By Marang Marekimane, founder of Business in Theory

As a service provider you are a specialist with a particular skill or resource. As an entrepreneur, you spot an opportunity to use your skill to solve a problem. There are countless articles on how to be a successful entrepreneur – often listing things like reading, waking up early, and exercising. While these activities may help you be more alert, they are by no means the key. You could do all these things to prepare for a marathon. You could do all these activities and still not excel. Simply because none of these create structure to support your business model.

The key is in using these activities to be more alert to do what is takes to be a specialist. Not a generalist.

When your business achieves a particular point of excellence, you become the specialist.

In order to achieve that point of excellence, you need to continuously reinvest in the teams, processes and systems.

Ensure staff are trained, processes are well managed and the systems are efficient.

So, to grow the business to the next level, you need to document the business processes – this will confirm the current state of the business operations; formulate a growth strategy; and start implementing solutions. This will create structure in the business.

Successful entrepreneurs continuously reinvest in the business. So updating the process manuals, the strategy and implementing solutions will keep you climbing to the top.

“The goal is to improve the sustainability of SMEs and create jobs in the sector”.

Marang Marekimane is the Founder and Chief Executive Office of Business In Theory, a South African company that assists entrepreneurs to formulate growth strategies and improve business processes. Marang also hosts workshops for entrepreneurs to define or review their business model and on how to implement and improve business processes. After spending more than a decade in the corporate sector working for major corporations such as Liberty, First National Bank (FNB) and Standard Bank, Marang now uses her knowledge and experience to articulate her insight of business development into turnkey solutions that improve the sustainability of small and medium enterprises.