Grant Smee — Entrepreneur, Investor, Property Investor, Passionate Crusader For Creating More Entrepreneurs

And it is what's involved a very, very good evening to you. Good to have you along with us. We're chatting to my special guest, Grant Smee. This "What's Involved" edition proudly brought to you by Epic.Africa. You can find out more details at epic.africa.com. Grant, hi, welcome. Good to have you along with us again. - Thank you very much, David. - So last time we attended, we discussed a little bit about Epic. We discussed some entrepreneurship. Today, I thought, let's dive in and have a chat about where do we begin, you know, because obviously everybody's world's changed quite a lot and there are people that have been retrenched, people that have lost their jobs. So in terms of this entrepreneurship journey, you know, there are some people who just sort of dive straight in, but I've also seen people who started a business out of desperation and it really didn't end up working well for them. So where would you suggest somebody starts? - Yeah, so, you know, I think a lot of people have been forced into entrepreneurship or opening an own business over the last few months and, you know, unfortunately it's a reality where they were unprepared to create their own business and didn't know where to start a business.

So the first thing I really suggest is, is if you're in a position where you have time and, you know, it's obviously useful not to have to run and jump into business right now, start just reading a bit and educating yourself around the process of setting up a business, understanding cash flow, understanding how to manage your accounting and finance, research products, research your market. So spend a bit of time educating yourself around entrepreneurship and running a business as well as around the business that you're intending on starting. So the first point is always just become informed. - Okay, a lot of times I hear when people sort of are talking about starting a business, talking about entrepreneurship, one of the first pieces of advice you very often hear is to find a problem and offer a solution to it. Is that something that resonates with you? - Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it resonates perfectly except I'm not a massive fan of that phrase and I'll tell you why, is when you talk about finding a problem and find a solution, people feel like they've got to go out and find a world issue, a major problem that they can solve. And, you know, if you look at a business like Facebook, for example, Facebook didn't or Mark Zuckerberg didn't go out and find a problem and solve it.

But what he did do and what I think is a better way to phrase it is find a market and then sell to them. So find a group of people that have got a common interest, a group of people that, you know, let's use people who are all interested in stamp collecting. Identify that community of people that have a common interest and then look at that group of people and say, okay, what is the problem that they have and can not come up with a solution for the problem that that group of people have. By just saying find a problem, find a solution, we look at this big, we look at the planet, we look at all the people, the population planets, we start trying to find a solution for all people and that's not how it's gonna work. So find a small community of people that have got a common interest and solve a problem that they might have and it's a much better way to start. - Sound piece of advice there, absolutely. 'Cause that was one of the questions that I was gonna be asking 'cause it rolls off the tongue so glibly, so easily, you know, find a problem, solve it, and then, you know, they build it and they will come kind of thing. But it doesn't necessarily happen like that. A theme that has been running through my chats that I've had on air over the last little while is this concept of becoming more human-focused and focusing on the humanity.

I tattered to a lady the other day who has got a, it's called BA concierge, her business. And she focuses entirely on serving her clients and in giving almost rockstar, superstar service to them and she sells stationery, she does bespoke gifting, et cetera, et cetera. She's done very well during the period of COVID purely because of this service level that she offers. But she discovered a niche that needed servicing and she went into that niche and she's passionate about it. This is where a lot of people I think also get it wrong, is, you know, this follow your passion as well. How important is that? - Sure, lots there. So firstly, focusing on humans, you know, focusing on people. You know, I think we've gone and again, COVID hasn't all the lockdowns rather than COVID itself. But the lockdowns have really made people sit back and reassess where they're spending their rent, the uncertainty around jobs, the uncertainty around the economy. People have become a lot more aware of where they're spending the money. So in terms of their expectations, I think we've moved away from a space where we just are consumers, where we move into a more space where people are becoming more value consumers.

