Raizcorp beneficiary company wins 2012 Zululand Chambers of Commerce and Industry Business of the Year Award

Five companies on Raizcorp’s ARIZE CED programme at the Richards Bay Prosperator were nominated for the Zululand Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ZCCI) Awards 2012 for: Emerging Business of the Year, Small Business of the Year (two nominees), Medium Business of the Year, and Tourism Business of the Year.

Smiso Investments, owned by Mamiza Makhathini, walked away with both the Medium Business of the Year and the Premium (Overall) Business of the Year awards.

Makhathini established her company in 2006 with a friend, and Smiso Investments has since grown tremendously, topping the R15-million turnover mark.

‘After only six years, Smiso Investments now employs 87 people with a full catering complement of chefs, servers, managers and administrative staff, and has secured lucrative catering contracts for Foskor, Sappi and the Richards Bay Coal Terminal,’ says Makhathini.

According to the Zululand Observer, Makhathini says one of the keys to the success of her business is that she only hires qualified and capable staff. ‘Qualifications are paramount. Too many businesses go under because people are hired out of emotion, and not according to the job description.’

‘I believe in positive competition, and stealing workers from a rival company only breeds negativity. On top of that, running a successful business is not just about the money, it is about making sure that your clients are happy.’ Makhathini says she made every effort to learn all she could about the catering industry. ‘If you want to run a successful business, you need to have certain skills, and it must be run in a professional way.’

‘So many businesses do not make it because their owners simply do not understand how to run a company properly, but there is help available.’

Makhathini is a firm advocate of programmes such as those run by Raizcorp, which help entrepreneurs understand basic business principles and equip them with the skills, tools and expertise they need to succeed. ‘I could not have done this without them,’ Makhathini said.

Award winners in Raizcorp’s ARIZE programme

2012 saw a number of companies in Raizcorp’s ARIZE programme being nominated for – and winning – major national industry awards. Congratulations must go to the following ARIZE programme beneficiaries and the corporate principals behind them:

Khomotso Choma, Turnkey Group (BHP Billiton Energy Coal SA) – winner of the Govan Mbeki Housing Award for the Best Informal Settlement Project of the Year 2012

Danny Tong, Investong General Products and Investments CC (T-Systems) – winner of the Business of the Year Gold Award 2012 for Service Excellence

Amelia Ramphadi: Amelia Women Project (FLSmidth) – winner of the Department of Trade and Industry’s Best Performing Quality Intervention 2012 award

National Pitch & Polish entrepreneurial competition winner is a “greentrepreneur”

Competition participants reflect the growing profile of social entrepreneurs in South Africa

The national Pitch & Polish entrepreneurial competition reached a thrilling climax at a glitzy final event at The Venue in Melrose Arch on 20 September 2012. The 2012 competition clearly reflected the rapid growth in South Africa’s social entrepreneurship sector, and in particular, the abundance of entrepreneurs who spy opportunity in environmentally friendly enterprises. All three of the finalists, Alan Butler, Bhongolwethu Sonti, and Criytone Revanewako, fell into this category of “greentrepreneurs”.

Out of the 174 online entries received for the competition and the venue-based wildcard entries, 25 entrepreneurs were selected to participate in the opening rounds. A further 9 entries battled it out on the airwaves during the wildcard round presented by SAfm, the Pitch & Polish media partner.

The 2012 Pitch & Polish finalists (L-R): Criytone Revanewako,  Bhongolwethu Sonti, and Alan Butler

The winner

Criytone Revanewako was selected by the final panel of experts as the winner for this year. His company approaches environmental issues from a recycling perspective, using slag generated by the ferrochrome smelting industry to produce economically useful products cheaply and sustainably, such as paving and building bricks, road construction material, roofing and flooring tiles, pre-mixed and ready mixed concrete, and numerous others.

Social entrepreneurship

The rise of social entrepreneurs and greentrepreneurs, such as these finalists, represents the growing awareness amongst South Africans of the importance of sustainability in all aspects of life, and therefore a bright spot in the country’s otherwise problematic economic outlook. Social entrepreneurship expert Bill Drayton, quoted in the Social Entrepreneurship Teaching Resources Handbook, characterises a social entrepreneur as, “someone who cannot come to rest, in a very deep sense, until he or she has changed the pattern of social concern across all society... they simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern. They will persist for decades.”

Given the high potential for needed positive social and environmental change that these entrepreneurs represent, the Pitch & Polish programme developed and run by South African small business incubator, Raizcorp, is an example of how corporate South Africa can generate education and business development opportunities for smaller businesses, while ensuring that sustainable social development goals are also met.

