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This book is presented solely for information and educational purposes. The author and publisher are not offering it as business, legal, accounting, or other professional services advice. While best efforts have been used in preparing this book, the author and publisher make no representations or warranties of any kind and assume no liabilities of any kind with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness of use for a particular purpose. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be held liable or responsible to any person or entity with respect to any loss or incidental or consequential damages caused, or alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by the information or
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No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. Every company is different, and the advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should seek the services of a competent professional before beginning any improvement program. The story and its characters and entities are fictional. Any likeness to actual persons, either living or dead, is strictly coincidental.
The A-Game Business Blueprint is a practical guide for growing businesses and businesspeople – especially critical to help light our way in those times of darkness that we all invariably face along the way. The standout for me is the specific focus on developing self-awareness as an entrepreneur – we need to know ourselves so that we can truly give the best of ourselves to others. In so doing, we grow communities and economies through enterprise.”
– Belinda Doveston – Former Head of Contribution Compass Global
Our world is crowded with ‘How to Start Up’ methodologies, books and seminars. What sets KK apart is a deep empathy for the human side of a growing business. Honest introspection of your strengths and weaknesses as an entrepreneur, along all steps of your business building journey, is uber critical to those who weren’t raised in a culture of entrepreneurship. KK’s book takes you along the journey but helps you manage yourself as much as you manage your business.”
– Cal Bruns – Founder & CEO of Pioneer Nation
At this time and in this context where many of us dare to hope that joy and peace will prevail. Especially after the totally unexpected BREXIT and outcome of the USA presidential elections, demonstrating the advent of total dissatisfaction with current governments of the world by most citizens, ubiquitous populism and hankering back to the conservatism of the past – dialogue between and among people that do not necessarily agree with each other and one another, but precisely because they do not even want to be in the same room with each other and one another.
To really talk about crucial and courageous conversations of how we do, together, give effect to the South Africa of Nelson Mandela’s dreams. To bring about nation building in our lifetime that must surely be the result of inclusive economic growth, so that we can genuinely achieve this elusive social cohesion. In all of this worthy aspiration, I am hoping that this dialogue will culminate in us reclaiming business as a national asset.”
– Bonang Mohale – Former CEO Business Leadership South Africa, Author of ‘Lift As You Rise’
The journey, for any entrepreneur, is a tricky path filled with forks, crossroads and obstacles. With a deep understanding of the testing terrain that faces the African entrepreneur, KK has penned a balanced practical guide that should be carried by all who embark on this challenging road.”
– James Scott – Publisher & Owner of Business Brief Magazine
Are successful entrepreneurs and great business managers born or made? Many successful businesspeople don’t fit the clichéd profile of how we think they are supposed to look. Yes, some natural-born, talented entrepreneurs can start businesses that become massively successful. But this type of entrepreneurs are few and far between. And having these natural traits doesn’t necessarily mean that success is guaranteed, as an entrepreneur, in the long run.
On the other end of the spectrum are unassuming folk who have had one job, working for the same company, for decades. They were never willing to take the risk of either improving their skills and expertise or looking for other work. Then, one day, the person is fired, retrenched, or is simply no longer able to work in the way they always have. Driven by little more than necessity (or desperation), they learn about starting their own business, and succeed at running them and, often, achieving the Holy Grail – sustainable growth. The same applies to people who’ve never seen the inside of a business before, who wake up one day, driven to find a way – any way – of earning an income. This income is often earned via a small, informal business that grows into a successful enterprise. Clearly, entrepreneurship can be learned.
The appreciation that ordinary people are able to build extraordinary businesses, forms the core of what The A-Game Business Blueprint intends to achieve. KK Diaz manages to capture the critical aspects necessary to both establish a business and to ensure that it develops in a sustainable manner, making adjustments as may be required, over time, within the broader socio- economic context.
Being developmental in nature, South African entrepreneurs, and other emerging and small business owners, are required to operate within a volatile, uncertain and complex environment. Coupled to their context are requirements that need to be fulfilled by big companies to benefit from government incentives to promote the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises as part of a broader transformation agenda within South Africa. This is done through what is called Enterprise and Supplier Development (ESD). Unfortunately, these requirements are often neither well-articulated nor embedded as part of the overall development process.