So they expect some sort of value and they want value from what they're buying. And the value from what they're buying is not only in the product itself, but the experience. And if you have a really good experience with somebody, you're gonna be much more likely to go and spend and re-spend your rent with them. So that's the first thing is, I think entrepreneurs need to focus on what value are you creating for your clients? The problem is you also need to be aware of, you know, the concierge service is specifically around very personal, professional bespoke service, which you obviously pay a premium for. So you need to be careful and look at your products. Does your product align with a premium service where you can charge a premium and therefore justify that extra level of personal interaction? Or is the value really, you know, sometimes that's when you're gonna deliver your parcel. It gets delivered, you know, one minute past 10 when you said it's gonna be there at 10 o'clock. And that's the value people get because they don't waste time waiting around the whole day. So you've got to take a look at where you can add value to people and your clients through the experience as well as selling the product that adds value to them.

So that's the sort of part one. So focusing on the client. Sorry David, I've lost where we were now. - Don't worry about it because I lose where I am very, very, very often. I was talking, I moved on to talking about passion and how important passion is. In terms of running a business. - No, it's perfect. So look, you know, passion is vitally important. The problem is you need to be conscious that sometimes passion overrides intelligence, I guess. And you know, you can run down a road of passionately looking after your clients and your business and really adding massive value that that might be to the detriment of ultimately the bottom line. And so when you are running a business there's that balance between passion and business intelligence being that you need to still make profit at the end of the day. You know, your passion is also not transferable to your employees. So if you're basing a business entirely on your passion and your love of something that's gonna be very difficult to transfer that to employees and that's gonna make it very difficult to scale in the same level where you, that you've pitched your business when you started out. So you need to just be careful that basing a business entirely on passion is something that's very difficult to scale and ultimately is probably just gonna leave you in the self-employed space versus the ability to create a business unless you can find a huge amount of people that are carrying the same passion and can continue offering your clients the same level of service and as passionately as you do.

- Now that's also very often a problem and we've discussed this prior, the difference between self-employed and being an entrepreneur is the scalability of your business and the ability at some stage to be able to remove yourself from the business. And for example, what I do for a living being radio and the podcasting, literally I am the product. So I'm one of those self-employed people at the moment because I can't remove myself from the equation and the business will keep on running. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, that's it, game over, thank you for playing. So there is this line that we need to trade and I want to stress that we strive for entrepreneurship but being self-employed is also not a bad thing, is it? - No, not at all. Some people don't have the aspirations to scale and have this massive business. Some people don't have the ability and also some products don't have the ability to scale into bigger businesses and also self-employment might just be enough for you and that's also okay. You can have a very, very good living and make a very good living out of being a self-employed person. So I think it's important that when you go into this, you understand what you're trying to achieve and if you're happy with running, yeah, I don't wanna talk down to self-employed.

If you're happy that it's gonna be you and you don't really wanna manage people and you wanna be responsible for your income and you don't intend scaling, that's also okay. But if you do want to scale and you do have the intention, you then need to be careful because you need to start setting up quite early to be able to scale your business 'cause it's very difficult when you're four, five years down the line, the business is based wholly around you, your expertise, your structures and systems that you built around you to now try and scale it. So you need to be aware upfront what your intention is and then start setting up and putting the puzzle pieces in place so that it all comes together when you do intend to scale at a later stage. - Wonderful stuff, it is what's involved. Proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa. You can check out what they do. It's advice for entrepreneurs, also people that are in the property investment space, it's epics.africa.com. We'll be back with more what's involved in just a bit. And we're back, it is what's involved. My special guest from Epic South Africa is Grant Smee. This, what's involved proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa. Find out more at epics.africa.com.

So Grant, we're talking about just before the break about entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship. We're talking about being self-employed and how that's okay if that's what you want to do. And a lot of times I think people sort of get into this business as self-employed people and they don't necessarily spend the time thinking about the scalability of the business. And that's a very important thing because as you say, then you find yourself five years into a business and you can't take yourself out of the equation. So essentially you're still working for a salary and the idea of entrepreneurship is to get the business to work for you long-term, isn't it? - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, any assets. So if you're going to the property investments environment and you want to build a portfolio, the idea is that you would put a team in place or have a source to management of that. So it becomes a, I guess, a two degree a passive investment when you're building businesses. And if you want to build one or several businesses, the idea is again to create a system that produces the results you want as well as is a profitable system. So yeah, so it's about creating systems and processes where you can remove yourself and that thing continues running and that's where the real value comes.

