If these SMEs could start again …

Building a business in South Africa is an act of defiance.

Load shedding, rising operating costs, fragile infrastructure and high interest rates dominate the landscape – yet entrepreneurs continue building, creating, and pushing forward.

Speak to enough small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) owners, and a pattern emerges: the issues that cost them the most were not always the obvious external pressures. They were the quiet operational decisions made in the early days when everything felt urgent and nothing felt certain.

Here’s what seasoned SME founders and owners say they would do differently – and why these lessons matter now more than ever.

Skip the accountant, pay the price

One of the most common and expensive early mistakes SMEs make is delaying proper financial management.

As Winnaz co-founder Pascal Murasira says: “The first mistake we made was thinking we could be our own accountants. We did not hire an accountant right away, and that led to mistakes in our financial system as we mixed up personal and company resources.”

A survey of 400 local entrepreneurs by Xero found that poor cash flow management was the costliest mistake South African SMEs made – to the tune of R90 000 per year on average. Before you hire anyone else, hire a bookkeeper.

The remedy: Establish financial hygiene early: bookkeeping, invoicing discipline, reconciliations, and basic financial controls – and before you hire anyone else, hire a bookkeeper.

Your ‘systems’ will eventually betray you

Many SMEs start out with manual or improvised systems – and it works, until it doesn’t.

Reel Stories CEO Nidha Narrandes built her video content business on instinct and craft. The tech infrastructure came later – too late.

“The mistakes I made were not dramatic,” she says.

“They were quiet and cumulative. Payroll on a spreadsheet. Files on a hard drive, pay slips on my desktop. No proper backup system. No real cybersecurity.

“I was running a 21st Century business on 20th Century habits. Every small business owner thinks these things can wait – until the day they cannot.”

Independent reporting shows that this pattern exists across South Africa: SMEs face data loss, failed backups, cyber risks, slow transfers and infrastructure gaps – all of which directly hurt revenue and customer delivery.

It is a pattern Cell C Business has built its SME offering around – cloud-based solutions, reliable connectivity, and business-grade infrastructure scaled to where a business is, not where it hopes to be.

As Cell C chief officer of sales, regions and customer care Chris Lazarus puts it: “SMEs cannot afford downtime, not even for a moment.”

The remedy: Cloud-based tools, business-grade connectivity, cybersecurity basics, and redundancy. These fundamentals sit at the core of Cell C Business’s SME offerings.

Find out more about Cell C’s Cloud solutions here.

Wanting a big client is not the same as being ready for one

“The most common reason [for failure] is that many businesses are simply not yet market-ready,” says Catherine Wijnberg, CEO of Fetola.

“While there is often a desire to onboard a big client, in reality the business may not be able to service that client.”

Wijnberg’s company has supported over 500 South African SMEs. Her consistent finding? Businesses that survive are those that invest in the fundamentals – systems, processes, delivery capacity – before chasing headline wins. Ambition is not a strategy.

The remedy: Build delivery capacity, operational discipline and reliable digital infrastructure before pursuing corporate accounts.

Over-promise, under-deliver – and you are out

“We have had a lot of issues in the past with people we have worked with because people over-promise and under-deliver,” says Moira Johnston, co-founder of EventRoom.

“The biggest lesson has been to always do a trial run before entering a formal relationship.”

Trial runs apply to suppliers, partners, and technology providers alike.

South Africa’s infrastructure constraints make dependency on unproven relationships a genuine business risk. Protect yourself contractually and operationally before you commit.

The remedy: Validate suppliers, platforms and partners before locking them in.

Underestimating cyberthreats

South Africa’s top SME digital nightmares have been identified as security breaches, failed backups, ransomware attacks and monitoring blackouts.

Each can derail a business overnight.

The remedy: Secure connectivity, encrypted networks, verified backup systems and real-time monitoring – all designed for scale-as-you-grow budgets.

Low cloud readiness

Studies show that many SMEs lack the awareness, preparation and skills needed to adopt cloud systems properly – contributing to poor implementation and underutilisation.

The remedy: Guided migration, simple cloud tools, human support, and step-by-step readiness assessments.

Trying to scale without digital infrastructure

Cell C’s Kantar-backed SME research reveals a stark reality: If the internet goes down, the business stops.

South African SMEs depend on connectivity for sales, payments, logistics, staff coordination and customer engagement.

Downtime is not a ‘technical issue’ – it is a business failure.

The remedy: Always-on connectivity, cloud-ready systems, predictable costs, and human support – the pillars of Cell C Business’s repositioned SME strategy.

Mentorship is not soft – it is survival

“Entrepreneurs must learn the power of networking and the value of mentorship, as these are the things that most entrepreneurs take for granted,” says AM Group founder Anda Maqanda.

“Personally, I am where I am because of a business mentor who changed the way I see things.”

The remedy: While South Africa’s formal business networks have historically been inaccessible to many entrepreneurs, today’s SME ecosystem – from Seda (Small Enterprise Development Agency) incubators to Fetola’s Tholoana Programme – exists to change that.

The bottom line

The entrepreneurs who endure are those who either paid attention to the mistakes of others and avoided them, or realised the mistakes they were making and course-corrected.

They upgraded their ICT systems, hired the accountant, invested in connectivity, ran the trial – and built something resilient enough to absorb the next curveball South Africa throws at them.

The SMEs that survive and scale in South Africa:

✔ Invest in financial discipline
✔ Upgrade their digital infrastructure
✔ Adopt cloud tools with guidance
✔ Secure reliable connectivity
✔ Strengthen their cybersecurity
✔ Trial and test before committing
✔ Build readiness before chasing scale, and
✔ Lean into mentorship and networks.

This is the foundation on which Cell C Business has rebuilt its SME proposition: reliability, simplicity, predictable spend and human support – meeting businesses exactly where they are and helping them get where they want to go.

Brought to you by Cell C Business.

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