).

“Someone has told them that you have to be black to do business in SA.

“Then you get Cyril Ramaphosa saying that he’s going to focus on BBBEE,” Smith said.

He added that a lot of people have fantastic ideas, but they were not doing anything with them because they didn’t know about business and they didn’t have startup capital, so they gave up, stayed at home and committed crimes.

He said for a business to succeed, you needed to “know your numbers by day one or your business dies by year two”.

“Fifty percent of all businesses fail within the first 12 months and 86% of all businesses fail within the first five years,” he said.

He added that the businesses that tended to survive were those that had just one employee, the owner.

They were inclined to grow and contribute to the economy.

“How I’m going to change this is, I’m going to meet with Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, Patrice Motsepe and Tokyo Sexwale to work out something,” Smith said.

He said he would like to work with Ramaphosa because they had the same vision.

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