Covid-19 is the final straw for small business owners after economic downturn

  • 📰 BDliveSA
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 71 sec. here
  • 3 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 32%
  • Publisher: 63%

Sverige Nyheter Nyheter

En-novate has been forced to stop taking emerging entrepreneurs abroad to give them global exposure

I am one of the many thousands of SA entrepreneurs who has been left with no choice but to close down their business as a direct result of Covid-19. Just as those living with the virus are telling their stories to remove associated stigmas, small business owners must also speak out to destigmatise Covid-19-induced business closure.

With my mentor’s support we pitched the company vision to Investec’s then CEO, who astonishingly agreed to support us. We decided to call the new company En-novate, and our motto was “Growth through global exposure”. When I look back at the nearly 1,000 emerging business leaders we took to 10 countries over the past four years, there are three specific trips I believe demonstrate the positive impact we aimed to make on our country.

For a number of our participants the trip was their first time overseas, and we aimed to show them that they are indeed internationally competitive. We took a group of medical technology entrepreneurs to San Francisco with Discovery in November 2016 and on the second day of the trip our group met Launchpad Digital Health, a prestigious digital health accelerator programme. The very next day one of the entrepreneurs applied to the programme, to which she was almost immediately accepted.

One of our participants, a successful private equity specialist, stood in front of two extremely high-net-worth investors and told her life story of having grown up in a township. She changed her name to attend a better school during apartheid, and overcame much adversity to eventually cofound a private equity vehicle with a major bank. Her story exemplified to these investors just how much untapped talent exists in our country just waiting to be unlocked.

 

Tack för din kommentar. Din kommentar kommer att publiceras efter att ha granskats.
Vi har sammanfattat den här nyheten så att du kan läsa den snabbt. Om du är intresserad av nyheterna kan du läsa hela texten här. Läs mer:

 /  🏆 12. in SE

Sverige Senaste nytt, Sverige Rubriker