As a result of our association with KK Diaz and his A-Game Business Blueprint we, at the Da Vinci Institute, created an important small to medium business development context for our partners and clients. We help decision makers to drive the development of SMEs, as well as to effectively capacitate their supply chain using strategically positioned ESD initiatives. This is a crucial aspect of the South African business context, and we’re very excited about our association with KK Diaz, who has significant experience as well as the ability to articulate the landscape such that people can understand and relate to it.
In this regard, The A-Game Business Blueprint provides a well-defined and well-integrated business development framework for both new entrants to the market, as well as existing small business owners, to respond effectively towards these business development requirements. The well-articulated step-by-step guidelines, contained in this book, make it easy for established business owners and prospective business owners to embrace a more formalized approach towards either the improvement of an existing business or the establishment of a new business respectively.
As you read this book, you will start to understand that there are clear – but not so obvious – reasons why, even with abundant financial and infrastructure support, many entrepreneurs still fail. The reason is that there is a big difference between just anyone starting a business and an A-Game Entrepreneur. So, don’t wait for the title of A-Game Entrepreneur to be given to you. You have to earn it and claim it for yourself! This book will help you to get started on this very fulfilling journey.
Wishing you great entrepreneurial wisdom and success!
Prof Bennie Anderson
CEO: The Da Vinci Institute – University and School of Business Leadership
BUSINESS SUCCESS, AS WITH LIFE SUCCESS, has a lot to do with managing emotions successfully. This may sound like a truism but bear with me. Read the first sentence again and pay attention to the word “managing”.
NOT MASTERING, BUT MANAGING.
One of the myths of our time is the idea that “winners” have developed the muscle necessary to gain mastery over their emotions. Business winners, so the myth goes, are tougher than, say, sportspeople or artists who seem unable to master their feelings in the same way as those who “win” in the business world.
Much of what we see and read in the media, especially in the world of popular entertainment, reinforces this idea.
Be they male or female, black or white, young or old, business leaders are invariably shown to us as immaculately turned out, qualified-to-the-hilt types who appear unruffled by the aspects of life that seem to impact the rest of us.
Maverick commercial stereotypes, such as Richard Branson or Steve Jobs, merely confirm the essentials of the myth. These mavericks may dress differently and have long hair, but they are presented to us as conquering warriors, nonetheless. They are champions who have learned how to conquer the strange anxiety of being alive, and who have made a vast profit in the process.
I don’t buy the myth.
The many signs we interpret as mastery over emotion are just emotions dis- played in a different frame. What can be more emotional – in the aggressive, conquering sense of the word – than the leader hero? The visionary? The innovator? The financial wizard? The master of teamwork and interpersonal conflict?
The basic idea behind this book – the one idea that hovers over all the others, and binds them, – is that business is exactly like the rest of life. Business is inherently emotional and, therefore, very challenging. Just like life itself. Based on this understanding, this book proposes the idea that the key to successfully managing the emotion of being alive (of being a human doing business, working with and relating to other people) is to develop a method: an approach that can be repeated, modified and adjusted according to your experience of applying the method.
My experience in the world of business – and in the world in general – is that method is the golden thread. From football to business to acting to reading the news, masters of their craft are bound by this thread. The thread of method.
Marketing is the collection of business activities that position a company within the public imagination. Many of these activities involve direct interactions between the business and the consumer about a specific product. Other interactions are subtler, involving proactive communication of your brand identity, as well as key product–related themes, in the public domain.
The A-Game Business Blueprint is a method that can be applied to small and medium-sized businesses seeking to grow in a competitive and volatile environment, i.e. the world of business. This method is not about finding the next best idea. This method primarily speaks to people who have already been in business for some time, not new entrepreneurs. There is a specific reason for this. It is often only once we have started a business, and started dealing with the medium and long-term realities of an initial bright idea, that we begin to realize the need for assistance, insight, and the development of a repeatable method. When you are brand new to business, you don’t yet have any context for your thinking – you are not yet at the stage where you are ready to apply a method.
This method combines global best practice, but not in the mystical manner of a Harvard Business Review White Paper or an MBA lecture. Rather, it distils a set of commonly agreed-upon approaches to business into a set of key phases. It then practically applies this thinking to the small to medium-sized business context.
Ultimately, this book seeks to help businesspeople to become more comfortable with the many challenges inherent to doing business. It achieves this by exploring the various dimensions of commerce, from commonplace topics such as communication and scaling your business, to lesser-explored topics such as energy flow and the role of the soul in business.
