Category: Opinion

The SME Brain Drain: Why Small Businesses Remain Small

There’s a cycle playing out in SMEs across the country that nobody wants to talk about. It’s not about lack of funding, market access, or government support—though those are real issues. This is about something more insidious, more personal, and frankly, more heartbreaking for those of us running small businesses.

We’re training the workforce for corporates. And we’re doing it at our own expense.

The Investment Nobody Sees

Picture this: A young person walks into your office. Fresh out of school, maybe a diploma or degree in hand, but zero practical experience. The big companies won’t touch them—no experience, they say. But you see potential. You see hunger. So you take a chance.

For the first six months, they’re a net loss. Mistakes everywhere. You’re correcting their work, redoing presentations, holding their hand through client interactions. You’re paying them a salary while essentially running a private training academy. But you persist because you remember when someone gave you a shot.

By month twelve, they’re starting to get it. Fewer mistakes. Better output. You can actually delegate without holding your breath.

By year two, something magical happens. They’ve become competent. Confident, even. They’re producing work that actually moves the business forward. They’re handling clients. They’re solving problems independently.

And then they resign.

The Cruel Mathematics of SME Development

Here’s what that journey cost you: Two years of salary. Hundreds of hours of mentorship and training. The opportunity cost of projects you couldn’t take on because you were busy teaching. The client goodwill you burned through while they learned on the job.

Just when you’re about to recoup that investment—just when they’re finally adding more value than they’re consuming—they’re gone.

The resignation letter is always polite. They’re grateful for the opportunity. They’ve learned so much. But they’ve received an offer they can’t refuse. Better benefits. Career progression. A fancy job title.

From a corporate.

The Corporate Playbook

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. This isn’t accidental. Corporates have mastered the art of talent acquisition from SMEs. They’ve figured out that we do the hard work of development, and they can simply cherry-pick the results.

But here’s where it gets particularly painful: Sometimes they don’t even wait for the resignation. They engineer it.

You land a contract with a big company. Fantastic news. You assign one of your rising stars to the project. They deliver. The corporate client is impressed. The contract period ends.

Then comes the corporate job offer. Direct to your employee.

The contract doesn’t get renewed. But your employee does—as their employee.

You’re left with a gap in your team, lost institutional knowledge, and the bitter taste of having been used as a free recruitment and training agency.

Why This Matters Beyond One Business

This isn’t just about hurt feelings or business frustration. This cycle is one of the fundamental reasons why SMEs struggle to scale. How do you grow when you can’t retain institutional knowledge? How do you build capacity when your capacity keeps walking out the door just as it matures?

Every time we lose a trained employee to a corporate, we’re not just losing a person. We’re losing:

  • The systems and processes they learned to navigate
  • The client relationships they built
  • The industry knowledge they accumulated
  • The mistakes they already made (and learned from)
  • The investment of time and money we poured into their development

We’re reset to zero. Again. And again. And again.

Meanwhile, corporates build on the foundation we laid, enjoying the benefits of employees who already know how to work, how to think, how to solve problems—all skills honed in our small businesses.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Young professionals stay in SMEs while they’re unsure of themselves. The moment confidence kicks in, the moment they realize their worth in the market, they’re gone. And who can blame them? We can’t compete with corporate salaries, benefits, and brand names.

But let’s call this what it is: An exploitative system where SMEs serve as the training ground for corporate talent pipelines, bearing all the cost and reaping almost none of the long-term benefit.

A Different Way Forward

Corporates, here’s a radical idea: Instead of poaching talent from the SMEs you work with, how about acknowledging the role we play in developing that talent?

When you identify exceptional people working for your SME suppliers, extend the contract with the SME. Increase the rates to account for the value that trained professional brings. Build long-term partnerships that recognize the investment SME owners make in developing talent.

Is this a pipe dream? Probably. Does it go against every instinct of corporate cost management and talent acquisition strategies? Absolutely.

But until something changes—until there’s recognition and respect for the role SMEs play in workforce development—we’ll remain stuck. Training staff we can’t keep. Starting over every two years. Never quite growing beyond “small” because we’re constantly rebuilding our foundation.

This is one of the many reasons SMEs struggle to graduate from startups to sustainable businesses. Not lack of ambition. Not lack of skill. But a system that extracts value from us without compensation, recognition, or even basic acknowledgment of what’s happening.