And that's really off the back of the leverage and leveraging other people's time and their expertise to accentuate the results that you would achieve on your own. So it really is about putting the systems in place and the system is ultimately what you could work firstly becomes the asset in terms of the business. And it's also the thing that's saleable at a later stage. So if you intend selling in five or 10 or 15 years time, that system, that process that you've put together that works together to produce profit is actually the asset that you can then resell later. - Okay, and once again, going back to what I do, I couldn't at this stage of where the business, this iteration of the business is, I couldn't necessarily sell it because I am it at the moment, which is a challenge. Now, talking to this, because a lot of people, you know, they think about business, they want to go into business. Very often it's people who've lost their jobs or been retrenched and they then sink a lot of money into a business. One of the things that is always sort of, I suppose interested on the one hand, concerned on the other is getting investors into your business because, you know, in the old days you could go to the bank.

I still remember many years ago when I wanted to buy my first house, I went to my bank manager and said, "I'd like to buy a house." I said, "Well, go and pick one." And I said, "But how much, what am I?" He said, "Just go and pick one "and then come back and talk to me." It was a whole lot easier then for them to also give you a loan for your business was also easier. These days, that's not so easy. And to sort of put a chunk of change into it is a problem. Do you recommend that people go the finance route or do they try and build up their own capital first? - So yeah, so I mean, there are never any capital story, you know, I think depending on the business you're going into, you know, some businesses don't need any capital at all. I mean, a services business, you can start by just allocating your time and going out and doing the thing you do, offering the service and then getting a return. So, you know, I think it's important that investors look, don't just look at ideas, they look at execution. So, and it's important that if you've got an idea, you get out there and you start doing something, start creating clients and customers and generating revenue. You can then take that proof to investors to then look at expanding.

So, to getting investors to invest in the idea, but also the future scalability of a business. The problem you have, I think at the moment with, and this is a technology problem, is that a lot of people who don't have technology skillsets but have an idea feel that they need to now go and get investors to go and invest in other developers that can do it. And the problem is your experience is divorced from the actual technical requirements to make that business achievable. But I think they're gonna get investors because they've got this massively great idea. I think investors are savvy enough to understand that if you don't have the technical ability to get the business going, that the investment is unlikely to go anywhere. So, it's gonna be very difficult to get investors. So, in the space at the moment, which is always interesting, and I think it's driven off the back of originally, Dragon's Den, Shark Tank, and then all these online funding guys is where you hear about people getting a million rate, two million rate, five, 20 million rate. They think that's great. But if you go and dig into the background of where these guys are getting equity, they are five, six, 10 years into their journey, and they've really proven their model, even though maybe not on a massive scale, but they've proven their model and that's where the investors are going.

So, if you're starting out, I think investment is highly unlikely, unless it's friends or family, and then they need to buy into the idea. But I've also seen so many people do that, invest in friends or get investment from friends and family, and then the business doesn't work, and that also damages relationships. So, my short piece of advice here is, you don't necessarily need capital, you need customers, because if you've got a product that somebody's willing to pay for, you could potentially take deposits to then do your first deal. So, I think your focus shouldn't be on generating capital, it's on finding customers first, and then customers, I think we, from one of our previous podcasts or interviews was, it was Mark Ashton actually in our podcast, spoke about the cheapest form of finance is actually your customer paying you for your product. And I think that's where the focus should be initially. - I would agree with you there, because I know some people, and they spend so much time with this great idea, running around, looking for funding, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this, we're gonna change the world. And ultimately, they either get the funding and it doesn't work out too well, or they don't get the funding.