The Final Panel of judges

Impact of informal business skills training

Bronwyn Echardt, the Pitch & Polish Programme Leader at Raizcorp, the small business incubator that develops and runs the programme around the country, attributes much of its success to its combined education and entertainment format.

Echardt said, “Research by Laurie Scholtz on the impact of social entrepreneurs’ education and business skills training, published in 2011, showed that only three forms of informal business skills training have a significant impact on the success of social entrepreneurship organisations, namely: business experience, networks, and workshops and conferences. Pitch & Polish is currently the only competition and workshop platform nationally that combines all three of these types of training.”

In addition to the intensive training that the competition entrants received at the free workshop events around the country, sponsored by Engen Petroleum (Pty) Ltd, 1 651 combined audience members received a full day’s expert training on the fundamentals of entrepreneurship.

Allon Raiz addresses the International Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society in Deauville, France

Allon Raiz, CEO of Raizcorp, was an invited member of the African delegation that attended the 8^th Edition of the Women's Forum Global Meeting held on 10-12 October 2012 in Deauville (France), with the theme “Wanted: 360° growth”. This was the first time that a major delegation from the African continent attended the Forum.

Founded in 2005, the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society is the world's leading forum looking at major social and economic issues from women's perspectives. It promotes the empowerment of women world‐wide, as well as the networks of collaboration that enable women's voices to be heard with clarity and force.

According to the Women’s Forum, the African delegation was composed of 40 leading, visionary and remarkable women and men, from business, politics, sciences, social entrepreneurship, academia, the arts, media and philanthropy. The delegation represented this year’s special focus on Africa in the main programme.

The only man in the African delegation, Allon Raiz participated in a high-level panel discussion on how Africa can create more high growth entrepreneurs. Raiz indicated that attending the Forum has led him to a new understanding of the challenges women face in the workplace, whether as entrepreneurs or employees.

He said, “I thought I understood how the fight for equality in the workplace was progressing and the issues that underlie it. However, research presented at the Forum suggests that approximately 40% of women would prefer not to be promoted to C-suite level. This leads to interesting questions around why women don’t want these roles and whether there may be other ways of contributing at that corporate level.”

“This is a particularly important challenge to consider when other research indicates a strong positive impact on the bottom line when company boards reflect gender and cultural diversity.”

A range of debates on economic growth and gender issues in Africa included discussions among more than forty men and women from countries ranging from Ethiopia to South Africa. Discussions focused on models to sustain economic growth in Africa, which is forecast to reach 5% in 2012; the use of new technologies among African women; and gender stereotypes across the African continent.

Summaries and webcasts of key debates from the 2012 Global Meeting can be found at the website www.womens‐forum.com.

Raizcorp CEO participates in the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Summit

The 5th World Economic Forum (WEF) Summit on the Global Agenda took place in the United Arab Emirates from 12-14 November 2012. Raizcorp CEO Allon Raiz participated in the Summit as one of the 15 members of the WEF Global Agenda Council on Fostering Entrepreneurship.

“Being able to give voice to the realities of entrepreneurs in the developing world at this gathering of intellectual luminaries from all parts of the world was indeed a great privilege,” said Raiz.

The three-day Summit saw members from across the 88 Councils in the Network of the Global Agenda Councils collectively identify issues and solutions that address serious global challenges in areas such as finance and economics, geopolitics, the environment, society, and technology. The purpose of the Summit was to nurture the ideas and to frame the debates that will shape the agenda at the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos in January 2013.

The hive-like setting of the Summit

More than 1 000 of the world’s foremost experts from academia, government, business, civil society, and media convened to discuss the world’s most pressing issues. Working in a hive-like setting, the various Councils were encouraged to develop actionable programmes for the WEF.

“It was gratifying to see that our thinking in South Africa is quite advanced in some areas,” says Raiz. “In terms of programmes to foster entrepreneurship, the importance of context-specific scale was highlighted. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that entrepreneurship in the developing world is rooted on a local scale. It wouldn’t be truly meaningful to extrapolate an example of entrepreneurial thinking such as Bill Gates to the context of a developing country such as Mali without taking the scale of local economic activity into consideration.”

The deliberations at the Summit highlighted various themes and concerns that will be addressed to the world’s leaders at the 2013 Annual Meeting. These concerns are drawn together in the theme for the 2013 Annual Meeting: “Resilient Dynamism”.

Raiz said, “On a personal level, I was extremely proud to be able to work alongside several South Africans on various Councils. Being immersed in the highly academic yet output-focused atmosphere of the Summit was an unrivalled learning opportunity, which has allowed me to bring the latest thinking back home for the benefit of our entrepreneurs.”

To find out more about the ambitious scope of the WEF Global Agenda Council Network, click anywhere on the following graphic.