Raymond Ackerman, one of South Africa’s most celebrated entrepreneurs, is quoted as saying that doing good is good business. The entrepreneurs of tomorrow appear to be taking a leaf from Mr Ackerman’s book – and we’re all the better for it.
University of Cape Town (UCT) students doing their postgraduate diploma in management: entrepreneurship were recently tasked with creating a start-up business and producing a product never seen before in SA. One group of students known as “Millionaires in the Making” (MIM) decided to add a cause-related marketing aspect to their business. They chose FoodBank South Africa as their cause.
Millionaire-in-the-making Leigh Barnett explains the brief and her team’s plan: “To raise capital to produce our product, students were given a R50 loan from UCT and three working days to make and sell confectionery goods. Millionaires in the Making decided to make popcorn, boerewors rolls and pancakes. As an incentive to students to buy from us, we offered a prize – a couple of holiday packages which we got sponsored – to our most loyal customers. We also gave customers the option to buy boerewors rolls for FoodBank instead of for themselves.”
MIM’s partnership with FoodBank was mutually beneficial. The budding entrepreneurs realised that some of their customers would buy large volumes of food in order to win the holiday, but wouldn’t be able to eat all they bought. They also knew that there would most likely be some food left unsold. Rather than see food go to waste, they incentivised their customers to donate to FoodBank, and did the same by giving all unsold product to FoodBank. This also positioned MIM as a responsible and caring business.
In three days, the young entrepreneurs turned R50 into R13,269 – outperforming their peers – AND donated more than 640 boerewors rolls to FoodBank, which in turn went to The Carpenters Shop, an agency serving homeless people in the city of Cape Town.
Leigh says that while the group still has a lot to learn about managing human resources and ordering the right amount of stock, one of the great lessons learned was that a good customer incentive strategy can have a profound impact on your overall success, including on your profit.
“Marketing can also make a massive difference to a product/brand and this is something that we will be keeping in mind as we move forward. Though we were disorganized and lacked a clear strategy, we made a very decent profit due to our incentives programme. It perfectly illustrated how 20% of the work can yield 80% of the result.
“It also showed us the merits of thinking outside the box and daring to do things that have never been done before. Although we’re aware that taking risks doesn’t always pay off, we will strive to break boundaries and be as creative and innovative as possible in search of success.”
We wish Leigh and her five fellow students from Millionaires in the Making every success!
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