OPINIONISTA: Sometimes big business thinks too big; take Bounty Brands, for example

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I read with glee my colleague Tim Cohen’s column last week about taking a small Karoo town off the electricity grid. It’s a clear and detailed investigation of the ongoing lack of electricity and how to fix it.

Prince Albert pays Eskom R16-million a year for wholesale electricity and would need 60,000 solar panels for its 15,000 residents to replace that. Tim estimates installation expenditure would be about R80-million and Prince Albert would take about eight years to pay for it.demonstrates it: to build a business, the company founders took on too much debt. The ultimate losers were us, to the tune of R1.8-billion in highly questionable investment of Unemployment Insurance Fund money.

The reason we are lean and agile is because, well, we’re a small business. We can’t afford to be showy or throw millions at projects that are not well thought out. We closed our offices and found a way to pay that money to staff. Please also don’t think my next sentence is self-congratulatory. Some old Mail & Guardian colleagues and I launched a startup in October 2019 called Scrolla.Africa to report in the old-fashioned way. Our first series was about the horrific family murders by killer cop Rosemary Ndlovu.

When an investor remarked, “Wow, you did this during lockdown!”, we breathed out a bit and realised we’d inadvertently chosen the worst time to launch a new business.

 

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