27 May 2014

“Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”

These are the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American president who led the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s and during World War ll

Despite his death almost seven decades ago, Roosevelt’s words of wisdom must have been ringing loud in the ears of a group of women in Ghanzi who ventured in the business of tent hire.

Having started operating late last year following a sponsorship from the department of gender affairs, the women had been wise enough to realise quickly that cooperation rather than competition – as Roosevelt advises, was the best way to run a business, and with the oldest member aged 98 such a wise move wasnot surprising. After all, wisdom comes with age.

Anticipating stiff competition from some already established and more resourced businesses, the women, who are a group of nine, were forced to pool their resources together and form one big entity. According to their testimony, the strategy has started to bear fruit.

“Ever since we started this thing of an umbrella life has been better for us,” Ms Gofaone Ntwaetsile, the group’s spokesperson, says. “Even though we cannot say we have reached our pinnacles, we can safely say that business is going well because a weekend hardly passes without us getting a tender somewhere.”

Ms Ntwaetsile says when they started all of them were struggling as tenders hardly came by, and that companies that have been established before them used to suffocate them.

“You see, one of the most effective ways of marketing a business is to serve your client beyond their expectations, and in that way they will go around recommending you to friends and colleagues, and when we started nobody knew us to recommend us, but only the established businesses got all the tenders because their work has been seen somewhere,” she says.

The 28-year old Ntwaetsile said that’s the main reason they then decided to form the umbrella and pool all their resources together to take on the “Big Boys and Girls,” and that because it is still new, they have not yet come up with a name for the entity.

“Our umbrella is not actually a merger of all the nine individuals, but just a mutual working arrangement where each of us still keeps their venture. What we do is only work together to assist each other,” she explains.

Ms Ntwaetsile said the way the group works is that each individual markets the whole umbrella, and that they have a schedule of who will be getting the next tender secured, and that in that way they ensure each member equally benefits on a rotational basis.

“With our eldest member being 98 years of age, it is important that we help each other out,” she said.

Ms Ntwaetsile said working together has also saved them a lot of money because when one of them gets a tender, other group members help her to pitch the tent and set the decor without demanding any payment from her, and in that way the profit will be much better.

She said pitching a tent is such a demanding job that hiring labourers to assist ends up gobbling the better part of the profit one could have made. Another benefit of working as a group is that they are able to provide tents for large capacity requirements.

“As individuals we often watched as tenders for big events passed by because they required large capacity tents, but now after forming the umbrella, we can now safely handle such tenders because we can join the nine tents together into a single, large capacity tent,” she said.

The group is making inroads in the Gantsi Township as people are now aware of their umbrella, and that the fact that because all of them are church goers has also assisted in marketing their business.

“We started by offering free services to our church as a marketing strategy and people saw and loved what we did, and then they started inviting us to pitch at events such as parties. We even pitch at funerals,” she said.

Perhaps sensing the curiosity, Ms Ntwaetsile quickly answers the next question even before it is asked: “Funeral tents are not about colour, I know that people are used to seeing military green tents at funerals, but what matters is to provide shelter, not colour,” she said, with the dexterity of a businessperson determined to close a business deal.

In fact, in her experience funerals provide the most business because in a township like Gantsi, hardy a weekend passes without a funeral taking place.

Now that the group has secured a market in the Ghanzi Township, it plans to invade the Ngamiland capital of Maun as well as the major population centres of the Kgalagadi District such as Kang and Hukuntsi.

Revealing a price for a tent is actually not that simple, because according to Ms Ntwaetsile, the price is determined by what the client wants. “A plain tent is charged at P1 500, but then from there the price varies as there are separate charges for chairs, tables, plates, spoons and the décor,” she said.

With all the nine women having been sponsored by the Department of Gender Affairs under the poverty eradication programme, Ms Ntwaetsile hails the government for its initiative to eradicate poverty and empower Batswana, saying most aspiring small scale business people, often fail to realise their business ideas because of lack of start-up capital.

“Most people have great business ideas, but because of lack of start-up capital their ideas often end up in smoke, but since the formations of various funding programmes through the poverty eradication drive, many Batswana, especially the youth, have now set up profitable businesses,” she says, citing their group as a good example of the initiative’s success story.

She says ever since they started their business, their families are sure of a meal each day, and yet they have not reached the peak of their potential. She however, said tent hire projects can be improved by including material for décor, red carpet and stage to make the tents a complete package, unlike the current setup where they are only provided with a basic tent.

Ntwaetsile also appreciates the business management workshop as well as the tent pitching and decoration training which was organised for them by the Department of Gender Affairs last year, saying it helped in bolstering the management of their business.

Her advice to aspiring business people, especially the young, is that they should choose projects that they have enthusiasm in, and not just pick projects because they are available.

She says tent hiring is such a simple project to venture into because it is not that demanding. “ A tent is less demanding because it does not require cleaning often, you do not pay rent, but just pack it into a small space in your backyard, and clients normally pay for its transportation,’’ she adds with a sure smile in her face.

Senior Gender Officer in the Ghanzi office, Ms Emmah Mmereki, was also full of praises for the project.

“This is one of our most promising projects and their success is partly because they have been offering voluntary services to their church as a way of marketing themselves,” she said.

She says their future looks even more promising because tent hire market is not that saturated in the area, but that it only requires one’s silky skills to survive.

On whether the idea of forming an umbrella goes well with her office, Ms Mmereki says the idea is welcome as long as it works for the beneficiaries. All the beneficiaries were sponsored last year at the tune of around P26 000 each.

With the umbrella project already realising positive results despite being conceived only this year, Ntwaetsile says now they are thinking of diversifying their services to include catering, and like the old adage; “The sky is the limit,” so is the future of the “Umbrella”. ENDS