BizNews Radio

Riël Malan joins Alec Hogg in Hermanus for a wide-ranging conversation about entrepreneurship, resilience and building businesses with purpose. From growing up in a farming family and launching Fruits Unlimited to creating 36 startups and leading Nurture Brands, Malan reflects on failure, leadership, partnerships and the lessons learned along the way. He discusses his transformative sabbatical, the power of journaling and coaching, private capital, brand-building and his ambition to grow Nurture Brands into a R10 billion group by 2032.

"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."

Johnny Copelyn turned a one million rand trade union investment fund into HCI, a business now worth well over ten billion rand, without ever raiding the pockets of the workers who backed him. In one of his last interviews as CEO, he talks candidly about a bank that nearly went under on his watch, buses set alight in a running battle with the taxi industry, and why HCI is still ploughing money into oil and gas off Mossel Bay and Namibia even after most of the world's biggest players walked away. He also explains, bluntly, why South Africa keeps sitting on resources that its neighbours are racing to develop.

In today's BizNews Daybreak, Geordin Hill-Lewis outlines the DA's ambitious push to govern six metros. MK Deputy President Duduzane Zuma confirms that land expropriation without compensation will happen as party policy. We also explore why South Africa’s anxious youth should look to Zambia's optimistic turnaround. Plus, BOSA’s Roger Solomons warns about Cape Town’s rising unaffordability, and US markets surge on Nvidia's AI revenue forecasts.

In this interview with Chris Steyn, Build One South Africa (BOSA) mayoral candidate for the City of Cape Town, Roger Solomons, describes how unaffordable it has become for ordinary citizens to live and do business in the Mother City. “I've crisscrossed the city, not just during this campaign trail, but during my public service, across all of Cape Town, all 118 wards, and the overwhelming majority of Capetonians say that life has become way harder over the last five to ten years… The people who nurse here in the city of Cape Town, police here, teach here, are finding it hard to live here. And that is an injustice…We want to build a New York and a London at the expense of ordinary Capetonians who just can't afford it.. So we have ordinary Capetonians who actually are building this beautiful city of ours; they're physically building, they're on construction sites, but they cannot afford to experience it. And that has got to stop.” Solomons vows to make affordable living and working his priority should he become mayor: “The principle that I would govern and lead the city by is not how much it costs the city, but how much it costs you and I as a resident.” His other priorities are equality in service delivery and more effective crime prevention measures.