Yesterday morning, I was sat having tea and a catch up with the inspirational Ruka Sanusi, founder of Alldens Lane based in Accra, Ghana - she is on a whistle stop consulting tour of South Africa right now. We were talking about one of her favourite subjects, Turning Passion Into Profit, a topic she will be blogging about regularly on Lionesses of Africa shortly. Our conversation made me reflect on just how many women entrepreneurs in our network have done exactly that, doing big career pivots in order to turn their passions into successful businesses. We have lawyers turned artisan bread bakers (Babette van der Walt, founder of Babette’s Bread); environmental consultants turned chocolatiers (Vicky Bain, founder of Chocoloza); and lawyers turned artisan gin distillers (Lucy Beard, co-founder of Hope on Hopkins), to name but a few. These inspirational women are proof positive that it is possible to make the successful transition from the corporate world to entrepreneurship if you follow your passion and make that the foundation of your business. 

At this time of the year, as more and more entrepreneurs are gearing up for the final retail quarter and the holiday preparation season, the need to cut through all the market noise in order to reach those precious customers becomes a key focus. The just published 2017 Holiday Retail Outlook report published by Alliance Data has some useful findings that can help guide any entrepreneur and brand to that breakthrough. One of the most interesting facts is how customers are influenced to make purchasing decisions by much more than simple promotions in-store or online. 84% of buyers are influenced to buy a particular product or brand by family and friends - that means the customer experience is key to repeat sales. 79% are influenced by the product information on a company’s website - is your online presence impactful and engaging enough? 77% buy on the basis of great product reviews - are you getting that all important customer feedback to use for your marketing? And interestingly, 75% buy as a result of receiving a free product sample - are you using product giveaways to tempt your customers to buy? So, how are you planning to make your products and brand stand out and appeal to customers in this critical retail season? 

We have probably all done it, said to ourselves and those around us: “I’ll do it tomorrow; I’ll get to it tomorrow.” We set the key goals to be achieved for ourselves and our businesses, but we keep shifting the goalposts because stuff happens and we assign different priorities in our daily routines. The problem is that if we keep deferring, we never actually make the progress we desire in moving towards our big goals. Days and months can go by, and before we know it we look back and wonder where all that time went with no results in terms of the realizing the big picture. It’s important that as entrepreneurs we take purposeful steps to reaching our big goals each day, no matter how small those steps might be. Because the fact is that if we don’t make a conscious effort to preserve some of our precious time on a regular daily basis to move towards our goals, they will never happen, and we will look back with regret further down the line. There will always be a hundred reasons to tell yourself you can start tomorrow, but usually, tomorrow comes and goes without any significant progress being made towards achieving those goals, so do it today!

Talk to any successful entrepreneur and they will likely tell you that the only way to build a significant, sustainable company that can scale is to build an A Team to walk the distance with you. As a founder entrepreneur, you set the vision, you create the business plan and the goals, and your passion drives all of those things. But the bottom line is that success depends on your ability as a leader to build the right team and to keep inspiring each team member to work together towards a common vision. So how do you ensure that you make the right picks for your team, people who share the same values, have the right skills sets, and importantly, a shared passion? It’s a process of being always in recruitment mode, looking out constantly for people who seem to be a fit and who could bring something unique to your A Team party. 

When you are focusing all your energies on building a business and brand, and creating new products and services, there is aways the temptation to hold back from launching until things are perfect. Yet the thing to remember is that done is better than perfect. If you keep delaying from putting your business, brand and products out there because you want to keep tweaking and refining them until the point where you feel happy for them to connect with customers, chances are competitors will beat you to the punch. As Guy Kawasaki famously said: “Don’t wait for perfection. Life isn’t perfect. Do the best you can and ship. Real people ship, and then they test, and then they ship again.” Remember, on the entrepreneurial journey it’s all about striving for progress, not perfection. 

Whilst checking out piles of books this last weekend as part of my weekly research for our regular Essential Reads book reviews, I flicked through a copy of Brian Tracy’s Million Dollar Habits, a really interesting read. The premise of the book is that 95 percent of everything you think, feel, do, and achieve is the result of habit - and that success in business and in life comes as a result of developing the right habits each day, and importantly, losing the bad habits. According to the experts, it takes about 21 days to form a habit and to incorporate it into your daily life. So, if you want to build habits that will help keep you on track and to develop a roadmap for success, then it all starts with making a clear decision to change your mindset. Tell those around you that you are going to be practicing a new set of habits, it will help you to become more disciplined in implementing them. Visualize yourself performing those habits each day and they will become second nature, and create an affirmation associated with each habit to increase the speed at which they become unconscious actions. You will be amazed at just how quickly you can change the bad habits of a lifetime that may have been holding you back in business and in life.

