#046 Lessons from a serial entrepreneur | Catherine Wijnberg

Catherine Wijnberg, guest · [04:05]I can tell that story. so my very first, not quite my first job, but one of my first jobs I took, I was agricultural economist for, for the Zambian Farmers, Union. And at the bright age of 27, you know, when you think you know it all, right? At 27, I was, Was tasked with the, with the, with the job of, setting the maize price or, or, or motivating for, for the maize price. And in my wisdom, I decided the maize price should be doubled. And done all the numbers, crunched all the numbers, and clearly it should be doubled. And so I have had to go through a journey, first of all, to the Minister of Agriculture, who was a, a general, a, a male general, and he was very, unhappy with this pipsqueak young woman waltzing into his office saying, no, no, we need to double the maize price. And so he said, okay, fine, you know, we'll do that. And I had to motivate then go to, Go and speak to the president. So I had to go to presidential house, state house, and persuade the president that we should double the maize price. And I had this great, I was a great, orator and very persuasive, and I explained to him, no, if we double the maize price, every corner of Zambia would be planted to maize, and Zambia would become the first exporting, net exporting nation in Africa, black nation in Africa. And that was very appealing to him. So he said, yes, great idea. but I had to then go to, to parliament and, expl, you know, motivate there in parliament. So I then went, and I said the same thing, you know, you need to do this, we're going to be the most amazing country in the, on the continent, we're going to be the first, net exporter, and everybody said it was a great idea, except for the one dissenting voice, which was the Minister of Finance, who said, well, we can't actually afford it. But everybody said, no, it doesn't matter, that we can't afford it, it's not relevant, and it was passed. And so at the age of 27, I basically changed the entire direction of the country, and they did, in fact, double the maize price, and that, in fact, was the first step towards opening of the economy in, in, in Zambia. So at the young age of 27, I had this rather scary experience, actually, of changing a nation. yeah, it was a little bit, it was a little bit overwhelming, actually, to

Catherine Wijnberg, guest · [06:32]that, not long after that, because in doubling the maize price, I had inadvertently completely unsettled the entire, economic structure in the country, and we, the country went into hyperinflation, and the World Bank came, stepped in and said, hang on, we're gonna cut off the money supply. And so what they did is, is they changed the way that you accessed dollars, because up until that time, You would only get dollars you had to apply through this special committee, that allocated money to kind of friends of friends. And so they started an auction system. And by the second week of the auction system, my husband and I were in business because we said, okay, this is an opportunity. We'll bid on, we'll bid on this for an exchange in order to access, foreign exchange in order to bring in goods, for the farming community that we were embedded in. And so that then began the starting point of this import company. We knew nothing about finance. We knew nothing about importing. We knew nothing about auctions. And we really just learned on the job. So it's kind of the classic example of seeing an opportunity and just jumping in, because if we'd waited in order to be perfect, we probably would never have done it. In fact, if we'd waited and looked at all the reasons not to do it, we probably never would have done it. And in that waiting, other people have jumped in. And so that was the start of a very successful, import.

Petro du Pisani, host · [07:57]Yeah, it almost sounds like that entrepreneurial spirits, you know, you see an opportunity and you jump in even though you don't know all the answers yet.

Catherine Wijnberg, guest · [08:05]Yeah, it's exactly that. I think that you, and that's maybe, people often ask me, you know, are entrepreneurs born or made? And I, and I really believe they're born, because there's this inherent ability to spot an opportunity, number one, but also having the courage to leap. And that's a classic case of we just leapt off a cliff. We had, we had no clue. and, and learned on the journey, so.

Catherine Wijnberg, guest · [08:39]Yeah, so there's a longer story in that, and that is over the, over the next ten years or more, my husband, at the time we moved to South Africa, so we started an export business from here, and then we had farms, and I had an apartment hotel, and we had all of this kind of suite of businesses. And then through a series of circumstances outside of my control, we actually lost everything. And so in 1998, yeah, we literally, we'd lost everything. I went, in the period of a year, actually, in the year that I turned forty, I celebrated my fortieth birthday, with great gratitude, beautiful husband, beautiful children, wonderful life, and nine months later, I had the clothes on my back and the three children. And so I had to start again. And part of that journey through, through pain is great opportunity for growth. And of course, I went, I'll gloss over the painful period, but in, within, I think it was about four years later, I really had this awakening that I was put on earth to do more. And the gift of losing everything was that I suddenly realized that I had all of these talents that I've been sitting on. I'd, I'd been, I'd been a support, I'd been the, the half of a, half of a team, half of a team of two, and I was forced to now be a team of one. And in that, recognizing, first of all, that I had this desire to do stuff. I wanted to make a difference. And to my surprise, I had the ability to do it. And that then, I, I, I had the courage to, I had the courage. Well, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, ignorance, whatever. I, I had the courage to start.

