Palesa Katleho Makoti

Start-ups have brilliant, billion dollar ideas, however in the absence of a robust foundation that is undergirded by good governance, processes and control many ideas never reach their billion dollar potential. The lack of proper financial and accounting processes, procedures and controls (“PPC”) means that start-ups run out of cash, lose out on funding opportunities, lack basic good governance and cannot effectively and efficiently scale the business when the time comes.

I am a Chartered Accountant with over 14 years’ experience working in large multinational corporates. I’ve observed that what differentiates “big business” from start-ups are the PPC. PPC is the backbone of strong, large corporates, which start-ups do not have and do not focus on … which in the long term is detrimental to start-ups.

I focus on training and equipping start-ups with financial and accounting PPC, which achieve the following objectives, inter-alia:
1. Understanding the information presented on the income statement, balance sheet and cashflow statement
2. Minimising the risk of running out of cash
3. Designing and implementing appropriate PPC over processes such as budgeting, cash and bank, hiring.
4. Preparation to apply for funding, by ensuring all the necessary governance and accounting records are in place.

The equipping is delivered in the form of training (and one-on-one consultations as needed). The focus is on immediate implementation, rather than excessive financial theory, where the endgame is to have start-ups take control of the financial aspects of their businesses.

I honestly believe that there are brilliant entrepreneurs that can bring tangible change to our world. However, there is a real risk of us never seeing much needed world change because the entrepreneur/start-up has been tripped up by things which could have been prevented. It is unconscionable to think that an agri-tech start-up focused on aiding small scale farmers with plant disease management (as an example) falls out of the ecosystem because they cannot raise funds because of shambolic accounting records, that cannot prove the track record and profitability of the start-up. The loss of such innovation for something as “simple” as accounting is a tragedy which I could no longer sit on the sidelines and watch. I’m an accountant and that is what I bring to the table: the marketing expert brings her/his skills to the table, the scaling expert brings her/his skills to the table, etc and as a collective we all work together to empower and equip start-ups to succeed