The Global Entrprise Academy South Africa

We want to support 40,000 people per year in the development of their enterprise skills, and find out more about their entrepreneurial potential. Our approach doubles entrepreneurial rates and I have delivered to more than 1000 entrepreneurs by myself in the past twelve months while working full time. 

Entrepreneurs are not born or made, they innovate their own existence. Our support allows participants to take responsibility for their own development. YouTube contains all the lectures anyone needs and when precisely directed, learning is self-driven.

In my ten years  as a business coach I have noticed that incubators like preaching to the converted. They select those most likely to succeed. Whilst they get results in accelerating participants thousands are left outside the system as they are either not yet ready to launch or are too far away from the incubators to reach them effectively. 

We'd created an inclusive virtual delivery that can reach entrepreneurs anywhere and then an invitation from Prof David Gibson OBE to use his world leading eFactor approach opened a window for change at scale. 

By allowing marginalised communities to find and develop their own entrepreneurial spirit we make South Africa a more entrepreneurial place. 

We aim to make South Africa a more entrepreneurial place by finding the hidden talent. 

"Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, not everyone is ready and some will never be" Prof David Gibson OBE. 

When I first read that I paused for a while to take it in. The world was telling me that anyone can be an entrepreneur when my own experience and Prof Gibson said otherwise.  

68 Percent of South African small business incubators are based in Sandton, Johannesburg. Unjustly much of our population are effectively excluded from support.

Entrepreneurial development mostly follows an academic curriculum approach. If this worked Universities would be printing entrepreneurs right?

So I started to work on a solution.

I found that most virtual incubators in the USA had failed. So I learnt by doing. I tried every way possible until I a medium that worked was found,  WhatApp.

In 2019 Prof Gibson invited me to become one of the founder members of the Global Enterprise Academy and to use the eFactor. It has loads of awards, and we tested it with cohorts of entrepreneurs on various programmes and found that our approach rocked. A 352% improvement over national reported smme stats.

There are four main challenges to making South Africa a more entrepreneurial place.

1. It costs a lot to put an entrepreneur though the formal programmes. A big bite of the money goes to admin and management fees.

2. Entrepreneurs do not learn like students. They demand and engage to learning that shows immediate promise of reward.

3. The formal timelines and classroom engagements approach used by most incubators takes participants away from work and their income.

4. Entrepreneurs are unique. So are their learning needs. 

Using WhatsApp to lower cost, we deliver content and personalised mentoring which can be consumed by potential entrepreneurs at a pace and place suited to their learning speed and need. They can choose when and where to learn and engage, and at what level they wish to find additional learning materials. The worlds best learning materials are already online and easily available with a little guidance from our online mentors. 

Participants literally tailor their learning to their own unique needs. Importantly they never leave their business, a practical classroom where they can experiment and learn with a coach in their pocket 24/7. Incremental innovation add up to solid sustainable growth and business sustainability. 

Our approach costs 15% of standard incubation for a twelve month programme. We are seeing results that suggest that we can deliver the same value in a three month period thus reducing cost even further without changing the level of impact. It's like riding a bike, when you know - you know, and can continue unaided. 

We leave large, long lasting communities who learn, exchange and network profitably with each other. 

We target those missed by a system designed to find the already successful. We help the hidden entrepreneurs in our nation find their own inner entrepreneur or develop the potential of their enterprise skills be that in owning a company or working for on. 

We reach many 1000s more entrepreneurs as we deliver through mobile networks.

We understand entrepreneurs, how they learn and how they think. 

We have taken the award winning research of Professor David Gibson OBE, the worlds number on academic on entrepreneurship, and translated his work beyond it's present theoretical academic confines and out into the field with real time real life scenarios that impact incomes, and livelihoods of individuals who have never had, and probably never will, access to entrepreneurial development support. 

We have developed a cheap and effective delivery system and methodology for the delivery of enterprise skills en-mass to 1000s of would be entrepreneurs. The approach doubles entrepreneurial rate.

We have taken a lean axe to Prof Gibsons award winning eFactor, which is used in educational institutions, and streamlined it to suit entrepreneurs in action and tested and refined our application in real time delivery over the past three years. 

The National Business Initiative (NBI) are using our programme to select participants in development programmes in a number of pilots around South Africa. They still hold onto a traditional developmental approach

We are now ready to scale ad make South Africa a more entrepreneurial place to live and work in. 

Our work impacts seven of the SDG's being, Decent Work and Economic Growth, No Poverty, Zero Hunger, Gender Equality, Industry Innovation and Infrastructure, Sustainable Cities and Communities and Good Health and Well Being. 

The why of our impact is that we maximise value to entrepreneurial development participants by delivering only what they need to grow.