When starting a business in South Africa, or I guess anywhere in the world, one of the things you learn is patience. Similar to fishing, things take time and a lot of patience. While many times I would love for things to happen “now-now” (=south African version of now, which begs the question of what the “now” alone means…), they take time. Whether you are talking changes on the website or getting a phone line, designing logo to writing content for brochures, things take time. And sometimes, this is exactly what we want, or….?!

The last few days, I was lucky enough to spend in Botswana, close to the central kalahari desert. Trust me, it was amazing! Seeing the sunset over the desert is a magical moment, that was only rivaled by the spotting of a lion pride at sunrise…but, I am digressing the the hard facts of business. A quick survey of possible customers has found that our current website design is, well, let’s say off kilter. Some say, there is too much text, not enough colours, the banner looks like a tourism website. Personally, I think it is great that people take such an interest in our success that they give us all this feedback, and at the same time, there is a difficult balance to strike between professional and pink&fluffy, between words and visuals….

Things are progressing nicely, well at least for African standards. While the bank, as so many other institutions, promises heaven and delivers something well below that, this is not surprising. Registering business bank accounts is the fast part, the slow part of course is the paperwork. Not to worry, as there are many other things that require our attention before we can officially open our doors for training! Currently the most important feature we are working on is our website. The shocking truth is that you can learn all you want about your mind, personal development and state management, at some point in the day there will always come the inevitable moment where you want to take your computer and get to work on it with a baseball bat and a big smile on your face…

Starting up a business is an interesting and exciting time, especially if you chose to do it in a new country. The International Mind Institute has been around for a while in the UK, offering training in NLP, Mind Power and hypnosis for a couple of years now, it is new to South Africa. Of course, with starting a new venture in South Africa comes a whole new set of issues, rules, and customs of the country…