Advice to entrepreneurs: never underestimate the power of small jobs

Small jobs are the best teacher

We are all waiting for that perfect opportunity. But these come rarely. Rather they are hidden behind many smaller doors that you have to patiently open one by one.

Never ever underestimate the power of small jobs as a business owner.

Am posting this for 2 reasons:

1. For entrepreneurs: never underestimate the power of doing a small job, even for little money (just try and remember to extract some value when doing something for little money - e.g. referrals, reviews, etc)

2. For speakers, executives etc who are doing presentations, slides etc to remind you to never forget to use the opportunities you have in front of you to introduce an entrepreneur around you that may not have access to those opportunities.

Background:

A few months ago I had the opportunity to speak in front of (forgot exact number) 14.000 people. I rarely use slides but for this one I decided to create some to help the audience - given the size of the hall (coca cola dome in Johannesburg) - stay on track with the learnings from my talk.

I asked the phenomenally talented Tshebetso Ditabo to help me design the slides for a rock bottom price. Not because I can't design slides but because I truly believe that when you have the opportunity you should do your part to open doors for others. So here we are. His name in big lights, immortally captured in this photo (which he took).

If we work together we can raise the tide for everyone!

Because SMEs matter, dammit.