Page 28 - Strategic Marketing Complete

WHAT I'VE LEARNT'

Finding a purpose for your

business

rowing Greatness is part
autobiography, part account
of the rise, fall and rise of Joe
Public, and part how-to guide to
discovering the deeper purpose of a
business.

Tracey McDonald proposed I write
a book about entrepreneurship.
One of my firm beliefs is that
you can’t close the poverty gap
in SA without creating more
entrepreneurs, [so] the broader
intention of this book was to inspire
people towards entrepreneurship.
But there is a deeper reason
behind the book, and that is to
inspire any entrepreneur out there
to find greater purpose for their
business. A reason beyond money.
The turnaround in Joe Public since
finding the purpose of our business
has been quite spectacular. We’ve
gone from bankruptcy in 2009 to
being one of the better performing
shares on the JSE. That’s not because
we’re suddenly working harder or
that much better at what we do: it’s
becasue we’re doing it with better
intention.

I attribute Joe public’s success
to this sense of purpose, and to
the diversity that has developed
organically as a by-product of it.
Our purpose is growth: to be the
fertile soil that grows our people,
our clients, and our country. We’re
a small to medium enterprise, with
300 people, but our diversity is
amazing. I believe that at the heart
of diversity is creativity. If you’re
selling creativity and you’ve got
one section of the market’s point of
view, in a market where you’ve got
eleven different points of view – just
culturally, let alone taking gender
into account – that’s not going to
work.

There’s a quote that says ‘it takes
17 years to become an overnight
success’. We only began to see
returns on our blood, sweat and

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