As Guy Kawasaki famously said: “Success is a series of small wins,” and in life and business there is a lot to be said for celebrating the wins along the way, no matter how small those wins might be. Often one of the biggest factors that leads to success in business is the ability to stay motivated and to persist along the journey, and there is no doubt that celebrating each small win along the way, fuels that motivation. In the world of sports, reporters often talk about teams being on a winning streak, and you see images of them in the news celebrating their wins after a major game or performance - it’s part of the sports ritual. Often those teams seem unstoppable once they are on that winning streak, to themselves and to the opposition. But they understand that ultimate success comes not from one big victory, but from lots of smaller ones gained over time, each one celebrated on its merits and providing the inspiration to move on to the next challenge. There are lessons to be learned from this approach and applied to the business building journey - after all, everyone wants to be part of a winning team, and success is built one win at a time.

Read any newspaper or magazine, watch any TV show, and you will experience the full force of global brands that have achieved sheer market dominance and appear to be in a league of their own. Take Nike for example - it owns almost half of the American athletic footwear market and its domination of the basketball footwear market stands at a staggering 96%. So what’s the secret? You might be tempted to think it's all about the sporting superstars who endorse the brand in their ads, or the celebrities who lend their names and faces to the products. But actually it’s all about leveraging the power of storytelling - making an emotional connection with customers through highly emotive, inspirational stories. In reality, they’re selling more than a product; they’re selling aspiration and that’s a powerful motivator. The brand, through its powerful storytelling and accompanying tagline, Just Do It!, inspires us to believe in ourselves, to achieve victory through our hard work and effort, to overcome all challenges. And ultimately, that message sells. It’s a lesson that every entrepreneur and every fledgling brand out there can learn from. It’s all about harnessing the power of authentic and inspirational storytelling to connect on an emotional level with the customers you are trying to reach. 

As entrepreneurs we always like to think we have things covered, that we can keep all the proverbial balls in the air whilst trying to juggle all aspects of our life. And, for the most part that’s true - and then life suddenly throws you a curveball. I was reminded of this when watching the truly awful coverage of Hurricane Irma in the US on my laptop when suddenly the power went down and the internet connection went down in my own city (I was in Johannesburg at the time), one of an increasing number of such failures during peak work times. However, despite such challenges, business has to keep going so it’s essential to keep focused and stay productive. So if you find yourself in similar challenging circumstances, here are a few tips to stay on top. Firstly, use the 80/20 principle, focus on those activities that will deliver 80% of the results from 20% of the effort. Secondly, take anything that is not a priority off your to-do list, it just causes unnecessary stress having one huge, ever growing list staring at you. Thirdly, delegate to others and share the workload. Finally, keep calm, focus on what’s important and remember that tomorrow is another day.

In recent years, we have seen more and more African women entrepreneurs building world-class retail brands and breaking into exciting and lucrative global markets. Women built brands such as soleRebels in Ethiopia, Rain Africa and Carrol Boyes from South Africa, to name but a few, have successfully pioneered a path and achieved international success for other women to follow. They are tapping into what is currently a growing global fascination with all things African, with consumers interested in supporting and buying from purpose-driven brands that have a socially impactful back-story, rooted in community. Each of these successful woman-owned global brands understands the power of connecting with consumers through storytelling, through their celebration of local craftsmanship, ultimately creating impact at a local level through the unique products they create. There are lessons to be learned here for the next generation of aspirant global brand builders looking to emerge from the African continent.

