As Jay sat across the table in so much confidence, it was as if every word he uttered was a testimony of his long experienced life. I knew that was just a scenario I had created in my head that gave him more power and made every word as believable as I wanted to believe it. That, unfortunately, happens every day in the business world where one party walks in so confident and so big they take control of the meeting and damn they even pay the coffee bill.

This scenario had me reevaluate my role in how I wanted to have my meetings; how I wanted to frame myself in such a situation; but not to dwell much into that there was one question I left that meeting with.

How do you position your business in Big City?

When starting a business or expanding there will come a time when you have to ask yourself that question; if you only have a budget to open up one store do you target a big city and exactly where in that big Cape Town City?

I was recently in Khayelitsha helping a customer set up a Point of Sale solution; right as we were getting started we found out we needed an RS232 cable. We spent hours driving around looking for one and could not come right nearby, so we decided to go to the CBD; well the search was even worse so we had to resolve to Google searching and driving some more.

Big cities are normally divided into smaller areas that serve as some sort of small towns with various business districts and this has caused the emergence of business parks, complexes and malls.

This kind of setup has turned out to be a nightmare for business owners because it means if you have a shop in Khayelitsha at some mall you can only really serve that market because no one is going to spend one-hour driving from Strand to buy a cable in your shop; they might end up buying it online. The worst part is you end up with a big rental and very little clientele.

When starting a business in a big city location becomes a nightmare, you have to choose carefully and also make sure you lead in whatever niche your trade is in. As I was sitting there on our drive back I had a wild idea, what if I had a computer store in Cape Town, where would I position it?

How about a small town?

There is one lovely thing about a small town when running or starting a business, people will find a way to come to you if they really need your service; they would even have an informal taxi rank next to you just to get to you.

This is why a lot of businesses  strive and become very profitable in small towns, in our records we have seen most profits from small and semi-urban towns as they enjoy better margins, lower running expenses and in some rare cases cheaper supplies.

Let us turn things around, a water shop would not survive in Cofimvaba. Even though water is a necessity for everyone, it does not mean everyone is prepared to pay R1 a litre for cleaner water when they could just buy a 2-litre Twizza for R10. We will not talk much about that, it is a story for another day.

Now back to my meeting with Jay, Jay is a business consultant from Sandton and well I am just a software developer with a lot of experience developing solutions for small businesses in Africa. Throughout our meeting, I was trying to learn something new and what I learned was how to take control and conduct a meeting, which gives me another idea, maybe I should ask him to write an article on conducting business meetings, he is fluent in that.

Nkosikhona Carlos @ Prys Accounting

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