But…
“I’m just one man,” I hear you say. “I have no experience and very few resources.
“What can I do?”
The answer is different for each of us, and has a lot to do with time, space, knowledge and circumstance.
Time, space and circumstance are different for all of us. Knowledge, however, is one aspect of the equation very much within our personal control. With access to the right knowledge, anyone can gain a surprising degree of control over the variables. Anyone, in fact, can start and grow a business that not only creates a sustainable livelihood for the entrepreneur, but for other people as well.
So, who am I? Why am I writing a book like this?
I’m a business strategist, coach and marketer. I’ve been involved in small business development for most of my adult life – as a business owner, coach (and therefore as an observer), and consultant to governments and corporations seeking to improve their efforts to boost small to medium-sized businesses by supporting the growth and development of their supplier networks and value chains. This book summarizes concepts and methodologies I continue to apply in my experiences in all these fields.
My experience tells me that the answers to many a country’s entrepreneurial and economic development problems are simpler than many of us think. I think that we need to re-look at ourselves as individuals and how we relate to:
CONSIDER THIS SITUATION THAT I’VE SEEN PLAY OUT MANY TIMES OVER: A global corporation decides to put $2 million a year into developing South African SMEs (Small & Medium Enterprises) within its supply chain. It does this by issuing business development loans to established service providers in the chain.
Two years into the project, several businesses have developed well, but very few of them have repaid their loans. Sometimes intentionally so.
The corporation shuts down the project. No more loans for emerging local businesses are offered.
This is a common South African scenario. It’s clear in this example that business ethics have to do with our community as a whole, rather than the relationship between the emerging SME and the global corporation. If local businesses are cynical about ethics, they end up making the economic environment toxic for future generations. That’s in the long term. In the short term, cynical businesses without a clear set of ethics impact on the lives and experiences of staff members, who earn less money, are less motivated to work, and who will likely experience very little in the way of personal development opportunities in their job.
If you think business ethics is simply a matter of how you choose to interact with greater commercial forces than yourself, think again.
THIS BOOK GIVES ENTREPRENEURS, managers and employees a method to carry out this examination. It allows readers to use the outcomes of the method to create a new culture of entrepreneurship – one that achieves wealth-creation by establishing a responsible, repeatable approach to business.
SOUTH AFRICA HAS A UNIQUE PAST that has created a specific modern-day context. There are very few economies in the world with the same structure and challenges as ours.
According to the 2016 – 2017 Global Entrepreneur Monitor Report, South Africa’s Gini coefficient is 0.63[1], making it one of the worst performing economies in the world.
The Gini coefficient represents the difference in income between top and bottom earners. This mechanism assesses the extent of the gap between breadwinners in a national economy. It explores, for example, the national impact of the extent of the difference in earning between a farm worker (earning as little as $10 per day) and a high level professional (earning, perhaps, $1,000 per day).
South Africa’s poor Gini coefficient ranking encapsulates some of our most disturbing socio-economic dynamics. In summary: inequality in wealth is even higher: the richest 10% of the population held around 71% of net wealth in 2015, while the bottom 60% held 7% of the net wealth.
The same report also claims that our Total Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) – the rate at which South Africans start businesses – sits at 6.9%. This means, “South Africa has one of the lowest TEA rates among the efficiency-driven economies, ranked 28th out of 32 efficiency-driven economies. The average for the efficiency driven economies is 14%, double South Africa’s TEA rate.” (page 24).
Why do these numbers matter?
There is a self-reinforcing feedback loop at play within South African society. Social ills, such as unemployment, crime and poverty, are clearly evident across the South African landscape. A buckling sluggish economy puts the country in the worst possible position to deal with these woes. As long as socio-economic conditions remain dire, the prospect of achieving strong economic growth and a vibrant economy capable of creating life opportunities for ordinary citizens recedes. It is a classic Catch-22 situation.
Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) development is frequently touted as the cure. Boost SME activity, so the thinking goes, and the Catch-22 will be resolved. Much time, effort, budget and policy weight have been thrust in this direction over the last two decades.
And yet…
Our numbers remain poor and the SME sector has not developed sufficiently,
despite all of these efforts.
One of the most obvious problems, in my opinion, is that we seem to lack a culture of business.
