For six weeks now, Will and I have been developing and co-teaching a course on entrepreneurship/small business development. The course has covered quite a bit of material, including:
- The theology behind why we work/our unique value in God’s eyes;
- An overview of small business principles/business flow/recording an income statement and basic bookkeeping;
- Personal finance (based on Crown Financial Ministries materials);
- Marketing/advertising/branding;
- Developing a marketing plan and business plan; and
- Running an experimental business for two weeks.
Our students, 14 in all, each have ideas for starting and managing their own businesses once the course ends—everything from selling cookies to selling shoes to being a real estate agent to operating a public phone service to selling dishes to being a caterer to exporting Zimbabwean sculpture… lots of great ideas!
This past Saturday, we had the “grand finale” to the course, taking our two classes on a field trip to the out-in-the-country campus of Operation Mobilization (O.M.) South Africa to participate in the same hands-on business class/game that Will and I ourselves participated in back in October. The business game, formally called the “BEST Game: Bottom Line Basics Course,” is offered through O.M. by the South African Institute for Entrepreneurship. In a very hands-on way, the game essentially simulates what it’s like to operate a small business, handle cash flow, negotiate, manage risk, deal with unforeseen circumstances, strategize production, keep precise records, balance the books and much more—all with fake money and heated emotions between competing teams.
It was awesome to see our students come alive on Saturday! Not only did their personalities all of a sudden appear in ways Will and I had not yet seen, but they caught on to the complexities of the exercise very quickly. Watching each team and each individual get totally into it was exciting, especially knowing that many of the principles we had introduced in the classroom were now coming together and making sense to our students. It was awesome, too, to see everyone dive in together as teammates and encourage and help one another. We pray that this is how they will continue to operate once they are on their own in their businesses. You’ll see how fun it was in the video below.
Overall, it’s been really cool to see the minds of our students expand with a greater framework of understanding business practices and with a greater confidence, necessary to handle the risks/mistakes/sometimes failures associated with owning and operating a business. Will and I have been careful not to promise that taking this class will guarantee success in running a business; but what we do hope is that this class will begin to expand the thinking of a generation perhaps lacking in confidence yet full of potential.
For me and Will, we have found in the exercise of teaching a brand new course that we have been perhaps the biggest students of all, figuring out as we go how best to develop a meaningful curriculum/how best to teach, and of course learning about and navigating all the cultural nuances of how things work in the township. In particular, teaching this class has really opened our eyes to how difficult it is to do business in the township and what all our students are up against as they enter the real world. We were shocked to hear some of the stories about how people sometimes withhold information from one another out of fear of competition; how people suspicious of one’s success will spread rumors, gossip and/or tell lies—whatever to undermine one’s potential of gaining a supportive customer base; and, less surprisingly, how the culturally-accepted way of paying “on credit” can ruin relationships while severely undercutting one’s cash flow. Will and I have tried our best to offer helpful suggestions, rooted most of all in one’s character in Christ. We have encouraged our students to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” and beyond that, have prayed with our students for God’s sufficient grace to cover the difficult, and even unfair, aspects of doing business in the township.
Congratulations and thank you, Thembi, Portia, Peter, Selina, Kate, Nkele, Rejoice, Motlatsi, Thabang, Remember, Prudence, Monika, Andrew and Lingani, on the great term and for learning along with us! We are so proud of you!