Now, I often think, you could have spent that time going out to sell your product, which brings me rather nicely to another question, that if you are wanting to start an entrepreneurial journey, we have this, and it's become, before it was very much like a, you didn't sort of talk about it, it was very tongue in cheek, the concept of a side hustle. I know there's a lot of people, a lot of people, 'cause South Africans are very resourceful, that have a side hustle of one kind or another. What do you feel about side hustles? - I think side hustles are imperative for individuals to have. And the reason is, is I'm a big believer in multiple streams of income. The educators out there, and guys who sell courses, and people who sell books, and they always talk about multiple streams of income, buy my book to understand it. But the reality is this, is if you are employed, and you have one stream of income being your salary, and that ends for whatever reason. It could be retrenchment, you could get fired, they could be downscaling, the business could close, because it's either the conscious loss through the current economy, or your directors make a bad decision, and lose massive projects, and then suddenly you're out of the job.

You have no control over that. So there's very little security these days in employment, because you have very little control of everything that's happening above you. You can only control what you do in your day-to-day employment. So your income isn't secure. I think it's imagined that your employment gives you some level of security. So part two here is, make sure that you've got other streams of income, just in case. So what's the worst case that can happen? If you have your salary and a second stream of income, and you lose your job, you still have at least some income coming in that you can last until you find another way to generate income. But even if you keep your job and you have a second stream of income, you can just take that money and invest it into an income-generating asset. For example, a property or another business, and then compound your wealth at a period of time. And if you continue doing that process, investing, reinvesting, and also securing yourself through a second stream of income, you're in a much better position to make good decisions, because I think a lot of poor decisions are made out of financial pressure. You take a job that you don't necessarily want because the salary looks good, but you end up working there for five years and hating your job, but you took it because the salary was good.

You make poor decisions because you're under financial pressure. And by having a second, third, fourth stream of income that really alleviates that pressure, you can make really sound decisions in terms of what you want to achieve. - Very, very good advice that, and we're talking about this job security thing. Just for example, my sister worked for a company for 21 years, same company. COVID came along, they closed down the entire South African operation. She's now sitting going, what next? I thought this was gonna be me. I was gonna work here because she was brought up, like a lot of us were, with those old fashioned values of go out, get a job, work until you're 55, 60, 65, and then you retire and that's the way life is. We need to talk some more about this. This is what's involved. It's probably brought to you by Epic South Africa. You can find out more at epics.africa.com. When we come back, I'm gonna be talking to Grant a little bit more about Epic, and if there is place for aspiring entrepreneurs there. More of this when we come back. And it is what's involved. We are back. My special guest, Grant Smee from Epic South Africa. What's involved, proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa.

Check it out at epics.africa.com. So Grant, before the break, we were touching on side hustles and multiple streams of income. You mentioned if you have a side hustle that's bringing you in additional income, you should invest it in a sort of somewhere that it'll actually generate capital for you. Is this something that Epic South Africa handles for aspiring entrepreneurs? Who would go and sign up at Epic South Africa? - Yeah, so I mean, Epic South Africa really, again, the core of it is that it's a community of people that are striving to achieve success in business or in entrepreneurship and in property investments. So really what I've worked at doing is creating this community of people that can interact and value to each other, almost like a peer group and really good signing boards as well as people that can become your customers and clients and you can leverage that group to get discounts against products that you might use, commonly use. So really, again, Epic is about a common interest community and that's where we drive it towards. So if you're looking to get into entrepreneurship, we have guys that have started us. If you're looking to get experience or speak to experienced entrepreneurs, we have guys that have been running business for 15, 20 years.

If you're looking to get into property investment, we've got property investment courses and coaches and people that are investing early stage, people that have been investing for the last 15 years, developers, architects. So really the Epic is about creating that community of people that can then feed off each other and really grow together. - Which to me is brilliant because one of the things that I have found is that entrepreneurship, self-employed, that journey can be quite lonely. And if you're not surrounded by people, because there's a saying that you are a reflection of the five people you spend the most time with. And to spend time with entrepreneurs and to go, hey, this is what I think, what do you think? Or man, I'm having a tough day or a tough month. I think that adds massive value. - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, you said right, is entrepreneurship and having your own business is a very lonely journey. And the reason for that is we imagine that having our employees around us that bind to our vision and everything else is great and they energize. At the end of the day, and nothing against people who are employment, they can have the same interest. But at the end of the day, everybody is in this for themselves and they need to make an income, they need to cut off their families.

