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Kevin’s presentation was entitled ‘Importance of storytelling and authentic leadership’ and covered the importance of good storytelling in your business and the duties that MD’s and business owners have to become authentic story tellers.
Check out the full presentation here:
The overriding theme that Kevin shared was as follows:
- Be as you wish to be seen and be authentic
- Be available and have an opinion
- Your reputation is all you have
Nicholas Haralambous is the founder of the online fashion company, NicSocks.com.
Nic was the CEO and co-founder of Motribe, the mobile community platform, before the company was successfully acquired by the social network, Mxit in October, 2012. He also founded ForeFront Africa consulting firm before selling that business to Imperial Holdings.
He was selected as one of the 200 young South Africans to take to lunch by the Mail&Guardian, featured on GQ’s list of top 30 men in media and was also a finalist in the Men’s Health Best Men Awards. The company he co-founded, Motribe, was named by Forbes as one of the top 20 startups in Africa.
His career included roles at the Sunday Times, Financial Mail, 702, Mail & Guardian as well as Vodacom SA.
PART ONE
PART TWO
It was Craig Rodney who in passing conversation said, “People like you and I have the innate ability to always make money.”
Craig is a smart guy who says smart things for a living. He said that quote rather glibly, a week after I started my new business venture, but it has been floating in my *Cerebra-l cortex for the past month.
It may first seem a rather cocky statement to make, but Craig is right. Certain people will always make small fortunes, fortunes that are not necessarily in the billions of Rands but money that is way above average incomes and often enough to allow the individuals to retire debt free with a property or two, regular holidays and some healthy interest payments.
Perhaps you may think this is a case of trial and error and that most entrepreneurs lose their fortunes before making their retirement numbers. This may be true but there is something deeper at work, something that sets the successful apart from the mediocre. I believe that something is the ability to network.
Networking is a skill that can be taught. There are millions of pushy motivational speakers who claim to know the key to successful networking in 5 easy steps. It’s the people who have a business and the natural talent to network which are the ones that outshine all the pseudo sales gurus. Let me define “natural networking talent” as an ability to integrate ones social skills with the needs of ones business, seamlessly, effortlessly and without expectation of a return.
Networkers I admire always offer up their contacts that can address my needs without expecting me to scratch their back too. They willingly share their information because they want to genuinely help and be supportive. These people are always on the top of my mind when someone I know may need their service.
Great networkers have cast their net far and wide thus giving them a broad spectrum of people they know and can refer to, when needed. They are approachable and always pro-active in introducing themselves to strangers. These people prefer networking face-to-face more than social media platforms as they thrive off personal contact and seeing people’s appreciation for genuine moments of friendship. Look at the successful people in your life and whom they are friends with – chances are they are successful people too.
I think it is basic Karma. Sharing is caring. What goes around comes around. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Let’s hope that Craig was right about me.
I was born in Hillbrow in 1975. For the first year of my life my family unit lived in Berea on the eastern outskirts of modern-day Hillbrow. We moved shortly after to the now, much greener northern suburbs, where my mother has lived in the same house for 37 years. I am a true Jo’burg boy. My accent reveals this truth.
Except for a brief stint in London I have not lived anywhere else in the world for an extensive period of time. I love Johannesburg. I preach my love on the interwebs and to friends and foreigners, alike. I defend Jo’burg in the great war between Johannesburg and Cape Town and I take pride in the fact that I live in the greatest city in Africa.
But something is slowly changing.
There is the great anecdote about the boiling frog that I have always believed to be true of the people who live in South Africa and Jozi in particular. The last 2 years of my life have been spent working in the inner-inner city of Johannesburg, where the melting pot of cultures and lack of space is obvious. Crime is rampant and local government service delivery is poor. These are not new revelations and I have been aware of this from as early as leaving high school, which I attended near Joubert Park, in the city centre, twenty years ago. What’s become more worrying is the ease at which my fellow neighbours and I are now accepting this slow decline.
I recently returned from a two-week break in Cape Town over December where I was deliberately looking at how well the city runs in comparison to Jo’burg. Cape Town is quite literally a different country. Yes, there are litter and crime and unemployment issues but the traffic lights all work, recycling waste is easy, the street curbs and island don’t have weeds growing out of them and the distinct lack of potholes is staggering. How can they have got this so right when Jo’burg has far more tax payers and a larger economy?
I am not one to talk politics but clearly at some level the Democratic Alliance (DA) has managed to grapple with problems and resolve them where the ANC is failing fantastically in central Johannesburg.
I’m considering “emigration” to the fairer Cape as an alternative to being boiled alive in Jo’burg. I fear that the path we take in Jo’burg is slippery, downhill and full of greased politicians.
I love my city. My tree-lined city. My non-windy city. My vibrant city. My city that I know so intimately. It saddens me to even consider leaving my network of friends, family and local businesses but the right hemisphere of my brain is winning this fight of leaving.
All that was won in the great fight to freedom is slowly being lost. I should end this post with “Vote DA!” but the problems are way deeper than sheer politics and are now engrained in us all. I, like many others, feel that staying and fighting this battle is now a waste of energy and that’s clearly half the problem.
How much time are you spending working IN your business rather than ON your business?
Over the past few years whilst helping small and medium sized businesses run smarter and more efficiently, trying to increase their cash flow positively and understand their margins, the same thing has cropped up over and over in every company: All the owners of these companies work long hours and are dedicated to making their venture a success, but lack doing one vital thing; working ON their business rather than IN it.
By this, I mean the owner runs the operation and is constantly fighting fires but never takes time to step out of his office environment and look at the business objectively analysing what he can do to improve where he is taking his business and how is going to get there.
