I have spoken and facilitated workshops in both the other two major cities of South Africa (won’t call them by name). I have addressed crowds of great diversity and from a wide variety of specific industries. Never before have I addressed just a group of my peers. Never before have I been asked to speak at an event where I did not have to prepare anything at all. I am to speak of my journey as an entrepreneur, which should be fairly simple right? Right.

It started when a client of our agency, Khuzmag Trading, declined to pay us by debit order when they signed up for our digital marketing services in January 2011. The conversation then jumped to who we’re using to debit our clients. By this time we have just heard the news that our existing provider has been acquired by a bigger finance software company and I was in great anticipation of higher fees. So after agreeing to accept payments via EFT, I enquired from Njabulo Magubane (the Khuzmag CEO) who their provider is and that is how I got introduced to Three Peaks.

Fast forward to 2012. Three Peaks is now also our debit service provider and Njabulo Magubane a trusted client and friend. Then I get invited to a workshop where Njabulo will be speaking. As his company’s digital marketing service provider I paid for and attended the workshop. I found it simplistically fascinating. Njabulo spoke for around 20 – 30 minutes on his journey as an entrepreneur. It was great listening to a fellow business man speak about things other than what his company does, their clients or their staff.

It is called the Interactive Entrepreneurial Workshop for a very good reason.

I absolutely loved the concept of a business person speaking at a workshop without punting his company. Just straight talk about the life journey to where he or she find themselves at that very moment. It was at this workshop where I met Cheri, Debbie and Nomvula of Three Peaks – all people I’ve been speaking to digitally for months at that point. Cheri and I then spoke about the possibility of me addressing the workshop at some point in future and I agreed.

And that’s how we arrived at the “Interactive Entrepreneurial Workshop with Arthur Charles Van Wyk”, scheduled for 20 April 2012.

On the morning of Friday, 20 April 2012 just after 8am I will be addressing a group of my peers, i.e business men and women from the city of Durban and surrounds (everybody from outta town are also welcome to attend). The subject matter is very simple. All about the personal and professional journey I undertook to get me to where I am today. I’m not sure they know that my telling this particular story could take a full day. And it would be a full day of intense listening cos my story is fascinating – even to me.

So here’s looking forward to fascinating some, mesmerising others and even educating one or two at this month’s Interactive Entrepreneurial Workshop hosted by Three Peaks.

Imagine getting invited to a business networking event to launch a business network and a business networking portal for SMEs. You accept the invite graciously and even invite a fellow business associate along to the event in good faith. Thinking of course that because the event is all about business, your associate can also benefit because he – like you – is in business.

As you get to the entrance of the hotel you notice the tags worn by the welcoming team. You recognise the name of the business on the tags from some interaction. You think.. you wonder.. you ponder.. and BAM! The lights go on. YOU HAVE JUST BEEN SCREWED. HARD TOO.

The name on the tags are that of a business you know. You know that business because 7 months ago you sat down with the owner of that business. You and that person had a common gripe about how a certain annual business event in your city is executed. They saw your public outcry on a social network about the ineffective aspects of this particular annual business event and invited you to their office for a meeting. At this meeting you poured out your heart. You spoke about how passionate you are about business in your city. You spoke about forming a business network that will be backed up by an online portal. You excitedly expounded on how you envision this portal working and contributing toward establishing and growing a vibrant business community. You just spoke and spoke.

Now here you are, at the launch of the very business event you so passionately spoke about to this person – as a guest.

The realisation that everything you are going to see and hear on that evening is actually your own vision brings tears to your eyes and a feeling of something cold and sharp stuck in your heart. Then you get inside the venue where the business networking event is being held and you find that a former protege of yours – obviously unknowingly – is part and parcel of the proceedings. His business is facilitating the multimedia side of the night’s proceedings. You stand in the auditorium and you witness your vision for business in your city being spoken about as if you wrote the script for that business networking event yourself.

And on realising that someone just screwed you hard, you vow to never share valuable information with fellow business persons ever again. From that point on everybody that requires your expertise or time will pay for the privilege. You will never divulge your vision for your business or any other business again unless there’s an invoice and a payment involved.

