There’s a ritual that plays out in entrepreneurship workshops across South Africa. Someone hands out a business plan template. Boxes get filled in. Markets analysed, revenue streams estimated, risks quantified, funding projections prepared. Then comes the awkward silence, because the room is full of people who have never written a business plan, some with no formal business education, being handed language borrowed from MBA classrooms rather than the streets they actually trade on.
Prof. Leenta Grobler at North-West University put a name to what happens next. These programmes produce paperwork instead of businesses. Her team built something called KasiKanvas in response, which starts with a conversation rather than a template, on the principle that you should start where entrepreneurs are and not where you expect them to be.
Read that and then go and look at how the marketing industry sells to small businesses in this country. Same disease. Bigger invoice.
The deck nobody opens
Here’s what an SME typically buys when it buys “brand strategy.” A discovery questionnaire with forty questions. A workshop. Three personas with invented names and stock photo faces, one of whom is always called Sarah. A competitor matrix. A brand architecture diagram with boxes and arrows. Positioning statements written in a dialect nobody has ever spoken out loud. Fifty slides, a PDF, an invoice.
It looks like immense value. It arrives in a folder. It gets opened twice.
And none of it is stupid on its own terms. All of it was designed for companies with marketing departments, brand managers and a budget cycle, where the deck exists so that forty people can agree on something before anyone spends money. That is a genuine problem for a large company to have. It is not your problem. You are one person with a day and a half a week and a phone that needs to ring by month end.
The template gets handed over anyway, because it’s what the industry knows how to sell and it justifies the fee.
Paperwork is comfortable. Selling isn’t.
There’s a reason both the workshop and the agency version persist, and it isn’t only greed. Filling in boxes feels like progress. It’s calm, structured work with a satisfying artefact at the end.
Phoning a customer to ask why they nearly didn’t buy from you is not calm. Standing in your own shop watching someone hesitate and leave is not calm. Discovering that the thing you’re proudest of is not the thing anyone pays you for is deeply uncalm. So we make documents instead, and the documents feel like the business getting stronger while the business stays exactly where it was.
The questions that actually do the work
Strip out the framework and almost everything useful in a brand strategy fits on one page. Not because your business is simple, but because these are the only answers anything else gets built on.
Who has already paid you money, and what did they have in common. What were they trying to fix when they went looking. Why did they choose you and not the last person they spoke to, in their words, not yours. What almost stopped them. What do you say about your business at a braai, when you’re relaxed and not performing, because that sentence is usually your actual positioning and it’s usually better than anything on the slides.
You get those answers by phoning six customers. Not by workshopping. Six calls, a notebook, an afternoon. That’s the whole method, and it beats the deck because it contains real sentences from real people who have already voted with their bank accounts.
What to do with the answers
This is the part where the honest version diverges from the sneering version, because “templates are bad” is not advice. The answers only matter if they change something a customer can see.
Their words go on your website, replacing whatever you wrote about being passionate and solution-driven. The objection that almost stopped them gets answered on the page, in plain language, before they have to ask. The reason they chose you becomes the first thing anyone reads. What you say at a braai becomes your tagline, or close to it.
Then it’s done, and you go back to work. A page of decisions that changed your website beats fifty slides that changed nothing, and it takes less time than the workshop.
The Friday test
Open the last strategy document anyone sold you. Find one thing in it that a customer has actually seen. Not a principle, not a value, not a persona. Something visible on your site, in your emails, in what you say when the phone rings.
If you can’t find one, the document wasn’t strategy. It was paperwork, and you paid for it.
If you’d rather spend that money on work customers can see, that’s all we do.