Communication is an underlying skill every entrepreneur needs. Whether it is communicating marketing messages to customers, pitching a business idea or running your own business. SME South Africa sat down with Bruce Whitfield, multi-platform award-winning financial journalist, author and speaker, to draw on his experience to offer guidance to our valued readers.
Don’t Pitch Before Someone Told You What Their Problem Is
“Desperation is usually the biggest problem,” Whitfield admits. “When you start a business, you love what you do so much that you want to evangelise and tell everybody about what you do, and you behave a bit like a six-month-old male puppy attached to someone’s leg,” he smiles.
He continues to explain that when you are that desperate for someone to hear what you are saying about this idea that you are so passionate about, you risk neglecting the most important part of communication: Listening.
“When you are so busy evangelising that you tell people what you offer, not stopping nearly enough to listen to what their needs actually are. So instead of going into conversations to speak, you should enter conversations to listen,” he recommends to entrepreneurs. “You can shape your offering to make sure that it meets their needs.”
Whitfield uses the following example: If a business owner has a product that screws into the wall, and the many conversations they have with potential clients highlight that a screw is fine and all, but what is necessary to them are picture hooks, the business owner needs to ask how they can adapt their product to serve this market. He acknowledges that perhaps the entrepreneur might not be able to flex, but if they are, it solves the problem for both the business owner and the customer: Products are sold, and the customer gets their picture hooks.
AI in Business Needs to Help, Not Harm
“AI is brilliant,” he admits. “But I am an AI sceptic. It is already fundamentally shifting the world, it’s already changing employment and the way we do our jobs – it has become vital. But it is overhyped in the short term and underestimated in the long term.”
Whitfield encourages entrepreneurs to explore these tools, but within reason. “I think you need to engage with AI tools and use them to your benefit, but you need to double-check everything that it tells you.” Whitfield alludes to the fact that AI has been known to hallucinate, or make up facts to suit its own goals of providing users with answers, providing made-up scenarios and events like the real deal.
“In forms such as generative AI, it’s unreliable and speaks with flattery,” he notes. “With research, for instance, it can speed up the process. Alternatively, it can help broaden your horizons and offer fresh perspectives.”
“It provokes me to do the work, rather than have it do the work for me. At this point, I don’t trust it to do the work for me, but rather serve as an aid.”
Choose Hard
At the recent South African Future Trust Summit, Whitfield presented his talk on choosing hard for the first time. He emphasises the importance of aiming high and choosing the road less travelled. He sums it up in the following points:
- Choose a business that is bigger than you and more resilient than you
- Don’t cut corners
- Don’t do obvious things
- Build a moat around your business that protects you from competition
- Be unique
“These things are hard, yet none of the great businesses today have cut corners. They have done the hard yards, and although it looks easy in retrospect, it is the hardest thing on earth.
“A business that proves that choosing hard is worth it is Tyme Bank, which took an unconventional approach to global expansion, from building a bank in the Philippines to Indonesia and Vietnam. The easier approach might be to take the step from South Africa to its neighbouring countries, but instead, it is taking a unique approach that differentiates it from competitors. Tyme Bank didn’t cut corners, nor did they do the obvious thing, and this is what makes them a bigger, more resilient case study,” he concludes.
Whitfield unpacks this journey in his latest book, It’s about Tyme, available through major book retailers.