African women entrepreneurs are increasingly building businesses for achieving scalable social impact through technology. They are demonstrating how technology can make a huge impact on the lives of Africa’s citizens by harnessing the power of technology for good. More and more game changing women techpreneurs across Africa are working to integrate technology into the work of social change. So, what’s driving this trend? And, are we seeing women leading the way? In sub-Saharan Africa alone, the number of mobile subscribers will grow from 600 million today to 930 million by 2020. Even more exciting, by 2020 nearly half of the world’s 6.1 billion smartphone users will live in the developing world. This explosion in mobile penetration means that we now have the ability to hear from, and reach Africans like never before, and incorporate their voices in exciting new ways. Women techpreneurs are leveraging mobile to great effect in Africa, such as Rapelang Rabana of Rekindle Learning, a great example of a company looking to improve education in Africa by turning people’s compulsion to check their phones into an opportunity to learn; or M-Farm, founded by Jamila Abass, a Kenyan computer scientist, who connects buyers and farmers to sell your produce, or receive up-to-date market prices via an app or SMS. We’re seeing award winning projects like Wecyclers, the brainchild of Bilikiss Adebiyi, and Recycle Points from Chioma Ukonu, both of whom are using mobile technology to drive waste recycling projects in the poorest communities in Lagos, Nigeria. The next frontier of tech-powered social impact companies in Africa is being driven by these inspirational women entrepreneurs who are making a difference and pushing boundaries on so many levels. 

Africa’s critical environmental challenges require immediate and effective solutions, that’s a fact. The world is facing more such challenges today than ever before, and Africa is feeling the harsh impact of many of these problems, from environmental degradation and deforestation, to shrinking water supplies, threats to biodiversity, lack of affordable green housing, and waste management issues. Innovative and effective solutions are needed and increasing attention is now being paid to the role that women entrepreneurs are playing on the continent in helping to provide possible solutions to many of these environmental problems. And the continent’s women eco-preneurs are showing themselves capable of rising to this challenge by building innovative green businesses capable of addressing environmental problems, whilst at the same time creating jobs and opportunities for communities to thrive. Africa’s women entrepreneurs really can make a difference to the planet, while still turning a profit. 

Much has been written about the impact that women entrepreneurs can make to the social and economic future of the African continent, but the scale of that impact is often underestimated. Consider these facts: as women entrepreneurs we typically reinvest 90% of our revenues back into our communities — by investing in education, in nutrition, in household expenditure, and in caring for our children and the elderly. This is not us saying it about ourselves — this is what the World Bank tells us is happening. Women entrepreneurs typically invest 90% back into their communities, whilst at the same time creating jobs and opportunities for other micro-entrepreneurs along their value chain. This significant impact is being recognised by governments in the region, with South Africa, for example, now acknowledging through its National Development Plan that 90% of the approximately 11 million jobs that need to be created by 2020 will be created through small businesses. There are women game-changers on the continent who are practically demonstrating that individuals with vision and the right skills can be a force for positive social and economic change in Africa, such as entrepreneur Victoria Kisyombe. Through her company SELFINA, she has financed 27,000 women micro-entrepreneurs, created 150,000 jobs, and economically impacted over 250,000 Tanzanians. Now that’s impact! 

If you read your edition of The Mix this weekend, and were following some of the truly remarkable sessions at last week’s Lionesses of Africa Annual Conference, you would have no doubt been inspired by a new generation of women social entrepreneurs putting Africa on the global impact map. Social entrepreneurs have the ability to envision a new future that is driven by individuals who believe they can make a positive difference in the world through their actions and their approach to problem solving. Women like Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, founder of Gorilla Conservation Coffee in Uganda, who shared her story at the conference. Gorilla Conservation Coffee is a for-profit social enterprise aiming to improve livelihoods of coffee farmers whilst at the same time protecting mountain gorillas in the area. GCCoffee pays a premium price to enable marginalised small-holder coffee farmers living in remote sub-counties bordering Bwindi Impenetrable National Park to improve their lives, which keeps them from resorting to damaging the forest through activities like poaching and removing resources like wood. This in turn helps protect the gorillas and their habitat. It’s a win-win scenario, created by a passionate social entrepreneur on a mission to make a difference and make an impact. 

Sometimes we get so immersed in the hurly burly, tough, day-to-day struggles of trying to grow a business, that it’s hard to keep perspective. We all know that entrepreneurship is not an easy path to take. Building a business is hard and often can be a very lonely journey, particularly for women business builders. But we can take heart from the many other great women entrepreneurs who have come before us. We can make a conscious decision to take every opportunity to learn from them, so that we can avoid making their mistakes when it comes to our own businesses. We can allow ourselves to be inspired by these women pioneers. And, importantly we must remember this one key fact: every big business started out as a small business.  