South African society was torn apart in many ways by colonialism and apartheid. People were purposefully kept in poverty and were denied opportunities to lead and create stable economic lives. Thus, the emerging generations of businesspeople have had precious few reference points. This lack is particularly obvious in the start-up phase of South African business, where seemingly viable, already operational, businesses frequently flounder. This is often a result of the fact that the entrepreneur has no idea how to move from a great idea to a solid reality.
In other words, the entrepreneur does not know how to do the basics; how to register a company, how to establish repeatable processes, how to control cashflow and basic accounting, or how to assess and pay taxes.
A lack of basic skills is one symptom of our poor entrepreneurial culture. The other is that, very often, we lack ambition. Our entrepreneurs settle for running a business that earns them a small living. Lacking a larger frame of reference, we stop shooting for the stars at precisely the moment that we should be loading up our gun powder and taking aim.
Take the famed South African Kota (also known as Bunny Chow in Kwazulu-Natal, and the Gatsby in the Western Cape). These delicious stuffed bread meals are sold throughout the country. Lunchtime is Kota time every single day of the week. Why is it then that 99% of the entrepreneurs who sell Kotas will never do anything other than just that – stay in the same place and sell the same thing for the rest of their lives? Then, Kota Joe arrives, and starts a franchise that becomes visible and successful across Gauteng!
A similar pattern applies with Chesa Nyama – the street approach to barbequed meat that defines local life. Most Chesa Nyama sellers stay exactly where they are, while Famous Brands, the country’s biggest fast food holding company, launches its own Chesa Nyama brand, with outlets across the country.
What, I hear you ask, is so wrong with the one-man show? Is a humble business not acceptable today? In terms of personal philosophy, it may be, but the South African context is unique and urgent. This country requires jobs – as many as possible, as soon as possible. Employment is the key to a national future freed from the dual curses of inequality and extreme poverty.
South African Small Business Landscape Sample [2]
I believe that entrepreneurship holds the key to resolving our Catch-22 situation. However, I also believe that we need a new kind of entrepreneurial lifestyle and motivation, different from the one we have now. South Africa, and indeed the world, urgently requires a business mindset paradigm shift. We need an economic revolution that sees people working together to build economically sustainable societies.
This is the context in which the A-Game Business Blueprint operates. It has a large vision. It speaks directly to the owners of existing businesses, while also catering to start-up businesses, as well as those who are still considering whether they want to pursue entrepreneurial life. It encourages all readers to believe that they can do better, and it lays down a system that can be followed to achieve this improvement.
Within this system is a set of tools designed to help the reader understand and manage the emotional roller coaster that accompanies any attempt to live a dream.
OUR RATIONAL SELF IS BURIED WITHIN LAYERS OF EMOTIONAL AND INSTINCTIVE ACTION. Most
of the time, when we believe we are behaving rationally, we are really justifying our instinctive, emotive actions. In other words, we are, rationalizing things we have already done.
This is a key realization for a businessperson – the idea that there is not one singular decision-making self, but rather that our business selves are made up of various interlocking layers of emotion and reason.
When I look at any element of the entrepreneurial journey, I see it playing out via three distinct layers:
The marriage of these three elements is what ultimately matters.
We tend to jump among the elements at various times, focusing on one of them exclusively, as if that one is the only aspect at play in our development. As we think about business, I believe it can be very useful to focus on the inter-relationship among the three elements. In fact, I believe it is this inter-relationship that truly defines the development of our career and personal life.
Every business, regardless of size and number of years trading, needs to carefully study which stage it currently is in, and then plan how it will take the next action towards progress.
This book has been written to help you to do just that.
KK Diaz founded A-Game Business in 2015. He is a business and brand strategist, digital marketer, speaker and author of 7 full-length books and numerous ebooks.
He equips startups, small business owners, executives and their teams to execute high-growth business and marketing strategies, to innovate, get more customers, create delightful customer experiences and an entrepreneurship culture of positive, passionate businesspeople who can adapt and thrive in times of rapid change and challenge.
Amongst his expertise he’s also the youngest certified facilitator of The Dealmaker Company Programs and acting CEO. There he teaches businesspeople about the principles of advance selling, deal making and negotiation as tools for increasing profitability in their business deals.
KK Diaz is an entrepreneur at heart and an investor in companies such as Maity Mailer and Sales Closer.
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