“Changes that are not connected to process, don’t last”

I officially started working and earning a salary at the age of 19 as an Executive PA at an Asset Management company that my mother was a partner of together with Vernon Mwamuka, Sue Vera, and South Africa partners Lowenthal and Venter.  Working for a living was not entirely a novelty, 3 years earlier a vocal group that I had started with my friends Kudzai Sevenzo, Sakhile Sifelani and Marjorie Ngwenya had not only led us to be the brain-childrens of African Voices of Africa choir at Chisipite Senior School aka AVA but we had accepted a well remunerated gig by singing  at a wedding taking place at the Chisipite Senior School Chapel.  We had been spotted at one of the most popular events during the school calendar “Miss Chisi” in 1995/6.  It wasn’t long when the group split up to focus on our A’Level studies and at the time taking such activities more seriously than they needed to would result in a lifelong of disappointment and failed ambitions.  The only person who was determined and courageous to take the singing activity more seriously then and still at it in 2015, is Zimbabwean singing sensation Kudzai Sevenzo.   I went on to study Accounts and then 7 years later an MBA and worked briefly in various roles; I heard that Sakhile was a lawyer and personal advisor to Morgan Tsvangirai prior to the 2013 elections and Marjorie is working and residing in the UK after graduating in Actuarial Science. 

I chose to study Accounts because I was good at it.  I had obtained an A for O’Levels without really even trying.  I remember, when I came out of the exams and we were discussing how the exams went and the level of difficulty of the exam.  Mercy, my friend and classmate and myself, were considered the top Accounting students.  We didn’t share the same outcome as the others.  Both our Trial Balances and Balances Sheets had balanced but with different amounts.  So we started engaged in our own academic discussion, dissecting each problem, well, how we remembered the questions in the Exam to convince each other that the methodology we had adopted in recognizing Bad debts and Provisions for Bad debts made the difference in what number was posted to the Ledger accounts.  Either way we couldn’t figure out how both our ledgers ended up balancing despite of differing carrying amounts.  As it turn outs, we both ended up with an A for O’Level and we were the only ones who obtained that grade in our class.  So, where am I going with this?  I have watched TedX Youtube of Robert Greene: “Key to Transforming Yourself” who shares with us that changes that are not connected to process, don’t last.  I have read a summary article of “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” by Psychologists Dr. Anders Ericsson and read a book by Dr. Cal Newport called “So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love,” a book that challenges the conventional wisdom that one must follow their passion in life if they want to be happy and successful.  Instead Dr. Newport states that “following your passion is bad advice” and one must be devoted to continuous learning but most importantly developing rare and valuable skills to acquire great jobs or to be successful.  He gives accounts of people he has interviewed overtime who followed their passion to acquire financial freedom versus those who had disciplined approached to becoming successful.  The common thread in Greene, Ericsson and Newport is Deliberate Practice also known as the 10,000 hour rule:

"Being successful isn’t just about 10,000 hours of doing the activity; it’s 10,000 hours of what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” According to the paper, “deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Work is where we exercise the skills we already have. Deliberate practice is not work and it's not play. At work, it is assumed that you’re bringing your best possible performance to satisfy the needs of a client or the organization...work involves using skills and talents you’ve already developed; the performance improvement from time spent at work is minimal compared to time spent in deliberate practice. That fact that you’ve managed a team for 10 years doesn’t automatically make you a world-class manager. Work isn’t deliberate practice.

…The goal of deliberate practice is improvement…When we’re in deliberate practice, activities that require total focus and are designed to stretch, we’re rarely enjoying ourselves. If you’re engaged in the activity for the fun of it, you’re probably not getting much better...If you are not engaged in deliberate practice then you are most definitely wasting your 10,000 hours.