A huge number of studies show that Entrepreneurship and Democracy are closely linked. Democracy works best when there is this kind of turbulence in the society, when those that are not already well-off have a chance to climb the economic ladder by using their brains, their energy, and their skills to improve their economic status, to create new product and markets, or to serve existing markets better than their older competitors. Simply put, entrepreneurs are a key building block of thriving democracies and the links between women’s economic empowerment, women’s entrepreneurship, and democracy are well known. In Africa specifically, women entrepreneurs uniting as a collective, speaking with one voice, must realise that they can become powerful agents for change in their countries, their communities, and on the continent as a whole.

Africa has an urgent need to develop a strong value-add manufacturing base and to address the under-representation of women in manufacturing on the continent. This is one of the key topics for discussion at this week’s Lionesses of Africa Conference which welcomes a high profile panel of 5 pioneering women manufacturers who are tackling this challenge head on. They have built their businesses against the odds, taking on previously male dominated industries, and are succeeding in creating great manufacturing companies that are an example for others to follow. Yet these women trailblazers remain in the minority. Africa’s manufacturing sector is not fully capitalizing on a critical talent pool, which could aid in closing the skills and opportunities gap. And particularly, women entrepreneurs who have the potential to create significant, high growth companies that create products for sale at home and abroad, and importantly employ local people in the process. So the question has to be, how can the historical gender bias that has tended to exclude or deter women from entering into the manufacturing sector when it comes to starting a business be addressed? Perhaps it starts with the need to reframe perceptions of traditional manufacturing as unprogressive and male-dominated, to high-tech and high-paying opportunities, in which women entrepreneurs can thrive. Follow this with inspirational examples of women manufacturers who are building genuinely significant businesses, and you have the start of a solution to addressing the manufacturing gender gap in Africa.

If you were to take a look at the traits of highly successful women entrepreneurs, chances are you would find self-belief right up there at the top of the list. It’s an essential driver of success in business and in life. After all, as the founder of your business it’s your vision that sets the path for others to follow, whether they are customers, employees, partners or investors. It’s your belief in yourself and your abilities that will keep you going during the tough times. And, it’s your self-belief that will see you taking on the competition head-on, finding new ways of doing things, creating new and innovative products and services for the market to love. A true exponent of self belief was the irrepressible US entrepreneur, Mary Kay Ash, who founded the hugely successful company that bore her name, Mary Kay Cosmetics, a pioneer of the retail cosmetics industry. She said: “If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right.” 

You know those days as an entrepreneur when it seems like everything is hard - an uphill struggle to get things done? Days when it seems like everyone around you is simply just adding to the stress, not coming to the party to help find solutions, and piling on unnecessary irritation. It could be all too easy in times like these to get overwhelmed by pessimism. But there is another way of dealing with these times, and it requires a mindshift. Staying optimistic and not letting ourselves get dragged to other people’s negative levels is a choice - being an optimist instead of a pessimist is our choice. So the next time you are confronted with challenging days, ask yourself three questions that will help you to find the positive in any irritating situation. Firstly, find just one thing that is positive about the situation you find yourself in. Secondly, ask yourself if there is any lesson to be learned from the situation, and turn that into a positive. Finally, ask yourself, is there an opportunity to be seized from this situation? Chances are that by putting on your positive lens when tackling a tough day, you will become a whole lot more optimistic about the outcome. As Winston Churchill famously said: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

How often as entrepreneurs do we find ourselves getting bogged down in the things that really don’t add positive value to our entrepreneurial experience. For some that will be dealing with never ending paperwork and admin; for others it may be spending too much time and energy dealing with continuous HR challenges. We allow ourselves to get sucked into the myopic, instead of keeping our focus on the bigger picture, essential as business founders responsible for making the business vision a reality. So how do we deal with this challenge at a practical level? One answer is smart delegation of key tasks so as to free you up to do the things that will have the biggest impact on the business. The other answer may seem simple, but it is harder to practice in reality - it is maintaining perspective, at all times.  As the old saying goes: “Perspective is the way we see things when we look at them from a certain distance, and it allows us to appreciate their value.” In our businesses we can simply get so close to the challenges and the mundane that we lose focus. Perspective brings us back and gives us an all essential birds-eye view of what needs to be solved. There is a great quote by Michael Dermer, ceo of The Lonely Entrepreneur, who says: “Perspective is the oxygen that fuels your ability to thrive while facing the personal and business challenges of being an entrepreneur.” How true!