Catherine Wijnberg, guest · [11:30]Well, there was a period, I mean, I was working for somebody else. I mean, I was the single parent, single, sole breadwinner for three children. So I was working, for somebody else. And I kind of got frustrated that my full potential wasn't, wasn't being realized. You know, I realized that by working, working for somebody else, you never get to express your full self. And at the time, there was a lot of talk about women's empowerment. Everything, this is, so this is in 2006, so everything was about women's empowerment. It was like the big, the big conversation at the time. And I thought to myself, you know, you're not, you haven't empowered anybody unless you've helped them, you put them in control of the money that they make, the money in their pocket. And initially it was like, okay, I'll help people to be better, you know, women to be better financially savvy. And then I thought, but that's not enough. If I teach them to be an entrepreneur, I teach them not only to be able to make and make and master the money for themselves today, but that it creates generational change. Because if one person's, if a mother's been an entrepreneur, their children will know about that, and the chances are they will then become entrepreneurs. And kind of my dream was to say, you know, today it might be the woman selling tomatoes on the corner. Tomorrow, her son might have the little spaza store, and in the next generation, his daughter might own the next pick and pay. And I actually had that experience once where somebody literally came in, and he, was one of our entrepreneurs, and his mother had been selling tomatoes on the corner, and it was just so thrilling.

Catherine Wijnberg, guest · [22:27]So I have to say, I always thought burnout was for sissies. I never thought, I never thought I would, I would hit that. I never thought it was for me. And in fact, just recently I took time out, I took some time out, I went to Greece on a retreat because I recognized that I'd got to that point. yeah, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not great, great at doing that. I, I think I'm very resilient, I'm, I'm very driven, I'm very mindful, my, my mission, my purpose has always been my kind of my North Star. and maybe it's now because I'm getting to a point in my career where I want to move on, but not because I have to, I don't, you know, I, it's just because if you're going to create a hundred year business at some stage, you gotta, you know, you gotta find another, another bunch of people to take it over. But that's definitely a step change in, in my life, and I think that as that personal alignment to the vision has now become a question mark, I think that's when something like burnout breaks through. and maybe it's cause it's an, it's an allowing, maybe you, I don't know. I'm kind of mumbling here, but I think that, I think, Bernard, you, you, I don't know if Bernard just hits you, and maybe it hits some people earlier than others, but yeah, I never thought it would hit me, so.

Petro du Pisani, host · [23:49]But you did something to... I did something to, I took some time out. I took, in fact, I'll

Catherine Wijnberg, guest · [23:54]tell you the story. So I, I decided, so somebody said to me, hey, there's, there's this friend of mine have got this retreat in, in Greece, and I thought, oh, that sounds like a good idea. I didn't read anything about it. I knew nothing about it, but I said it felt like a good idea. And then when I got there, I suddenly realized, oh my word, you know, people are going to expect me to go back all healed and fixed. And I've like been here for like ten days. And I said to myself, that's crazy. You can't fix in ten days. I need ten months. And so then what I said to myself, I'm going to give myself the ten months. I'm not going to expect to be healed and perfect in ten days because that was just putting more pressure on me. And so I said, okay, I'm going to give myself ten months. So I've kind of given myself ten months of love, to make a transition from where I was to where I'm going. The next cliff that I'm going to jump off.

Catherine Wijnberg, guest · [36:51]so I was asked to do some research, for the Startup 20, part of the G20 component, and I was asked to do a strategy, with, Andy Network, so the Aspen Network are development entrepreneurs, and they said, okay, can you facilitate a conversation about how do you create successful startups? And my starting point was to say, well, I don't have the answers to that. Let me go out and look at what other countries are doing around the world. And I chose six leading developing nations in the world, and then six in Africa. And the cross-cutting information there was, if I just say there were six things, if I can remember them, the first one certainly is, if we look at China, so if we look at China, they are the gold standard. They're managing to grow a thriving economy. What I didn't know was that eighty percent of their economy is actually local economy, only twenty percent roughly is export orientated. And so they have a very strong local economy, and we haven't done that. We haven't actually, we, we have many people, but our local economy is very, very weak. We have a tiny, like eighty percent of our economy goes through a tiny sliver of businesses up in the top end. and so the, one, one of the things all of these countries have done better than us, have done well, is that they've really fostered a strong local, local economy. the second thing, again, if you look, look at China, is that as an exporting nation, most of their exporting, products are built through a whole value chain of small businesses. And so there, if you're going to have a product that's world-class, every single entrepreneur along the line needs to be world-class. And I don't think that we've done that. We've just said, oh, let's give you a catering, an opportunity, or let's give you a, a logistics opportunity. We've not thought world-class, so we're not thinking as a nation, how can we be the best? And so I think that's the second thing that we're get- that we couldn't do better with. The third is collaboration. So in, in South Africa, we're not great at collaborating, especially entrepreneurs. They like to have their own idea. I'm not going to tell you about it. I want to do it all on my own. And if you look at even countries like Rwanda, they're doing much better than us, and part of it is because they've been really good at, at, at building collaboration. Some of the others are obvious. Education, we know our education's not, is not great. other countries are getting that much better, and we need to change that really, really fast. It's not enough just to say you've got metric, if actually that metric is not of no value to, to somebody. the fourth one then is about access to finance. We know this, there's, we know that we need to improve access to finance, and we know that we need to teach people to understand more of their personal anxieties around money and to manage that better. And the sixth one I can't remember.