It suddenly occurred to me the reason I had obtained an A for O’Level with quite little effort then was because I had been engaged in such an activity.  My decision to study Accounts was because I understood it not because I was passionate about it.  The real challenge came when I took Audit and Taxation Classes for undergrad.  Not only did I get lost in the legal terms but also in the process of when, why and how of Taxation under the GAAP system.  I never went on to do the CPA nor the CA.  The Audit and Tax element of the Accounting discipline throttled my interest.  But let's not also underestimate the impact of working full-time for bread and butter and to pay tuition fees plays in dividing my time to be able to focus on the discipline deeper. Thus, if I had been engaged in deliberate practice I would most probably acquired the professional qualification(s).    Instead, I changed my entire focus to understanding the Strategic Management discipline in my late 20s as a result of working in my mother’s consulting business since 2008.  However, my non-linear journey to acquiring career capital has exposed me to various skills and exposure to types of mindset.  I will reiterate only three key strategies Greene identifies:

1. Adopt an internally driven mindset - stop fixating on what people are saying or doing.  Focus on yourself internally.  Become stronger yourself.
2. Return to your primal inclinations – spark a childlike intense curiosity in your work.
3. Transform yourself through your work – enter a journey of deliberate practice. ‘Changes that are not connected to process; don’t last’ says Greene.  Job hopping is a result of doing following your passions instead of working right to acquire skills that are rare and valuable says Newport.

My journey to success has been a non-linear one.  After 3 months of series of interviews with a Swedish consulting PLC; I am down to my final interview with the Managing Director.  The Consulting role exhibits an accumulation of the skills that I have acquired in my various roles are unique and in alignment to this company’s strategy.  One of the Senior Directors said after my 45minute case presentation interview with a panel of 8 team members that included the MD: “we have been in the banking industry for a time and to see a presentation like this demonstrates that not only do you understand the key components but depth of analysis shows how curious you are.” I only had two/three questions from the panel and the MD was quite impressed with the presentation.

 

I have been engaged in a process of learning and continuous improvement for some time now and will continue to adopt an internally driven mindset.  Greene says “you will draw opportunities to you because people will sense how prepared you are.”  

Here’s to the organic process of self-improvement, no matter how laborious.

A Memoir of a Restauranteur Rookie

My interest for food did not begin from the sexy culinary shows we now see on DSTV’s food and lifestyle channel.  Neither did it begin with my brother’s gradual interest in studying from the vineyards of Western Cape to the small quaint village towns in South of France.  Rather it began in my grandmother’s kitchen, meekly nestled in an urban home located in Hatfield, Harare.  The journey was subtle.  It started with the regular ritual of baking that my grandmother partook in weekly.  She would prepare the family favourite, banana loaf bread and small banana cookies.  She also enjoyed baking her favourite fruit cake and, then as kids we did not enjoy the idea of dried fruit in a cake until our palates matured and began to savour the fullness of the fruit cake. 

I don’t recall how it happened but I found myself at 15, taking Cookery class for O’ Levels at Chisipite Senior School.   My Cookery teacher at the time was Mrs. Soltau. I remembered how she taught us how to prepare béchamel sauce.  She was relentless in making sure we were meticulous in how we prepared it.  This is because the white sauce is significant and versatile in many dishes in the kitchen around the world.  We also learnt how to make short crust pastry and flaky pastry from scratch.  In fact, choosing to do cookery class back then was not even a novelty.  All I know is that I chose it as an O’Level subject from a limited choice of Art and Fashion & Fabrics classes. 