The brain drain is real. And it’s keeping small businesses small.

Entrepreneurship Is Not Self-Employment: Lessons from 20 Years in the Trenches

For years, we’ve been sold a story: start your own business, be your own boss, achieve financial freedom. It’s a story repeated at workshops, in glossy brochures, and by motivational speakers who make a living selling the dream. But after two decades of building, winning, stumbling, and rebuilding, I can tell you this: what most people call entrepreneurship is not entrepreneurship at all. It’s self-employment. And the two are very different.

The Illusion of Financial Freedom

When people talk about entrepreneurship, they often mean self-employment: opening a small business, freelancing, hustling to pay the bills. That’s valid work, but let’s not confuse it with true entrepreneurship. Self-employment can give you independence, but it often traps you in endless work, thin margins, and constant compliance battles.

In countries like ours, the system makes this worse. Taxes pile up. Access to credit is almost impossible. Compliance costs eat away at your revenue until you’re forced to cut corners. Many SMEs don’t fail because their founders are lazy or incompetent—they fail because the environment punishes them for trying.

Meanwhile, the narrative of “financial freedom” is dangled in front of you like a carrot. But financial freedom doesn’t come from self-employment. If anything, it can chain you tighter.

What Real Entrepreneurship Looks Like

True entrepreneurship is different. It’s not about creating a job for yourself. It’s about building systems, assets, and organizations that can live beyond you. Entrepreneurs don’t just own a business; they design a machine that creates value at scale.

Self-employment says: I work for myself.
Entrepreneurship says: I build something that works even without me.

That difference is massive. The self-employed are limited by their own time and energy. Entrepreneurs multiply their impact through people, processes, and products that grow larger than their personal effort.

One of the books that helped me see this distinction—beyond my own experience—was Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant. Kiyosaki explains the difference between being an Employee (E), Self-Employed (S), Business Owner (B), and Investor (I). Most of us are stuck in the “S” quadrant—working harder and harder for ourselves—but never crossing into “B,” where systems and people work for you. That framework clarified for me why so many SMEs get trapped and why so few make the leap to true entrepreneurship.

Why the Distinction Matters

I’ve succeeded at times and failed at others. I’ve made money, and I’ve lost more than I thought I could. I’ve seen corporate classmates climb the ladder with stability and security while I wrestled with tenders, compliance, and tax burdens. And through it all, I’ve come to one clear conclusion: the language around entrepreneurship has misled us.

If we keep confusing self-employment with entrepreneurship, we will keep producing more disillusioned founders, trapped in survival mode and wondering why the “freedom” never comes.

We need honesty. We need to separate the two. We need to stop pretending that registering a business is the same as building an enterprise. And we need to build systems in this country that actually allow entrepreneurs to thrive—because when true entrepreneurship wins, society wins.

Three Steps to Move from Self-Employment to Entrepreneurship

If you’ve recognized yourself in the “self-employed” trap, don’t despair. You can start shifting toward true entrepreneurship. It won’t be easy, but it is possible:

1. Build Systems, Not Just Income
Ask yourself: can this business run without me for a month? If the answer is no, then you’re not yet an entrepreneur—you’re self-employed. Start documenting processes, training others, and creating systems that make your business less dependent on you.

2. Leverage People and Partnerships
You can’t scale alone. Entrepreneurs multiply their impact through teams, collaborators, and networks. Hire, delegate, and form partnerships that expand your reach and create new revenue streams beyond your direct labor.

3. Focus on Assets, Not Just Hustle
Assets—brands, intellectual property, technology, distribution networks—are what separate the entrepreneur from the self-employed. Hustle pays the bills, but assets create long-term wealth. Start asking: what am I building today that will still generate value tomorrow, even if I’m not working?

Final Word

If you’re self-employed, don’t be ashamed of it. But know what it is. Don’t let anyone sell you the lie that it guarantees wealth or freedom. And if you’re serious about entrepreneurship, prepare yourself for something much harder, much riskier, but also potentially much more rewarding.

After 20 years, here’s what I know: self-employment feeds you. Entrepreneurship changes the game. And until we stop confusing the two, we’ll keep lying to ourselves.

