Sometimes Thinking Small is
Better than Thinking Big
Fred H. Walti, II
Windhoek, Namibia: For two weeks in November, three other entrepreneurs from the US and I joined a similar team from Namibia to mentor 50+ Namibian almost-entrepreneurs in the basics of business building. We were taking part in the Mandela Washington Fellows Exchange for Young African Leaders program sponsored by the US State Department (apparently, not all foreign aid has stopped). This year’s focus was on assisting “cleantech” entrepreneurs, but we quickly expanded to include anything remotely sustainable.
For those of you not familiar with Namibia, it’s the country directly north of South Africa. It’s large, sparsely populated, with only 3 million people, and has the world’s oldest desert along its entire coast. It’s called the Skeleton Coast, with over 1,000 shipwrecks jutting out of the waves along its beaches. The desert’s heat pushes against the cold air from the Atlantic, causing a permanent fog. This, combined with muscular winds, makes navigating along its coast challenging, even today.
Namibia has plenty of African bush, rugged mountains, and a wide variety of animals. Etosha National Park, along the northern border with Angola, is one of the best places to see the coveted Big Five: lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros, and Cape buffalo. Especially enchanting is watching the parade of animals visiting its most enormous water hole at midnight. Here’s a live webcam at the water hole. There might be something happening right now. Etosha Webcam
Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac at the Hosea Kutako International Airport is as far away from LAX as one can get. Surrounded by miles and miles and miles of African bush, one walks down the stairs and then drags one’s carry-ons for a couple of hundred yards to the terminal. There is only one small building, the terminal, and nothing else. It immediately says this place is different. Namibia has become one of my favorite places among the 50+ countries I’ve seen, which is why I’ve been there four times in the last year.
The other reason is business. NGIN is working with various innovation stakeholders (the government, NGOs, financial institutions, universities, etc.) on programs that stimulate entrepreneurship. We’ve held technology challenges, implemented a United Nations Industrial Development Organization acceleration program, and conducted work sessions on everything from funding to pitching your company to building an innovation ecosystem. Being asked to be a Mandela Fellow was down the center of my fairway.
We Look for Innovative, Scalable Companies
I’ve spent the past 14 years helping entrepreneurs build innovative, scalable “cleantech” businesses in almost every part of the world. Scalability is an integral part of the equation because with scale comes impact, and with impact comes making a difference.
Yet on our projects, it’s common for a significant portion of the entrepreneurs’ companies to be unscalable. Many are just regional copies of innovations in another part of the world, or too embryonic to tell what their future holds. This is not a criticism, just a description of what we often encounter.
At the beginning of a session, we went around the room, asking each entrepreneur to share their business idea. A mother with her young girl literally on her knee said, “I want to grow vegetables in my backyard so I can sell them to my neighbors and the local market. There is a shortage of quality food because most of our food is imported from South Africa. And it’s expensive. In the back of my mind, I was worrying about how to offer business advice for a vegetable garden.
Namibia Entrepreneurs are Even More Embryonic
I was struck by the very early stage, even rudimentary nature of some of the entrepreneurs we worked with here in Namibia. This was especially true of the people we worked with in Swakopmund, the largest ocean-side town on the Namibian coast. About half of them were subsistence entrepreneurs – trying to sell vegetables from their garden or raising some chickens to sell eggs to the local market or sewing a hand-made warming/refrigeration bag that slow-cooked food during the course of a day (this was a very clever product that was one of my favorites.), or buying a school bus to take children safely to school. While their business ideas were very rudimentary and they lacked many of the skills and capital to make them a reality, their enthusiasm and willingness to try were remarkable and encouraging.
A Personal Aha Moment
Eventually I started to really look at what these entrepreneurs were trying to do. I put away my preexisting assumptions of what kind of help they needed. Instead of scalable, innovative companies, I got to thinking, could these very small businesses be the answer to Namibia’s near-term future?
Any assistance we could offer needed to recognize the realities of today’s Namibia: forty-five percent unemployment among young people. Food scarcity because of expensive imports and the challenges of growing food in its climate. There aren’t many big employers beyond the mineral extraction businesses. I began to ask myself, what if we could supercharge the creation of these small businesses, thus creating both a supply (small business owners) and demand (other small business owners and those they employ)? If we could help enough, say 500 or 1000 a year, couldn’t we over a five-year period create a small business economy that would eventually start to create scalable businesses and just plain successful businesses?
This is simply the antithesis of how I usually think: innovation, competitive advantage, growing market, scalability. But what other choices do we have that Namibia can implement without relying on some other foreign company supplying the needed investment? Data centers consume huge amounts of resources and don’t employ many (today’s equivalent of the warehouse worker). The development of the newly discovered oil fields off its coast over the next decade will certainly generate some local jobs, but toward what end? More mining of different “rare” minerals? We would just be continuing down the path that Namibia has taken for decades, if not centuries. Toward what end?
What if we used this oil money to seed a nation of small businesspersons?
Why not make Namibia into the Small Business Capital of Africa?
OK, here’s the non sequitur of all time: can we build non-scalable businesses at scale? : )). It’s funny just thinking about it.
If you have any thoughts on this, please jump in. We’re putting together a plan on how to accomplish this and would welcome ideas.
