The Mind Institute of South Africa

Small Steps to Success

Thomas — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:41:16 +0000

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….?!

When people ask me how it is to start up a business in a new country, two words immediately come to mind: Exciting and scary. Exciting, simply because it is a new and different experience, from which a lot can be learnt. Exciting, because all of a sudden you do not have twenty bosses and 40 co-workers that can help you, you are essentially on your own, making all the decisions for better or for worse.

Scary, well, it is. Similar to a journalist, writer or sportsman, you are putting yourself out there. You are making yourself vulnerable to criticism from friends and family, as well as inviting your competition to take a position against you. In our society, success is measured in the profit you can generate and as such, if you have your own business, people will measure your success in the money you turn over. All this and much more, can make the wait for the final go, well, quite pleasant!

In the end, it is about realizing that the business is born as soon as it is registered. From that moment on, you are actually in business, even though no customer has called you yet. From the moment you tell the first person your business phone number or internet address, the ball has started rolling, and it is up to you to accelerate it or slow it down….For us, well, we now have a phone number which means the next purchase is going to be a phone. The ball is accelerating, and as Kate Hudson so aptly said in “Almost Famous”, it’s all happening….

Finding the balance

Thomas — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:08:41 +0000

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….

At the Mind Institute South Africa, we are very passionate about people and about our values. We would not be offering our services and courses if we did not think that they can add value to people, and if we would not see that they can positively change lives forever. All this means is that we have a lot to say about ourselves, and about our courses, and we try to put as much information on the website as possible for people to read about us, the courses, the company, …..

Yet, people in general also want to look at pictures, and some are avert to long passages of text. It is said a picture is worth 1000 words, but what in a picture the possibility of interpreting it differently than we intend to is also very high. An example will illustrate: Let’s say we talk about learning new skills and discovering new possibilities, and we want to use a picture to illustrate that. For arguments sake, we focus on learning and use this picture:
For some people, this might stand for exactly what they want: Somebody up in front of a crowd, teaching them, and them passively taking in knowledge. For others, this will bring back memories of classrooms and experiences in school, good or bad. If, on the other hand, we talk about our courses being taught interactively, and exercises and experience being the most important part, we know what message we are sending out, and we have a higher chance of people understanding it the way we intend them to.

So, what to do? Well, it is a delicate balance. Pictures can enhance as well as detract from the main message of your site, so it is important to spend time to find the right ones, that fit to what your are saying, and then the next trick is where to place them….

Fun and games with websites

Thomas — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:17:43 +0000

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… Our webdeveloper, bless him for working the hours he does, is a big fan of content management systems. This means that instead of having full control over the website, you get a little box where you can input your text and modify it. While this is great for some things, it also proves to be a touch of a hassle at times. While I was battling it out with keywords and formatting, Nathan (owner of the Mind Institute), went to work on editing the text. After writing a really beautiful homepage text in the editor, the computer god, who must be Loki, decided to play a little prank: the editor timed out, and that did not necessarily amuse Nathan too much. He is currently trying to intimidate his computer into giving the text back, or alternately plotting its early demise by some very creative ways. Building a website out of thin air really is a very interesting venture, something that can challenge you, your skills in copy writing, patience, and research. That is of course if you want your site to be excellent, otherwise you can just upload anything you want. We will keep you updated on how we are progressing, for now I better stop Nathan from building his insane moustrap/killing machine that will end his computer….

Getting started

Thomas — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:10:58 +0000

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…

While the business registration itself is quite easy and straightforward (if you find a good accountant that is), it does take about 2 weeks for the official paperwork to come through. This of course is highly dependent on the business registrations office, so it might take longer or shorter than that. Moving from Europe, we noticed that down here time runs a little differently. Overall, when the sun shines, things seem to move just a little slower

Phonelines however are a completely different issues. While in Europe you have several providers fighting over your business, South Africa has only Telkom offering their very monopolized services. This means that currently, all business is at the mercy of one provider. For the moment, it takes (at least) one month to get phone lines installed, and if this is a new business, you end up paying quite a hefty deposit (it seems you have to earn their trust first). So, for the moment, we are waiting for phonelines to be installed, and the main thing we are working on right now is the website and Brochures.

We will keep you posted on our development, and soon post more about our training services in South Africa….