So you can imagine you're a number one employee. If he got offered or he or she got offered 30 or 40% increase in salary because there's a bigger, stronger, better company out there that can take them on. Do you imagine for a second that they're going to look at it and go, you know what? Actually, no, I'm gonna stay. And I'm not saying it'll never happen, but you're probably 95% of the time you'll find that those employees might say, I actually, for the good of my family, I need to make that financial decision. And that's where I say it's lonely. You can have loads of people as an entrepreneur around you, but that stress that your mind never stops ticking. All of that is unique to entrepreneurs versus employees that you have working for you. They might work longer hours than everything else, but they're just not carrying the same load you do. And that's where the loneliness comes from. So it's really nice and comforting to be able to have conversations with other entrepreneurs who are experiencing the same things as you are, maybe not necessarily in the same industry, but to have the same feelings, they have the same difficulties, they have the same rough patches. And the useful thing is it never, not everybody has a rough patch at the same time.

So somebody who's just come through a rough patch and said, you know what? I just went through this, come out the other side, this is what I did, this is how I did it, this is what I thought about, this is what I focused on and helps you through that process. But it's not only about the tough times, also celebrating the wins. So you can share with a community of people that are out there vying for your business and really sort of supporting you as much as possible, that you can share your wins with them and it's a really good feeling as well. - It is something that I think is vital. And I know because once I started making contact and chatting to fellow business owners, entrepreneurs, suddenly I was like, okay, I'm not the only one that's going through this. Other people have been through it, there's advice, there's all of those things. But now in terms of Epic South Africa, is it a membership site? So do you have to sort of log on and is there a membership fee that you pay? - Yeah, so you go into the site and you join as a member, there's a membership fee. It depends which level of membership you're looking at. So yeah, and then you come and you join and then you become part of our network, any events that we might have, any online learning, well, as our community groups, you become part of that as well.

And then as we go forward and we create more content and courses and we are able to leverage our community for better discounts that then flows through into the community as well. - That's brilliant. And I'll tell you why I think it's such a good idea is I started out a good couple of years ago and I was very, very keen on this make money online thing, what they call MMO. And I went out and there was a guru's in that, that market or a diamond dozen. And everybody was saying, do this, buy this, get the next new widget, you can do this, push buttons, sit back and generate money. I can tell you that that is pie in the sky, it never happens. But because of the marketing, I bought into a whole lot of that. I've ended up spending quite a lot of money on stuff that is apparently going to change my life. And sadly, it hasn't. And then I came across a group, which is a group of ethical online marketers. Now ethical and online don't normally go very well together. But this is a group where there's like-minded people, they've got great morals, integrity, ethics. I joined that group. I've learned more from that group and save more money by being a part of that group. So my membership to that group has more than paid for itself, purely because it stopped me making some very, very expensive mistakes.

And I'm guessing Epic South Africa is a very similar thing to that. - Yeah, I think there's a common sense check being part of that community. You can say, look, I'm investing in a product or service or why I'm thinking about doing this and what do you guys think? And although there's a diverse range of industries and people and personality experience in there, you get some good sense checks by having that conversation with everybody. So there's also people that are giving advice within the space that don't have any ulterior motives. Other than to helping you make the best possible decision. So whether it's Epic South Africa or Group Life, you've joined or anywhere else, I think it's important that you are part of a community of entrepreneurs to make sure that you are, you do have good sounding boards and you have a space that you can sort of put ideas out and get some real feedback into it, rather than going to your employees or your friends or family who, to be honest, can't give you unbiased opinions. And also the way you're gonna frame that conversation to people might frame it in a way that they're gonna give you the opinion that you're looking for versus in a space like ours where people are just blunt and honest.

