Face of the Future
F
The Accidental Baker
In the northern part of South Africa, another young business-owner is making waves in her community. Lebogang Makila’s foray into baking was purely by chance. “I’d bought a cake for my son’s birthday, but when we cut it, we discovered it was stale. The worst thing was that the bakery from which I’d bought it refused to give me a refund,” says the 30-year-old owner of SinqoSanda Business Enterprise. After that incident in 2015, she made it her mission to upgrade her baking skills.
She started off by baking for her family and neighbours. Now she is competing with some of Modimolle’s best bakers, churning out delectable scones, muffins, bread, and wedding and birthday cakes. Makila says she saw a gap in the market, especially in the township of the small Limpopo town. For the past three years, she has been enrolling in short courses and travelling as far as Johannesburg to fine-tune her craft.
When she is not meeting deadlines and creating mouth-watering masterpieces, Makila is also studying business management. Her ultimate dream is to own a fully-fledged bakery that will create jobs. She also received mentorship from the Awethu Project. Like Mdutyana, her eyes have been opened to the tricks and twists of running a business.
“I was clueless when it came to pricing, managing finances and actively marketing my business. I used to rely on word of mouth to secure clients. Now that I’ve put up placards and posted on social media, I’m getting more orders. Soon I’ll need to train an assistant to help me with the many orders that are landing in my lap,” she says.
She is looking forward being able to compete with more established bakeries. “I want to be independent and have others look up to me and tell the story of how I started,” she says.
De Villiers says incubation programmes are key to helping start-ups survive the initial challenges of running a business. He believes the education and mentorship offered by these programmes should be incorporated into mainstream schooling, in order to channel young people to view employment differently. “We ought to be cultivating the capabilities and personality traits that entrepreneurs share. Great entrepreneurs are resilient, creative, risk-tolerant and strong networkers. So if we focus on developing those traits in young people, we position them to be effective entrepreneurs,” he says.
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“Great entrepreneurs are resilient, creative, risk-tolerant and strong networkers. So if we focus on developing those traits in young people, we position them to be effective entrepreneurs.”
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