South African business social networking platform OpenTenders has launched a Small Business Toolkit, offering comprehensive advice on starting and running a business.
OpenTenders said the downloadable toolkit had been developed in response to statistics saying more than half of small South African businesses fail within the first two years.
The self-teaching toolkit has been developed by South African entrepreneurs Madoda Khuzwayo, Sivu Maqungo and Mnive Nhlabathi together with a number of experts, and comprises more than 5,000 pages of information to teach entrepreneurs and small business owners the basics of starting and running a sustainable enterprise.
It is divided into 10 chapters, covering topics such as how to register a business, how to draft a business plan, legal compliance, marketing, and finance, as well as a number of templates that entrepreneurs can use.
“We have developed the information in this toolkit as a result of wanting to find and discover information that would help us as entrepreneurs. The majority of the information we found was US-based and focused. While useful to a point, it was not specifically geared to operating a business in South Africa,” said Nhlabathi, chief operations officer (COO) of OpenTenders.
“We hope to change this so that when South Africans search for assistance to grow their businesses or even start one, this toolkit, built by South Africans for South Africans, will come up first and therefore circumvent unnecessary time and misinformation and put potential successful business owners on the path to economic security much earlier in the process.”