20 years later, I found myself, running a franchise restaurant, a family business, in the northern suburb of Johannesburg.  As I stood in the middle of the restaurant, there were pockets of patrons in the store.   No promising signs yet, of a full lunch-hour in the horizon. The restaurant had old tall wooden sliding doors, some of which were about to come off their hinges; some of which you could tell had been repaired just enough to survive till the next “repair” job which was anywhere between a week to a month from now.   The space where the patrons dined humbly was dark and a feeling of desolation filled the room.   Part of the reason was the lighting in the store was dim and antiquated; the other, was the sharp contrast, past the boundaries of our restaurant, were bright well-lit surroundings; and the sound of vibrant and chatty customers in the adjacent restaurants quietly revealed the warmth and welcoming environment that our new restaurant reluctantly lacked.  The store was located inside a mall, so no natural light ever saw the curves and edges of the restaurant.  Only the white cold ceramic tiled floor of the mall provided some semblance of light into the reception area of the restaurant; beyond that, a black and white checked floor greeted the foot of the entrance of the door and a sea of wooden dark chairs covered in a red substandard faux leather fabric littered the dining area.  The walls were white and awaited a recoating.  Half way down the wall a black and white tiny ceramic mosaic tiled border emerged, to contrast the accent longitudinal wall of wood from the border to the floor.  The wall represented the history and the age of the store whilst a few of the framed pictures on the wall did not share the same liberty.  It is why a few months later when the Franchisor wanted us to spend money in the 1^st year of operating the store on redecorating the wall; my mother kept the original design of the wall without the large human portrait wall papers accompanied by a few of the framed pictures.

A lot of work needed to be done to restore the franchise restaurant to its supposed former glory but we also had to be realistic. We had just bought the store and adding refurbishments to the first financial year of the business was quite ambitious.

During the first three months of running the restaurant we decided that we needed to understand a lot more about the functions of each and every staff member and what they did on a daily basis.  Where the management’s job started and ended?  What kind of service the waitrons were providing to the patrons and whether they were incentivized to offer good customer service?  What would motivate the kitchen staff in the kitchen and why they liked talking so much in the kitchen as if they are vendors at a market place? We started piloting our way through the kitchen.  We embarked on a journey of discovery that would reveal that we bought an old restaurant with legacy issues such as immature operational systems, low staff morale, no pride for the brand, and poor working culture.  The changes and improvements we tried to foster in the coming months to turnaround the restaurant were met with distrust and hostility.

I don’t remember how it quite happened but eventually I had grasped the basic Pilot System quite well prior to taking the intermediate and advanced course at the Pilot HQ in Woodmead, Sandton.  I had been taught by a manager at the store and Franchisor Operations manager on how to capture invoices on the system, how to count stock items, and how to print the income statement to ascertain our food cost weekly.  We were advised by the Franchisor that food cost had to be around 37% at least monthly; but unfortunately, during the first three months our food cost reported 40% and above.  Many questions came to mind.

How can our food cost be so high?

What are the factors that could cause high food cost?

What is the importance of the variance report because the current management did not see the use of the daily and weekly reports?  

They would print it and file it but there were no tactical plans around it on how to improve or check the abnormalities on the sheet.  The whole entire process was overwhelming, but I was determined to demystify the process of running the kitchen.  If anything I picked at business school is that human beings complicated issues.  The drawbacks are the gaps identified between how the processes should be running, compared to how it’s currently running.  If the gaps are too wide, it’s a legacy issue and to fix it at store level one would have to address it with the Franchisor.

My MBA came in handy in identifying, analyzing and making recommendations to my parents in steering this store out of the woods.  I had not been part of the original negotiations when my parents decided to buy the store so I was pretty much unaware of the operating expenses of the store.  The first three months my mother would handle the expenses of the store whilst I handled operational issues including human resources issues and payroll.  I learnt later that absolving myself from operational expenses of the store left me exposed to the real cancer of the business, RENTAL EXPENSE.  Despite our best efforts of being good restauranteurs, we had to be better. That means understanding what we should have understood before signing the dotted lines.