There's no reason for them to do it any other way. - Yeah, because I mean, very often when you see all of these other schemes and whatnot and everything, they'll tell you. You see the sort of Facebook or Instagram lifestyle and that's what they sell. They don't sell the hard, nitty-gritties. When we come back, I wanna talk a little bit more on side hustles. I did get a bit sidetracked, but just a bit on that and where to start and what to go through, what to look for. This is "What's Involved," proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa. You can find out more information at epicsouthafrica.com. Back with the founder, Grant Smee, in just a bit. And we're back, "What's Involved," proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa. Find out more info at epicsouthafrica.com. Just before the break, Grant, we mentioned that, well, I mentioned that this concept of side hustles, multiple streams of income. I would say that's a very good way to get going in terms of starting whatever your entrepreneurial or business path is, purely because you've still, hopefully, got the security of a full-time job. So if you're working, you have a full-time job, what sort of thinking would you need to apply to start a side hustle?

Because I'm assuming you don't just go, okay, I'm going to, let's think of an example. I'm gonna buy a food truck and I'm gonna go and sell food at events. There's gotta be something to look at. So what do you leverage if you're starting out there? - So the first and easiest thing to do is to leverage technology. The fact that you can send and receive emails. You can get WhatsApps and orders via Shopify. So creating an online store and online ordering system, taking payments online. All those things are quite possible and really easy to do and set up. We can almost automate your business from scratch using existing technology that's accessible to everybody. So the first thing is thinking about what your product is and then how you're going to market it, get it to market. And secondly, when your customers or clients are interested, how do they transact with you? So those are a few items. You can market via Facebook by putting up scheduled posts. So even while you're sitting in a board meeting or in a staff meeting or team meeting, those posts can go out. So a lot of it's around automation and using technology to automate the business as much as possible. But the thing about a side hustle is you need to accept that you're gonna work your nine to five and then you're going to have to allocate energy and effort into it in the evenings and on weekends.

And if you are able to sustain yourself and sustain the business and grow the business while working on those days that you're most tired, the days that you've had a really bad day at work, you reenergize to carry on running your business at night and you carry on interacting with the clients and creating a footprint for yourself, then that gives you a good indication of your ability and your willingness to really follow this through. And it comes back to is this something that's driving you and are you doing the business because it's a passion and are you passionately looking to achieve something? What is your objective? What is your goal out of it? Or are you just doing it just for the money? And if you're just doing it for the money, it's gonna be very, very short-lived. So again, it's why you're doing this, and starting with why is quite important, which again was in one of our recent podcasts. But then, so the very important point you made there, however, is you keep your job, keep that financial security, keep the financial security provided by the salary coming in every month and then leverage that to create your business. And once that business is big enough and your job is no longer paying you enough to justify you staying there and your business is big enough that it can justify you going into it full-time, that's when you make the shift over.

So it's important that you retain that financial security for as long as possible while you grow your business. And to be quite blunt about it, it's the single biggest mistake I made when I got started. You know, we started our proactive business 15, 16 years ago, should have started as a side hustle. We were, myself, our business partner, were hell-bent on leaving unemployment as soon as possible because we thought that's the way you do it. And we just left way too early. And in hindsight, now, I should have stuck around another year or two, would have been much further down the line. The difficulty we experienced right in the beginning wouldn't have been as accentuated as they were because we would have had at least that financial security. And we could have quite easily, in hindsight, ran that business for the first year or two as a side hustle. - You make some very important points there because that's a very quick way for you to find out if you are made for this running your own business, being an entrepreneur thing, is starting off your little side hustle. And as you say, when the chips are down, are you prepared to put in those hard yards? Because then it is, it's exactly that.

I mean, I was chatting to somebody the other day and they said to me, oh, what are you gonna be doing for the weekend? And I was like, weekend? What is this weekend thing you speak of? Because when I've got deadlines, if I've got things I've got to do, it doesn't matter to my client when I do them as long as it's done. And if that means for me personally, if it means working weekends, early mornings, whatever the case may be, that's what I do. And I do it because I love what I do and I have a vision of where I want to take it. And that is something that is so, so important. Another question for you though, Grant, is I've done this show for a good few years now and I've spoken to a bunch of entrepreneurs. And if I look at them and look at who I've spoken to and the kind of things they do, I would say the majority of them have more than one business. There are those that are purely focused on their one business and that's what they do. But even some of the guys that own fairly large businesses, I always find they're doing a little bit extra on the side. You talk about multiple streams of income. Is this a way to go? So maybe you can sell your Burevost rolls outside the shopping center on a Saturday and then maybe Sunday you go to the local church bazaar and sell pancakes.