In my opinion it is essential to take time out and re-evaluate what is happening from ‘inside’ the company at least every 90 days. With almost 90% of new businesses failing in the first 5 years, it is clear that the basics of understanding a business are lacking.
The obvious mistake most start-up business owners make is think that because they have the technical skills of making a product or delivering a service, they assume that he/she can make a success out of running an organisation that delivers this product or service. The technical work of a business and a business that does the technical work is vastly different.
Being “just” an entrepreneur is not enough. The entrepreneur needs to be a salesman, the product technician, the general manager, the accountant and the visionary leader. Without wearing all these hats in the beginning stages, the company will more than likely fail.
While working ON your business you should create a working manual that would in theory allow you to sell or franchise your business without you, the owner having to remain involved. This would then cover every aspect of your business, allowing the systems and procedures to make up for any skills lacking in the business and “fool-proofing” poor service and product delivery.
80% of your business is the same as every other business – why re-invent the wheel? Measure, improve and repeat your successes.
I recently spent three days in Tel Aviv, Israel, with a good friend of mine. It was a short, spur-of-the-moment, holiday trip combined with 3 days in Istanbul. I was last in Tel Aviv in 1994 when I was 19 years old. Israel was the first country I ever visited outside my home country, South Africa. I hated it.
I was never keen on going back to Israel and particularly Tel Aviv, as I just remember it being a dusty, dirty old city with run down buildings and possibly the worst architecture I had ever seen. I discovered that the style of architecture is now called “Brutalism” – a word that accurately describes the ugliness of the block-like buildings. Tel Aviv was a brutal place to see from the inexperienced eyes of a 19-year-old boy, who had only seen the best of South Africa during the dark apartheid years.
Nineteen years later and I arrived in a city that was going to be severely criticized by my jaded views and me. I was more than pleasantly surprised of what I found. Tel Aviv is a thriving multi-cultural city with an amazing beach and café culture. The buildings are mostly as I remember them, but having studied and experienced the world in greater detail since my last visit, I appreciated the intricate history of the Bauhaus movement and the move toward the Brutalistic era. I saw people, who are mostly middle class, enjoying a very pedestrian city filled with quaint streets, restaurants and multi-level retail spaces. The sea winds and the large trees that have been imported from Australia nearly 100 years ago cool the epic heat on the streets.
The public transport systems work efficiently but even more satisfying was renting a bicycle and cycling the streets with no fear or apparent danger. It’s a very livable city with a very non-religious feel, which again, surprised me.
The city had certainly changed a fortune in the gap between visits. Or had it?
I’m starting to think that the city today was actually very similar to what it is was twenty years ago. I’m starting to think that what has changed the most, was in fact, myself. Ones outlook on the environment will determine the experience they have and the level they enjoy it. My life has changed radically in the last twenty years and the cities I have visited, in many countries, have changed the way I saw Tel Aviv. It’s no longer a shit hole, but that’s because I was not looking at it in a comparative negative light.
We view our lives the way we want to see our lives. Looking at it from a positive and favourable standpoint makes all the difference. You can read this in any light you wish.
On the 22nd May 2012 I walked out my office, which I had occupied as the ‘boss’ for 17 years, never to return. It was a moment that took about 5 long years of mental abuse; jaw clenching sleep and exhaustion, to reach.
My business was all I knew. It was an integral part of who I was in my life and how people portrayed me. After a few months of insomnia, tears shared in sadness and pain it was finally over and I packed my car with what little trinkets I wanted to take with as a reminder of what was, and drove off.
I was petrified of unemployment and finding a “Job” and starting again. I had lost millions of Rands, a large part of my ego and friends. For the first few weeks I could not sleep through the night and even though my 5:30am alarm had been turned off, the seventeen-year cycle, of waking up in the dark, could not be broken. I would wake up and look for something to do; anything would do, as long as it took my mind off what was. I avoided all phone calls as the liquidated company owed money’s and old customers demanded services that were no longer deliverable.
I found myself pulling out weeds in my driveway, drinking coffee alone at the local roaster or sitting in friends’ offices using their free Wi-Fi just so I could get out the house. I dabbled in a few small businesses and helped out people who needed help – no matter what it was they needed. I was fighting depression, guilt and loneliness. All my friends were trying to cheer me up with the fact I was free to do what I wanted – something I wanted for many years, but freedom is not what you think it is. Freedom for me is being able to make a difference in my life at my own pace and having an impact on people around me that I cared about. I was not any freer than I was in the business I hated being in.
I committed to holidays I could not afford and bought clothing I did not need in order to fill the gaping void in my empty existence outside my business. My true friends and family in their wisdom kept reminding me that all would work out, that I was a bright young man that could start again and would find my feet and hit the ground running. In hindsight they were right. It just took me a few months to realize this for myself.
I am now working for someone in his business. I picked a new career that makes sense to me, that fits in with my life requirements of time, flexibility, answerability and creativity. You may think I am lucky now, but it’s a decision I made. I took the time to find what gave me pleasure and allowed me to wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose. I never understood how people could love their job or how they could work for other people and not be the owner or leader, until now.
I am not a religious man but I believe I have been re-born, re-incarnated, rejuvenated and re-invented in the past twelve months and I love the new me. I am not a motivational speaker or preacher but I have seen that at any stage of your life you can step away from whatever you feel is shackling you and start again. It’s nerve-racking and breathtaking but wholly worth the risk.
Risk everything for your happiness, I did, and now for the first time in years I’m a toddler looking into my future with new eyes, scared of nothing, ecstatic with all the newness and change in the world.
Thanks to Mom, Kim, Hammies, Jo, Mark P, Don & Rich, Spratty, Rodders, Shpronkles and the Bermans. You saw me through the worst and I love you all in my own way.
