- USAF
Studentpreneurs should stop focusing on writing plans and concentrate on making businesses happen (South Africa)
Student entrepreneurs tend to be obsessed with writing business plans, how to access money, register their company, set up a bank account, and with buzzwords such as “business modelling”. Yet these obsessions, said Dr Johann van der Spuy, lecturer in the School of Economic and Management Sciences at Sol Plaatje University (SPU) in Kimberley, didn’t really matter. They were “icing on the cake” and “nice-to-haves”, he said, adding that as academics they played a role in emphasising things which aren’t that important. Van der Spuy, former director of the Mamelodi Business Clinic at the University of Pretoria, was speaking to a virtual and in-person audience of students and entrepreneurship academics at the fifth Student Entrepreneurship Week (SEW). SEW is an initiative of the Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE) programme, primarily sponsored by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and implemented in partnership with Universities South Africa (USAf). SPU hosted #SEW2021, which promotes entrepreneurship as an alternative to employment, and Van der Spuy addressed one of its key aims in his talk titled An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Building a Sustainable Business. Van der Spuy said students mistakenly think being a successful studentpreneur is about how they talked or dressed. He cited the example of an engineering student who came to him for advice 10 years ago. The student was wearing sunglasses, shorts, flipflops, and a t-shirt, and carrying a packet of cigarettes. His business was importing cheap fishing tackle from China, selling it through an online shop, and marketing it through fishing hobby websites. He was doing so well, he needed advice on how to raise R5000 to R10 000 additional seed capital to buy extra stock. “The dude did not have a business plan. He used his private bank account, didn’t even have a registered company. He didn’t come dressed up in a suit and he didn’t use big buzzwords. This individual had certain characteristics that made him very entrepreneurial,” said Van der Spuy, who said it is important for students to stop focusing on superfluous things and start realising what makes a successful entrepreneur. He said students tend to spend months on writing a business plan. “That is a dead document,” he said. “My experience with business documents is that they are excellent, expensive forms of toilet paper”, he said. “Business plans are a bunch of figures, normally sucked out of your thumb”. Worse than that, they often inhibit entrepreneurship because students are so busy refining the document, they miss a window of opportunity. The student in his shorts and t-shirt had a proposition that investors could take seriously. “But if you walk in with this thick document, and it’s just bullet points and bullet points, jargon, jargon, and more bullet points, does it really add value? I don’t think that’s the way to build a sustainable business,” said Van der Spuy. He compared a business venture to a horse race. The racetrack represented the market, that is, people who are going to buy the product, and the amount of available money.
Read more here
The RUFORUM Blog 
Leave a comment