It is after all just BUSINESS; never PERSONAL

I started working for Sytech Supplies as their Head of Brand Marketing in March 2008. When I got there I did a thorough assessment of what the company had in terms of brand collateral and what they did not have, so as to give me a clear idea of what to do and where to start. So after spending my first week doing this, I had a meeting with my manager John Tellis and the owner of the company to discuss the way forward. One of my first suggestions to them was a multi-domain web strategy. I suggested we get the local and international domains for the full company name Sytech Supplies and just for the word Sytech. They both refused point blank. I went back to my office with my tail between my legs. After days of pondering, I thought: “Screw the both of them”, and I registered the domains anyway. Long story short.. I carried the cost of registering and hosting those 3 domains from April 2008 until January 2011 without even telling anybody in the company that I did that. I did it because it needed to be done. So when I left the company in February 2011 – after I realised my season has come to an end – the company owner Malcolm Groger refused to pay the little bit of money I was owed and sign my provident fund forms until I hand over (listen to this shit) “THE COMPANY’S DOMAINS”. I kinda had no choice cos I wanted to get closure to the quagmire that caused me to leave in the first place. Besides I had no use for the domains. But that was a great lesson in spending your own money thinking you’re helping someone else with more money than you.

Then in 2010, after a whole lotta back and forth emails between myself and Lelo Boyana, my company started hosting the Just Curious website – www.justcurious.co.za. I quickly realised that the amount of traffic the website was drawing would grow phenomenally fast, so without telling Lelo I started renting additional server space to accommodate her website’s traffic. This cost me an extra R400 per month (in dollar to rand exchange.. it would fluctuate some months) and I collected only r120 per month from Lelo for hosting. By month 6 I started talks with Lelo about getting her website’s advertising business (her site’s traffic is hotttt), but she had some guy who she has a deal with even though he wasn’t doing squat. So I held out for the advertising business and in the meantime continued paying the R400 extra to host her site and collecting the R120 from her every month. I then started talking to her about getting a Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Hosting for her site because her traffic was really going through the roof. She and her co-bloggers also were not familiar with how to optimise images for loading time and minimal bandwidth consumption, and that was a real concern I shared with her. In addition I had to adjust her site’s available bandwidth every single month too because her traffic just grew and grew. I even offered her the low price of a VPS for R900pm – which she declined. Long story short.. in December 2011 our provider in the States blankly refused to host a site with that level of traffic on a shared server and shut her site down. I conveyed the news to her (same thing I preached to her for 9 months prior to this happening), and she instead opted to move her site to another hosting provider (from whom she moved again less than a month later). I now pay R400 less every month and that R400 expense now gets split between my daughters’ bank accounts. The great thing about this is that on the same day I lost that R120 monthly income, I won two pitches that gives me a monthly income of 18 times that R120 she paid – per client. Still the deed is done. I have paid more money than I made for something i was hoping would materialise – and never did.

So here’s something all you young entrepreneurs and uber ambitious business people can learn from. It’s not a bad thing to bend over backwards for your client or your boss, but make sure the person you’re doing it for knows and understand what you’re doing for their benefit and make sure your efforts are rewarded – in whatever way you deem satisfactory. DON’T JUST BEND OVER BACKWARDS. IT’S TOO EASY TO GET BITTEN IN THE ASS.

Then on Monday morning I swung by the bank to collect my new cheque account card, which Carino Singh at FNB Musgrave Road was kind enough to get me in record time. I also saw Mahomed Akoob – the business banking manager, and he emailed me the form I need to complete to get this done. I am submitting the form today and expect that before the end of this week our digital marketing agency should be a member of the Durban Chamber.

This is probably one of the best things I’ve seen happen for businesses of any size or shape in the South African commercial space. Well done FNB.

Whoever develops the copy for business documentation suffers from a serious sense of misguidance as far as their target or captive audience is concerned. Take as an example these lines from the website of a business organisation based here in Durban:

“…aspires to be a thought leader in the area of efficient, holistically aligned business and investment vibrancy.. creating a thriving and inclusive economy through leveraging the organisational capacity of the private and public sector..”

I can’t begin to imagine who wrote this, and even less who it is written for. What does it say to the first time reader of business documentation? Instead of that first line would it not be easier to instead say: “We are middle-men for investors wanting to invest and business owners seeking investment”. The idea is to write in words that humans can understand because the objective is for humans to read it, understand it and act on it. How then will we get people to act on something that can’t comprehend?

So the question to ask ourselves is whether “business English” really work in business, or whether it is more a burden than a benefit. Are we really communicating when we verbally regurgitate dictionaries at people in the hope they will be impressed enough to want to do business with us because we appear smart?

Do we absolutely have to say “Mr. Anderson” when all we really have to say is “Neo”?