David White: "Entrepreneurial time poverty," DRG's dot-com crash and B-BBEE's "success formula"…

"Running a business is really complicated," says David White, founder and CEO of DRG, BusinessFit SA and The Africa Marketing Initiative, and the resulting "entrepreneurial time poverty" is what quietly kills small businesses long before bad ideas do. In conversation with Irakli Rekhviashvili, White explains how BusinessFit's open source self-assessment platform works as a "mentor multiplier" for South Africa's estimated 12 million entrepreneurs and SMEs, since "there are not enough mentors around the world, or in particular South Africa," and why structure changes the odds: "if an entrepreneur is able to better understand what is required for them to build a sustainable business, there is almost no reason why those businesses shouldn't be successful." White also revisits DRG's own JSE listing within two years of founding, and the dot-com crash that followed. "I would never do it again, to be honest," he admits. "It took away that magical essence of why we started the business in the first place." What replaced the chase for money, he says, is something else entirely: "spending time with entrepreneurs who believe the world can be a better place... is a reward in itself." On the B-BBEE Act's push for larger companies to direct 3% of after-tax profit and 30% of supply chain spend to SMEs, a combination he's called a "success formula," White is broadly supportive but draws a hard line on how it's funded: "I'm not a great fan of the grants... when we're giving money and there's no expectation for it to be returned, I think the mindset changes of the entrepreneur."