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Turning talent into performance
Our goal is to build an ecosystem of small businesses that are operated by a partnership of the graduates of our Talent Makers training programme.
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Most entrepreneurial opportunities require entrepreneurs to be fully formed. There are few spaces available to young people that have the talent to run a business one day, but not the experience, to grow into the role.
We are changing this.
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Our approach borrows from the talent development principles of high performing professional services firms.
Our makers start in entry-level jobs as the beginning of a highly structured and demanding two-year development programme that rotates them through each of the functional, operational and strategic areas that makes businesses successful.
Developing and learning new skills are not separate from the job - it is the job. Our makers join us because they want to run their own business one day and want to learn how to do so, on the job, serving real customers and experiencing real business pressure.
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At every stage, entry-level team members have clearly defined individual and group performance
expectations, with related areas of responsibility. Over time, the complexity of responsibility is increased across our key metrics of profitability, supplier management, operations, performance management and leadership.
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We focus on retail and service businesses because they are excellent training environments. They are well contained and provide lessons that can be applied in any type of business and require different skills with different levels of complexity. Ongoing opportunities to solve customer problems requires leaders to motivate their teams. Profitability is easily visible with well- established systems rich in data.
Our approach also makes these businesses stronger. Providing a pathway for talented, young, ambitious South Africans to master what it takes to run a business, means that every employee is engaged with all elements of the business performance and this creates a superior and more competitive customer experience.
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Building businesses by reducing the cost of finance
We are building a pipeline of ambitious, young business operators with a demonstrated track record of performance. But running their own businesses requires easier and cheaper access to finance.
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Most of our team can't access normal capital markets because they don't fit the profile that banks and other institutions require. Our makers typically come from low-income backgrounds so they and their networks don't have collateral or surety. Any finance they can access is so costly that it becomes unaffordable for the underlying business that they want to run.
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Our owner-operator model provides talent that passes through our programme with access to the capital required for them to operate their own small retail business without having to put down any collateral or surety. They do, however, have to have made it through our rigorous programme. We take on the capital risk and manage it by managing our talent pipeline. Only the best of our graduates are given this opportunity.
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We believe that small business ownership is the only way that we are going to legitimately deal with our jobs crisis. To create an ecosystem of small businesses we have to be more innovative in how we reduce the cost of accessing finance and our owner-operator model goes some way in doing this.
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