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This is a story of a tech-startup founder who invented the Uber of cleaning. With over 500 000 cleaning jobs complete, 8 000 cleaners, and 60% youth employment, her business success is so inspiring, that her company, SweepSouth, received investment from the prestigious 500 Startups accelerator in Silicon Valley.
Meet Aisha Pandor, the tech powerhouse undoubtedly heading one of the country’s biggest and fastest growing startups. Her story of how she is Owning The Table in tech, is one that every startup founder seeking massive success needs to read.
What does “Owning the table” mean to you?
It means confidently taking your seat at the table (usually career or corporate table) and not just being a passive and quiet participant, but an active and assertive member in a way that feels authentic to you. It also means building your own table if you don’t like the rules of the one you’re seated at.
Throughout your career, you have dabbled in various professions from academia to management consulting. Can you tell us the skills you learned in each that were later useful as an entrepreneur?
Academia taught me about true hard work and grit (pulling all-nighters regularly and sleeping under my laboratory bench on more than one occasion). It also taught me as about logical, process-driven thinking and learning fast and applying robustness to my reasoning.
The other thing academia taught me was how to take feedback and constructive criticism well. This is invaluable when you’re an entrepreneur and are working on something you feel so emotionally connected to.
As a management consultant, I learnt hard business skills, as well as how to manage well upwards and downwards. A lot of it was about navigating change and managing others who feel anxious about that change. The recommendations we made to businesses always necessitated a bit of a shake-up. Entrepreneurship requires you to be comfortable with constant change and guide your employees (and customers) through it.
We tend to judge big corporates so much, often for good reason. But being embedded in different businesses, I learnt a lot about how good vs. bad managers can have an impact.
I also developed a lot of empathy regarding how hard it is to run a good business. One that does well, has happy employees, and is able to manage change whilst continually innovating. Incredibly difficult!
Finally, as a twenty-something year old with education but little work experience, I needed to have the confidence to convince much older, established c-suite executives to trust my recommendations.
Your company SweepSouth solves a problem that is very pertinent to the empowerment of unemployed and underemployed women through technology. In your view, which other gaps exist in creating more opportunities for women using technology?
So many! There are a plethora of issues women face, from financial security and inclusivity (having access to credit at decent rates) that could be solved by redefining what it means to be financially responsible through technology and behavioural data.
Many women who don’t qualify for access to loans are actually some of the most responsible and incredible people in this country, caring for multi-generational families on an absolute pittance.
Similarly, the perception of risk when it comes to funding women-owned businesses and understanding the huge potential of women owned businesses to grow (given that women make the majority of buying decisions in SA) should be redefined through data and technology.
Most tech startup founders are male. How did you, as a young business woman make your voice heard and your decisions taken seriously when starting out?
I think the experience of having to get the respect of older, white male c-suite execs as a young management consultant was a huge help. I learnt to rely on my credentials if I needed to. But to also always back this up with being fully prepared, having as much data and doing as much analysis as is possible before stating something.
Also, and perhaps understated, is having the confidence to say “I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out” if there was something I wasn’t sure of.
I also made sure to surround myself with males and females who are about total gender equality. I did this to avoid founders, investors, and partners who would see my being female as an issue.
At the end of the day however, the best way I could beat gender stereotypes was to build a successful business.
Tech startups can be quite capital intensive. How did you fund your business in the initial stages?
In the early stages our business was funded by bootstrapping, and we cashed in our savings and pension plans, and sold our car, house and house contents. We later raised some angel/seed funding from early stage investors (once the business was up and running).
How did you manage to convince investors that the market was big and lucrative enough for them to deem your concept as viable for investment?
I put together financial projections and models that I could defend and that were stretch goals, but also backed by data. For example, we used the number of domestic workers in South Africa (1 million!), size of South Africa’s middle class market, and target pricing data to demonstrate that the total market is worth over $1 billion annually.
You have expressed your plans to scale SweepSouth into other African markets. What do you foresee to be the biggest challenge as you do so?
Distance from the team at HQ will be a hurdle we’ll need to get over. Additionally, ensuring that there is good transfer of company culture, mission and learnings to the teams in other countries. There is also the notion that South African businesses enter other markets and try to cookie-cutter the South African business into this new context. That’s a mistake we won’t be making! There are also technical questions around pricing, currencies, languages and marketing language and norms that we’d need to understand well and plan for.
What are some of the financial lessons that you know now that you wish you had known earlier that come with being a business owner?
Make sure you don’t run out of cash, you’ll always need more than you think.
Also, if raising money, always start before you’re desperate. If you “need” it, it’s too late and you have no leverage.
Manage every cent extremely well. Apply for an overdraft when you have money in the bank, well before you need it.
Lastly, use compound interest to your advantage wherever you can.
Entrepreneurship is not always easy, with various humps along the journey. How are you managing to keep your mental health in check whilst growing your business?
I’m lucky in having wonderful family (kids, partner, parents and siblings) and friends, who keep me laughing and smiling and forgive my workaholic lifestyle. They constantly keep things in perspective. I also try to ensure I work out a few times a week and we’ve recently started taking two breaks a year to make up for the intense pressure from a hectic schedule. We haven’t got it right just yet though and I’ve been very close to total burnout multiple times.
What are your ambitions moving on from here? Where can we expect to see Aisha in the next 5-10 years?
I want to grow my business SweepSouth into a household brand in emerging markets. In 5-10 years we will be creating work for hundreds of thousands of women. And by virtue of the resultant impact on their families, we’ll be positively impacting millions. We will serve as a model for how technology can be used to grow a business fast, give investors great returns and at the same time change peoples lives.
We’re giving access to earning opportunities, education, financial and digital inclusivity, and in doing so are creating effective, sustainable change in the country, the continent and in the world.
We will also be an example for other young black women wanting to enter into the tech space.
Lastly best advice with regards to money that you’ve received. And best advice you can give to anyone reading this today?
Don’t borrow unless absolutely necessary. Make sure if you’re doing it, that you’re using that money to maximize your own returns and effectively multiply it.
Price and value your time well. Don’t be shy about wanting to be financially stable at worst and financially independent at best. The best investments in the early days are into yourself and your own learning.
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