Building a business in SA is an act of defiance.
The country’s unreliable power supply, rising operating costs, fragile infrastructure and high interest rates dominate the landscape — yet entrepreneurs continue building, creating, and pushing forward.
Speak to enough SME owners, however, 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 is what seasoned SMEs say they would do differently — and why those lessons matter now more than ever.
1. Skip the accountant, pay the price
One of the most common and expensive early mistakes SMEs make is delaying proper financial management. As Winnaz cofounder Pascal Murasira recalls:
“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,” says Murasira.
The first mistake we made was thinking we could be our own accountants. Not hiring one early led to mistakes that cost us far more than we expected
— Winnaz co-founder Pascal Murasira
A Xero survey of 400 local entrepreneurs found that poor cashflow 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.
2. Your ‘systems’ will eventually betray you
Many SMEs start out with manual or improvised systems, and it works, until it doesn’t.
Nidha Narrandes, CEO of Reel Stories, built her video content business on instinct and craft. The tech infrastructure came later — too late.
“The mistakes I made were not dramatic. They were quiet and cumulative. Payroll on a spreadsheet, files on a hard drive, payslips on my desktop with no proper backup system,” says Narrandes.
“There was 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,” she says.
SMEs face data loss, failed backups, cyber risks, slow transfers and infrastructure gaps — all of which directly hurt revenue and customer delivery. Independent reporting shows this pattern across SA.
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’s chief officer for 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
3. 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. While there is often a desire to onboard a big client, in reality, the business may not be able to service that client,” says Catherine Wijnberg, CEO of Fetola.
Wijnberg’s company has supported over 500 South African SMEs. Her consistent finding is that businesses that survive 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.
4. 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.
“So, the biggest lesson has been to always do a trial run before entering a formal relationship,” says Moira Johnston, co-founder of EventRoom.
Trial runs apply to suppliers, partners, and technology providers alike. SA’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.
5. Underestimating cyberthreats
SA’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.
6. Low cloud readiness
Studies show many SMEs lack the awareness, preparation and skills needed to adopt cloud properly, contributing to poor implementation and under-utilisation.
The remedy: Guided migration, simple cloud tools, human support, and step-by-step readiness assessments.
7. 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.
8. Mentorship is not soft, it’s survival
“Entrepreneurs must learn the power of networking and the value of mentorship, as these are the things that most entrepreneurs take for granted.
“Personally, I am where I am because of a business mentor who changed the way I see things,” says Anda Maqanda, founder of AM Group.
SA’s formal business networks have historically been inaccessible to many entrepreneurs. Programmes such as Small Enterprise Development Agency (Seda) incubators and Fetola’s Tholoana Enterprise Programme, which offers structured mentorship and growth, exist to change that.
The entrepreneurs who endure this market are rarely those who get everything right. They are the ones who paid attention to the mistakes and upgraded their ICT systems, hired the accountant, invested in connectivity, ran the trial and built something resilient enough to absorb the next curveball SA throws at them.
The bottom line
The SMEs that survive and scale in SA are the ones that learnt early to:
✔ Invest in financial discipline
✔ Upgrade digital infrastructure
✔ Adopt cloud tools with guidance
✔ Secure reliable connectivity
✔ Strengthen cybersecurity
✔ Trial and test before committing
✔ Build readiness before chasing scale
✔ Lean into mentorship and networks
The foundation on which Cell C Business has rebuilt its SME proposition is reliability, simplicity, predictable spend and human support — meeting businesses exactly where they are and helping them get where they want to go.
This article was sponsored by Cell C Business.