Franchise Disclosure Agreement

The Franchise disclosure agreement, also referred to as an FDA in franchising is a very pertinent document that discloses to the prospective buyer/franchisee the costs of owning and running a franchise restaurant; cash flow projections/potential returns and main overhead expenses.    The costs can include the following:

·        Franchisee Initial License fee

o   Training Manuals

o   Operations Manuals

o   Training of staff (some Franchisors don’t usually charge for training staff for Franchisees)

·        Outlet Development costs, includes but not limited to the following:

o   Assistance with lease negotiations with the prospective landlord

o   Assistance with application for financing (some Franchisors may not assist with this aspect)

o   Planning, layout and interior design

o   Site supervision

o   Site development

o   Store evaluations, equipment and fitting

·        Other costs – the cost of improvements to an existing building would depend on the amount of remodeling needed to change the interior to meet Franchisor’s specifications

·        Stock Deposit

·        Royalty Fees

·        Advertising and Marketing Fees

·        Insurances Costs

·        Liquor License

·        Trade License

·        Rent Guarantee/Deposit plus Gross Rental for 1^st month – dependent on the landlord

Main Overhead expenses – will impact directly on Net Profit of the business are:

·        Food Costs

·        Labour Charges

·        Worker costs

o   Uniforms

o   Staff food

o   Contribution to any regulatory authority

·        RENT – NB: MAXIMUM SHOULD BE 10% - 12% of TURNOVER

·        Electricity

·        Gas

·        Other Expenses

o   Bank Charges

o   Interest

o   Insurance

o   Accounting fees and Administration

o   Telephone, fax and postage

o   Stationery, etc

In essence, the FDA should essentially help you make up your mind.  However, it’s important not to rely on this document alone to make your decision.  Do your own due diligence, even if it means speaking with the existing Franchisees directly of the brand you would like to invest in before securing the right of first refusal to an area.   Nonetheless, the documents my parents received at the time weren’t as explicit in outlining the list of costs and expenses listed above.  That list formulated above is an excerpt of the FDA I prepared for the Franchisor at the time on a volunteer basis.  Running this particular franchise restaurant was a very expensive lesson to learn but not as expensive as the business school education in Denmark!

I still love the restaurant sector.  It’s a calling for me not a career not a job.  A restaurant is not just about providing glamorously plated food to customers at a premium.  It’s a lifestyle.  If we fail to deliver the tastefulness and beauty of culinary cuisine on a plate; we rob our customers of an experience that transcends the mediocrity of everyday life. 

Extract from the upcoming book Franchising Bull$h*!: Lessons learned in running a Franchise Restaurant.  Copyright @ May 13, 2015.  This article was first published online on BlogSpot by Tambu Ndoro, Enterprise Development Consultant, Author and Blogger.  

Marketing is not advertising...

This month we celebrate our management consulting business’ second year of life.  In dog life it would be 14 years; and given the demands and expectations of small business generating instant cash flow in the Zimbabwe market, the life of companies should be measured in dog years!  One is expected to generate cash flow within 3 – 6 months of operations!  Failure to do so, one is seen as a mickey-mouse business and not a serious player in the market.  Hence, it is no wonder you see many companies in Zimbabwe apportioning some of their capital into advertising their products in various forms of media platforms.  Whilst that is not entirely a bad idea, it is slightly deceptive if you think advertising alone will send your prospective clients into your store.  Here are four (4) reasons why advertising is not purely marketing:

1)       Advertising is for the lazy

Yes. I said it.  Advertising is for the people who expect a couple of beautiful looking pictures and sign post to pique a psychological reactions in your prospective and current clients to come and leave their hard earned money in your store.  Think again.  If you ask marketing executives from the big companies like Coca-Cola; Microsoft, MacDonald’s why they advertise; they will tell you that it is to develop BRAND AWARENESS and INCREASE PRODUCT VISIBILITY.  The oldest people in the marketing game are telling you something: the objective is not to derive direct revenue as a result of advertising.  Marketing academics will even further testify that it is difficult to measure and pinpoint how much of sales made in a particular period; comes from a specific advertising expenditure either during that month or previous months.