The Death of Marketing in Eswatini: Why We’re Stuck in Templates

Walk into most boardrooms in Eswatini and you’ll find a marketer with a neat calendar of campaigns: the annual golf day, the December billboard, the Trade Fair stand, the “back-to-school” promo. It’s tidy, predictable, safe. But let’s be honest—this isn’t strategy. It’s habit.

Many of our biggest companies would survive just fine without their marketing departments. They’ve been around for decades, with guaranteed customers and stable markets. The marketer’s contribution is often a matter of repeating what was done last year, with the same suppliers, the same playbook. Businesses do need marketing—desperately—but marketers themselves have bought into the illusion that what they’re doing is enough.

The Comfort of Templates

Too many marketers in Eswatini are scared to rock the boat. To present disruptive, iconic ideas is to risk failure, and failure feels career-limiting in a small corporate circle. So they stick to templates—until someone else tries it first. Then it becomes “safe,” and only then does it get adopted. This is not bravery; it’s bureaucracy masquerading as marketing.

When asked to invest in something new—say, E10,000 on an experiential activation that connects directly with customers—marketers hesitate. But the same marketers won’t blink at signing off hundreds of thousands for a glamorous Trade Fair stand that exists more to win an award than to grow sales. It’s easier to justify the shiny, the traditional, the board-pleasing, than to defend the gritty work of moving markets.

When Disruption Makes People Squirm

I remember a campaign we ran around 2015 or 2016 that showed me exactly what disruption can do.

A colleague of mine had just joined the client company. He was the type of marketer every industry needs more of—restless, disruptive, unwilling to settle for the ordinary. He pulled me aside and said: “Let’s do something they’ll never forget.”

And so we did. We designed a campaign that broke every mold they were used to. It was loud, it was fresh, it cut through the static. People were talking about it in taxis, in offices, in bars. It was marketing that actually moved.

But success came with discomfort. The campaign shook the walls inside that company so much that operations called for internal investigations. Payments to us were frozen. I was summoned to their fraud department, treated not as a partner but as a suspect. A Manager who has been instrumental in enabling the campaign was dragged through the mud as though innovation itself was a crime.

Yati came out clean, of course. There was no fraud, no wrongdoing from our part —just the shockwaves of genuine disruption. Still, the fallout was real: resignations followed. My colleague himself, even though never called for a formal DC,  eventually left the company, disillusioned by how allergic they were to boldness.

That’s the kind of disruption I’m talking about. Marketing that rattles nests, that unsettles people, that forces conversations no one wants to have. And yet, as long as we are clean, as long as our motives are pure, that kind of disruption is not only safe—it’s necessary. Which is exactly why I struggle with local marketers today. Too many prefer the comfort of silence over the chaos of growth.

Operations Over Strategy

This culture has also reduced senior marketers into coordinators. Too often, the marketing manager is the one unpacking branding at an event, arranging chairs, or even taking food to promoters at a mall stall. These are not unimportant tasks, but they are operations. Strategic marketing—the kind that designs growth pathways, unlocks new markets, and creates value for customers—gets crowded out by event logistics and daily firefighting.

Of course, the problem is partly structural. Many companies in Eswatini don’t have full marketing teams. The “marketing department” is often one or two people expected to do everything. But shortage of staff should not become a shield for mediocrity. Strategy does not need a large team; it needs courage, clarity, and conviction.

Why This Matters

The result of template marketing is that businesses are losing opportunities to grow. Marketing has been reduced to a cost center instead of a growth engine. Budgets are cut in areas that matter—data, insights, customer engagement—and diverted to what looks glamorous on a report. Sponsorships worth millions get approved, but subscriptions for real-time consumer data at a fraction of that cost get declined.

The irony is hard to miss: marketers are meant to be the champions of change, but in Eswatini they’ve become custodians of comfort. Instead of leading their organizations into the future, they spend their time defending the past.

A Call to Marketers

This is not written out of bitterness. It is written out of urgency. Eswatini needs marketers who will stop hiding behind templates and logistics, and start fighting for strategy. Who will have the courage to pitch the disruptive idea, even if it risks rejection. Who will insist on data over gut feel, growth over glamour, customer impact over board applause.

Our economy is too small, our challenges too large, for marketing to be treated as rinse-and-repeat. If you call yourself a marketer, ask yourself: are you building growth, or just keeping your chair warm?