South African entrepreneurs have it tougher than most
So we don't need to be told again about how hard it is to run a successful business. I’ve been a business owner for most of my working life and know many entrepreneurs who are ridiculously smart, capable, hard working, eloquent, good looking, resourceful, had extensive experience working for larger companies, you name it… and they all struggle. And depending on your industry: whether starting, growing or running a business, each phase all have their unique challenges. As the old saying goes: 'A new level, a new devil."
If you’ve been in business for longer than 6 months you’ll know what I’m talking about.
All the credible market research sources back up the pain we experience siting that the failure rate for SME’s in South Africa are some of the highest in the world. They say about 70-80% of start-ups won’t make it past 5 years. That’s rough.
Then juxtapose that little factoid with the fact that SME’s make up over 30% of South Africa’s GDP and are responsible for employing over 60% of our country!
So if 70-80% of SME’s go out of business, it’s not just tough for the business owners and the people their income was supporting (which is bad enough), it’s the knock on effect it has to the people they can no longer employ and the suppliers they are no longer buying from. Which means the success of small businesses has a direct financial affect on 1 in every 2 South Africans.
Small business is actually a really big deal.
The problems entrepreneurs face are well known
What your business needs to really grow is...
- Regular high impact specialised work, that is modern and result-driven,
- Delivered by verified experts that have a track record of successfully having done it before for companies like yours,
- At a cost you can afford to start now as well as being able to scale with you as you grow,
- With the flexibility to stop or swop services as your business needs.
The options currently available is risky business
Times are tough. Agencies, firms and hiring full-time employees is expensive and takes time to get going and to see results.
Freelance marketplaces:
For those of us that need something done but in a tight budget might have tried using one of the global freelance marketplaces which provide cheap services, but come at a cost of quality. You know the old saying of: "you get what you paid for". We are able to use these services to get some minor type work done, but require quite a lot of hand holding and specificity especially when dealing with someone whose first language is not ours. Statistics show that most of the work done on these freelance marketplaces are once off smaller projects as apposed to actually leaning on these freelancers as a regular reliable source of getting high impact specialised work done.
Outsourcing:
Then, in the search to work with someone local with better quality you might have tried outsourcing to agencies or firms, which charge more only to find the speed to get going, in terms of onerous onboarding and project management processes got in the way of moving at the speed your business needs.
Hiring in-house:
And then you’re left with hiring in-house, which is a big commitment with ramifications if you hire someone who is not a good fit. And they come with a long-term financial commitment with protections and rights given to them by law. Rightly so.
We know the time to onboard new employees to the point where they are productive takes anywhere from 3-4 months.
Entrepreneurs need superpowers
So we looked at all of this and said to ourselves, if we could wave a magic wand and that gave every entrepreneur business superpowers what they be?
It would be:
- A way to fill my skill, knowledge and experience gaps with top class expertise. How could I have a CTO, CFO, CMO that could handle these aspects of my business for me without me spending what they actually cost.
- To help my business upgrade the quality it puts our there so I can compete with larger players in my industry even an international level without the head count and expenses. Whether operationally, running my business better with processes and customer service or whatever I’m putting out to my customers.
- The ability to have an idea or see an opportunity and have it actioned in minutes. No more having to phone around and find the people who can do it, get comparative quotes and then schedule the meetings and write briefs and get proposals to review. None of that. Just idea to action.
- To never have to micro-manage anyone. I never want to question whether someone has met a deadline or their quality is not up to scratch.
- Have the ability to make decisions that are always profitable and never lose me money.
- To have all the above activities to somehow be immensely profitable. So that I am always making much more money than I am spending. There is this magic superpower that prevents me from losing money.
ManyHands was built to give entrepreneurs superpowers✨
ManyHands is the largest collection of the single best version of every essential fixed-price service for every business phase in South Africa. We have found, vetted and categorised the largest database of the top 5% of certified-only service based businesses and professionals who deliver fixed-price services.
ManyHands is able to fill your knowledge gaps and be your executive assistant helping you get hundreds of important but mundane tasks done faster than you can imagine with our incredibly capable ManyChat AI assistant built on top of OpenAI's ChatGPT 4
We are able to give access to certified industry specific Chief Financial Officers, Chief Marketing Offices, Chief technology Officers, Lawyers and HR Practitioners in our fractional model. This allows you to make use of top class talent when you need it at a fraction of the cost.
ManyHands removes the risk of contract lock-ins providing you the flexibility of pausing a service subscription or cancelling and switching to another as your business needs.
We reduce your management overhead by providing a central home for all of the costs, tasks and communication of all your services.