2)      Be relationship managers

Marketing is a relationship with your customers/target market.  People like to buy from companies that reflect who they are and sell their products in a way that is not just a quick exchange of product and cash.  Let me tell you a story of a company that manufactures wrought iron furniture.   After several months of the owners selling and marketing products for the business; they decided to hire a couple of sales and marketing executives.  Part of their remuneration would be earned as 50% commission of the the business that they bring to the shop (sales).  No doubt, the sales and marketing executives are clever, groomed and articulate however, that alone did not get more customers coming into their Umwinsidale showrooms.  In fact, management saw a decrease in sales over a period of 3 months; coupled with a high wage-bill.  Why?  The sales that did come through the door where as a result of the longstanding relationships that the owners have with prospective and existing clients.  This is because, unlike the employees; the business is a lifestyle not just job to the owners.  Upon further investigations, it became apparent that the owners are in every nook and cranny of social media platforms and social functions where every opportunity presents itself to package their product and service offering to their friends, family, and colleagues.   In addition, owners aspire for the quality of life that our clients aspire for.  Hence, the conversations with the clients go beyond just selling the finished product to them when they visit the showrooms.

3)      The discerning customer (value proposition)

As a result of globalization we are seeing the impact of consumer purchasing power on retail, manufacturing and services sector sales.  This is because the consumer is often exposed to many more choices and therefore, requires companies to offer value to their customers in the way that other companies offering the same product and/or service may not.  The degree of sophistication of a customer in an emerging market economy has increased over the last two decades.  Therefore, purely exhausting your advertising budget without a second thought to the discerning customer is like giving money away.  It’s useful and noble but does not generate any revenue for your business; thus compromising on the future viability of your business. 

4)      Marketing is about understanding the market

Marketing is one of the strategic functions in a business; advertising on the other hand is the administration function of marketing.  When I work as a consultant as I often do for some medium-sized companies in Zimbabwe, I am delighted to discover that 50% of them knew the importance of understanding their market.  They even demonstrated it through the previous surveys that they continuously conducted on product awareness campaigns, visibility of their brand amongst other factors.  In academia we call this Market Research.   Market Research is more appropriate execution for larger companies whose capacity and client base is too rigorous to manage.  However, we cannot under estimate the importance of engaging with our customers on a continuous basis.  I think small business do a better job of knowing their customers’ needs better than larger organizations.  This is because the environment in which they collect feedback from the client is informal; face-to-face; less structured and instant.  Thus, quality of the feedback is more likely to accurately reflect the customer’s honest view.

So, dear marketers don’t rely on your advertisers to be the custodians of your relationship with your clients; don’t be lazy! 

Copyright @ November 18, 2013.  This article was first published online on BlogSpot by Tambu Ndoro, Strategy & Innovation Consultant & CEO-Founder at Hanga Consulting Private Ltd©2011.  www.hangaconsulting.co.za coming soon. 

Private Sector, do you know what your Ministry has in store for you? : The Tripartite Free Trade Area Agreement

Yesterday, our organization, the SME Association of Zimbabwe was invited by the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce to a Consultative workshop about Tripartite Free Trade Area  (TFTA) between COMESA-EAC-SADC.  This workshop is being funded by the British Council and we were only alerted of its nature less than 48 hours.  So, I took it upon myself to read up on TFTA what it is and why they need our input as an organization.  So I download two 20-page documents off the internet.   The first document I read was a well-researched paper by Petros Shayanowako, ‘Towards a COMESA, EAC, and SADC Tripartite Free Trade Area,’ (January 2011).  They were critical aspects to the paper he covered which would be useful to any SMEs or Private Sector whom would want to understand the historical background and impact of the TFTA on business, trade and industry.  I will not bore you with the details of the paper but more emphasis on Import-substitutions and Value Additions on our local industry would have been useful.   Hence, I then, referred to the Draft TFTA as suggested by Shayanowako’s paper to understand the specific legal guidelines that is informing the author’s deductive reasoning.  

