Through the ages many successful leaders have spoken about the opportunity that is bred from adversity. These weren’t merely quotes to sound clever or “go viral”, as most of these people lived long before the fleeting celebrity of social media. These were words spoken from the trenches - hard, lived experience.
Statistics SA confirmed what all of us knew – that jobs were shed and that the economy was battered. Indeed, March 26 will go down in history as a watershed moment – the day the off-switch was flipped on our economy. It was hard, it was fast and it represented shared adversity on a national scale. Of the businesses on Retail Capital’s books that make less than R10 million turnover, not one that applied for relief was approved. This wasn’t a relief plan for the businesses that really needed it, it was an exercise to protect the banks’ balance sheets. This is why, between disbursements and payment holidays, we put more than half a billion rand into the SME economy during lockdown.
Retail Capital has spent a great deal of time speaking to these business owners in order to translate their success stories into actionable tips for as many entrepreneurs as possible. This exercise has reaffirmed the importance of an opportunity mindset.Essentially, when one analyses the winners during lockdown they all share the same mindset traits as Alexander Fleming when he discovered penicillin or Travis Kalanick and Garret Camp when they founded Uber.