The system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as designed. And that design keeps small businesses small.
I remember the day I realized my business had become my prison.
It was supposed to be a day off—something I rarely allowed myself—but by 10 AM, I was fielding calls about a supplier issue that “only I could handle.” By noon, I was driving to meet a client who insisted on dealing with me personally. By evening, I was back in the office fixing a problem that should have been resolved by my team hours earlier.
That’s when it hit me: I hadn’t built a business. I’d created an expensive, demanding job for myself, with worse hours and no guaranteed salary.
If you’re running an SME in Eswatini, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re not alone in this struggle—most small businesses here are stuck in what I call the Capacity Trap, a vicious cycle that keeps entrepreneurs working harder but never growing bigger.
The Myth of Control-Hungry Entrepreneurs
Let me dispel a myth that frustrates me every time I hear it: that small business owners don’t delegate because they want to control everything. That’s complete nonsense.
If you’ve ever run a business in Eswatini, you know the truth—you would love to delegate. You just don’t have anyone to delegate to.
Through building Yati Group, I’ve experienced this firsthand:
You invest time training staff, but they don’t take initiative. They complete tasks but never think beyond the immediate instruction. When something unexpected happens, they stand there waiting for you to solve it.
You hire people and invest in their development, only to watch them leave the moment a corporate job offers them more money and better benefits. Your small business becomes their stepping stone to something “more stable.”
You try to hire experienced people who could actually help carry the load, but they want salaries your cash flow can’t sustain. The people you can afford need more training than you have time to give.
You bid for contracts that could transform your business, but procurement committees look at your size and immediately assume “insufficient capacity.” Meanwhile, they’ll award multimillion-rand contracts to untested foreign companies without blinking.
So you do it yourself. Not because you want to, but because if you don’t, everything falls apart.
When Your Business Owns You
I started Yati Group to create freedom and build something meaningful. Instead, I found myself trapped in a cycle where the business ran me rather than the other way around.
The symptoms are unmistakable:
If I took a day off, things went wrong. Not catastrophically, but enough to remind me that my presence was the glue holding everything together.
If I didn’t personally review client deliverables, quality suffered. My team was capable, but they didn’t think like owners—they thought like employees completing tasks.
If I wasn’t driving business development, sales stagnated. Clients wanted to deal with “the principal,” not whoever I sent in my place.
If I was unavailable for even a few hours, decisions got delayed because no one felt empowered to make them without my input.
This isn’t a business—it’s an elaborate, expensive way to employ yourself with unlimited overtime and constant stress.
The System That Keeps You Small
But here’s what I’ve learned that most entrepreneurs don’t realize: the market system in Eswatini isn’t accidentally biased against SMEs—it’s designed this way.
I’ve lost count of how many tenders Yati Group didn’t even qualify for, not because we couldn’t do the work, but because the evaluation criteria were designed for large, established companies. Procurement committees see your name and immediately think “not enough capacity,” even when you know you could deliver better results than the expensive South African companies they prefer.
The requirements are set up to exclude you:
- Years of experience in a market that rarely gives new players chances to gain experience
- Audited financial statements that cost more to produce than many SMEs make in profit
- Proof of capacity for contracts that would actually build that capacity
- References from clients who won’t hire you without references
Even when you do break through and win a contract, the system continues working against you:
- Payments are delayed, strangling your cash flow
- Scope creep eats into already thin margins
- Price negotiations assume you have corporate overheads and profit margins
- Success is measured against standards set by companies with completely different cost structures
It’s designed to keep you as a small supplier, never as a strategic partner or competitor.
The Vicious Cycle That Traps Growth
What I’ve observed in my own business and in countless others across Eswatini is a predictable pattern that keeps SMEs stuck:
Limited Resources → Limited Delegation → Limited Growth → Limited Resources
You can’t afford experienced people, so you hire junior staff who need extensive training. But you don’t have time to train them properly because you’re handling all the senior-level work yourself. So they remain junior, and you remain overwhelmed.
You can’t invest in systems and processes because you’re spending all your time on immediate client needs. But without systems, everything depends on your personal involvement, which prevents you from focusing on growth.
You can’t take bigger contracts because you don’t have proven capacity. But you can’t build capacity without bigger contracts that allow you to invest in people and infrastructure.
Meanwhile, your clients get used to dealing with you personally. Your business becomes synonymous with your personal involvement. If you try to send someone else, they feel shortchanged. You’ve accidentally made yourself irreplaceable in your own company.
The Uncomfortable Path Out
After years of being trapped in this cycle myself, I’ve learned there’s no easy way out. But there is a way—it just requires accepting some uncomfortable truths and making some difficult changes:
Let People Fail (And Learn)
I had to stop shielding my team from the consequences of their decisions. If they made mistakes, I let them own the problem and find the solution. Yes, this meant some uncomfortable client conversations and occasional rework. But it was the only way they learned to think like owners rather than task-completers.
Stop Being the Bottleneck
I realized I was spending hours on administrative work that could be handled by someone at a fraction of my cost. It felt wasteful to hire someone for “simple” tasks when I could do them myself, but every hour I spent on admin was an hour not spent on strategy and growth.
Document Everything
If my team kept asking me the same questions, it was because I’d never created systems. I started documenting processes, decision criteria, and quality standards. This felt like wasted time initially, but it was actually an investment in my freedom.
Build Brand Trust, Not Personal Dependency
The hardest part was training clients to trust Yati Group as a company, not just me as an individual. This meant sometimes sending team members to meetings where clients preferred me, insisting on company processes rather than personal relationships, and gradually shifting credit from myself to the organization.
Choose Your Trust Investments Carefully
Not everyone deserves deep trust immediately, but some people earn it through their actions. When you find those people, you have to fight your instinct to micromanage and instead give them real ownership of their domains.
The Strategic Perspective
What I’ve learned through this journey is that the Capacity Trap isn’t just about individual business management—it’s about how Eswatini’s entire economic ecosystem functions.
Large organizations benefit from keeping SMEs small. They get competitive suppliers who can’t threaten their market position. Government procurement benefits from having “diverse” suppliers who never get large enough to challenge established players. Even banks prefer lending to established corporates rather than investing in SME growth.
Understanding this doesn’t mean accepting it, but it does mean being strategic about how you navigate it.
The Choice Every SME Owner Faces
After years of building Yati Group and watching other SMEs struggle with the same challenges, I’ve realized every small business owner in Eswatini faces the same fundamental choice:
Accept the Capacity Trap and remain a well-paid self-employed person with a business-shaped job, or fight through the discomfort of building systems that don’t depend on your constant involvement.
Both choices are valid, but only one leads to real business growth and eventual freedom.
If you choose to fight the trap, understand that it will get harder before it gets easier. Your clients will complain when you’re not personally handling everything. Your team will make mistakes you would never make. Your cash flow will be tighter because you’re investing in people and systems rather than keeping everything lean.
But if you persist, something remarkable happens: your business starts running without you. Your team starts solving problems before they reach your desk. Your clients start trusting your company’s capabilities, not just your personal involvement. Your business becomes an asset you own rather than a job you perform.
The Bigger Picture
The Capacity Trap isn’t just about individual businesses—it’s about Eswatini’s economic development. Every SME that breaks through this cycle creates jobs, builds local capability, and proves that Swazi companies can compete at higher levels.
But it starts with individual entrepreneurs deciding they’re tired of carrying their businesses alone and willing to do the uncomfortable work of building something bigger than themselves.
Are you ready to break out of survival mode?