As I read ‘The Draft Agreement Establishing the COMESA, EAC and SADC Tripartite Free Trade Area,’ Revised (December 2010).  It became abundantly clear what the benefits and the challenges of the TFTA were.  Now, I am not a Trade lawyer and neither, do I have a PhD in Trade and Development but it doesn’t take a social scientist nor a legal practitioner to explain Article 3: General Objectives, clause 1: to promote the rapid social and economic development of the region through job and wealth creation and the elimination of poverty, hunger, and disease through building skills, innovativeness and hard and soft infrastructure; and through improving the location of factors for sustainable generation of national, regional and foreign investment and trade opportunities. In essence TFTA is promoting the competitiveness of a country by developing the country’s competitiveness of its local industries.  So, here is when things became uncomfortable for me when the following assertion amongst others, were made by various senior persons with the mandate to speak on behalf of ZNCC and Ministry of Industry and Commerce, paraphrased as follows:

Zimbabwe is a dollarized economy.  When countries export it is because they want to buy up foreign currency; and since Zimbabwe has the U.S. dollar; the Botswana Pula; the South African Rand; and the European Euro then Zimbabwean SMEs can benefit from having countries in the COMESA-EAC-SADC trade with Zimbabwe for that foreign currency.  

Now here is the question I later posed to the panel after painfully listening to their unsolicited and uninformed advice about how SMEs can leverage from the TFTA.  How does a company in the manufacturing sector benefit from TFTA when (1) their production inputs in making a product is in a strong currency such as the US$; and (2) distribution (transportation costs) are in US$.  The retailer then puts a mark-up on the product to sell to consumers in the domestic market.  In the end, the products only fetches particular consumer with a specific disposable income and if one takes this product across the board to South Africa to sell in a weaker currency in South African rands; how does that product perfectly compete on price with South Africa?  Is this a sustainable model for the SMEs? Can the SME still maintain Zimbabwean jobs?  Can the SME still circulate income in the Zimbabwean economy?  Can the already under capacity-utilization manufacturing plant avoid the economic-certainty of poverty, hunger and disease knocking on its doors?  How do all these factors promote import-substitution and value addition?  My question was not welcomed by one of the panel members, in fact they responded as if they needed to exorcise the demon that had descended on me to even dare ask that question.

My question was greeted at first with ‘I don’t understand your question about exporting and production costs in US$?’ Then I repeated it slowly in simple non-economic terms to the Economists asking?  Then the respondent defiantly acknowledge the question and responded with soft indignation ‘I don’t understand why your production costs would be in US$ and why it would be more expensive? Anyway, it shouldn’t be more expensive because you have to look at what you are doing wrong in your processes to minimize that cost so that your product would be affordable.  So, fix that in your business processes and your products would be cheap.  At this particular point, my brain-stopped processing information, the way a laptop stops functioning the minute someone mistakenly pours water over it.   There were few more questions I needed clarity on, for instance how do you balance the contradictions inherent in Article 9: Prohibition of Export Duties with Article 19 of Safeguard measures…etc.  The respondent at this point was like, ‘Are you suggesting we bring back the Zimbabwean dollar, back?’ My colleague, sitting next me unsolicitly says ‘Yes,’ and the respondent greeted back with the violent ‘NO.  You can’t do that!  It is getting political. It’s a non-starter.  Like I said, look at your business processes.’ I responded passively saying that this was supposed to be an open dialogue and on that note our Q&A was shut-down by ZNCC official chairing the consultative workshop.  

******

During lunch I engaged with various colleagues as a few found my line of questioning an important one but did not have the courage or the insights to ask more questions and response to my queries.  As for the panelist, neither of them had the curiosity to want to understand nor seeks to impart their in-depth knowledge of the TFTA  to ensure we were all the same page.  I watched the stakeholders who had called the consultative workshop huddle into their respective groups without interacting with the rest of the delegates and accepted (finally) that the Zimbabwe I now found myself in, had a type of dysfunction, that to bring Zimbabwe to absolute resolve can not result in political change alone!

Copyright @ April 17, 2013.   Published on BlogSpot by Tambu Ndoro, Adhoc Strategy & Innovation Specialist for UN Commission Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and Hanga Consulting (PVT) Ltd, ©2011.  www.hangaconsulting.com.  Tambu is also a member of Research and Development Committee of SME Association of Zimbabwe ©2011