I might be oversimplifying it. Is it something you recommend? - Yeah, I think it's definitely something I recommend and I'm in that boat. But I think what's important is that you as an entrepreneur have your core focus, mine being our property businesses and property services business. And then if you do have other businesses that you're aligning with other people that can grow and build those businesses and what you're bringing to the party is either capital or access to market or resource or expertise. So you're bringing something to the party in terms of that other business. So I don't recommend that you sell pancakes and you sell hot dogs and you sell cold drinks at various markets. That's just you. Again, you just created three jobs for yourself. But if you have the ability, let's use your example, to sell hot dogs in one and then you can find some students that you supply with all the ingredients and they do pancakes next to you, then you're running two businesses, a hot dog business and a pancake business right next to each other. You're just providing capital and resources for the one to be able to have those too. And you're leveraging the student's time to make money from that.

So yeah, absolutely. And what I do recommend though is focus on your one business and make sure it's established, make sure that it's stable, that it's grown into a space where it's not an image of business. It's not a startup, but you're in a space where you've got your clients, you've got your regular clients, there's regular orders, the revenue streams are either stable or growing. You have staff that can run that business and the systems are in place and then look to plug in other businesses, either on the side that are complimentary, sort of a bid this bid this model or sort of business separately where you have somebody else that can take the reins and run with it than you in the background. - Very, very good advice. I'm gonna throw you a bit of a curve ball here because I was asked this question the other day and I didn't know the answer. Somebody said to me, what happens if I am a director in a PTY? And we're running the company, but I've got an option to get involved in another company. And they said they were going home to do it and then the accountant said to them, but if you as a director of one company get involved in another company, your company loses whatever small business tax cuts or whatever.

Do you know anything about this? I know it's a curve ball, but it's just something that when the question was put to me, I kind of scratched my head and said, I actually don't know, I'm gonna have to find out 'cause I don't know. - Yeah, so there's something called small business tax relief which is obviously, sorry, a tax relief for small businesses. So it's a reduced tax level and there are certain criteria around that. And one of those being that if your directors can only be a director of your company and not of multiple companies, so they need to be ring fenced there. So again, it's a small business. It's not when you've established yourself and you're doing quite a substantial turnover. It's when you're really in that, I suppose, call it a startup phase. And I don't know exactly the threshold, but it's below a certain threshold. You get a small business tax relief. And the minute you go over that, you go back to the normalized tax of 29%. But if you are a director of both companies, no matter how small those businesses are, they both don't benefit from small business tax relief. So it's just something you check with your accountant, whether your entity qualifies for small business tax relief and to reduce income tax level.

And, but then you're at the minute that he, if that person became a director of a second company, that small business tax relief would fall away for essentially both businesses. - Okay, I just hope the person that asked that question is listening now so that they've got a very clear answer from you because I was, as I said, I was totally lost about that. Grant, we're running out of time. Thank you so much for joining us. Do you have some advice for current entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs or somebody sitting listening to the show and they've been sitting on the fence? What advice would you give about becoming an entrepreneur? - I mean, I think it's always gonna be the same advice for me is just take the first step to getting started. You know, you can sit on the couch, you can be at home and you can come up with a million ideas and, you know, but ideas only create value for you or anybody else once you start executing. So, you know, take the first step, start finding your customers, start creating a product. And once you have sold that first product, you've got your first income, then don't stop. So, yeah, the piece of advice is take the first step, get started. - Grant me from Epic South Africa, find out of Epic South Africa.

Thank you so much for joining us. You'll be back again next month as we continue with our entrepreneurial journey. It is what's involved. It has been proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa. Find out more at epicsouthafrica.com. In the meantime, thank you for listening. Grant, thank you for being here with us and chatting to us. - Thank you very much David. - And well, we'll have some more what's involved in just a bit. Until then, thank you for listening.