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Peter Morrison as detective used to solve
crimes. Now, as director of the business advice
centre run by Richards Bay Minerals (RBM) in
Zululand, he solves business problems.
After leaving the police, he worked for a
consumer goods company and got to know hundreds of
Zulu traders. He increased sales dramatically by
attending to their problems and offering training
in merchandising, stock control and service to
customers. He later joined the small-industries
division of the KwaZulu Finance Corporation, and
helped township manufacturers.
Between 1984 and 1988 he also ran three
successful businesses of his own, selling curios,
fast food and clothes. He maintains this experience
provided him with a practical degree in managing
small businesses.
When RBM, which mines mineral sands on the
Zululand coast, decided to set up a business advice
centre at Empangeni near by, it appointed Peter
Morrison as director.
The centre, where he has the help of Arnold
Mthembu, business consultant, Sarah Molokoane,
secretary and Dorothy Blacklaws, co-ordinator of
entrepreneurship education, conducts about 1,800
consultations a year. It has helped set up factory
units in the Umbonambi area.
Morrison says that, for every period of
satisfaction, he experiences at least nine of
frustration; but satisfaction does come in seeing a
businessman or woman, after years of counselling,
succeed. “It’s like being present when a blind man
has his sight restored,” he says.
Confident people emerge whose example is
contagious, particularly when they begin helping
other traders. One notable success is that of Erny
Dlamini, a former RBM employee who now runs Erny’s
Electrical, a contracting business employing over
30 people. The BAC sponsors a sewing school which
helps the families of people in prison make a
living.
One of Peter Morrison’s initiatives is an
education programme called EASE (Entrepreneurship
and Self Employment). While on holiday in the
United States, he got in touch with Ohio State
University and developed EASE from this
approach.
It is being taught as a one-year subject at
Tisand Technical High School which RBM built. It
can also be used as a six-week course for school
drop-outs and for people threatened with
unemployment. More and more schools throughout
South Africa are using this material as well.
Johannesburg Consolidated Investment recently
agreed to train 20 teachers from Botswana to teach
the EASE programme.
Roy Macpherson, managing director of RBM, points
out that seven in ten pupils who complete a full
school career fail to find formal jobs. He hopes
that teaching entrepreneurship in schools will help
develop a new generation who will address this
problem.
Peter Morrison has commissioned a video for
hawkers entitled Better Bus Rank Business. He has
set up small-business exhibitions and business
opportunities centres in Durban and Richards Bay,
helping small subcontractors get work from large
companies.
As a policeman, he enforced red tape restricting
business freedom. Now he sees over-regulation as
discriminating against people seeking to improve
their lives.
He writes: “Enthusiastic but misguided
bureaucrats enforcing government, provincial and
local-authority legislation have done almost
everything in their power to stamp out
entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs have been forced to
operate outside the law with little or no access to
finance. They were regarded as pests and litterers
and as creating additional work for
bureaucrats.”
“Generally speaking, only a fifth of any
population possesses entrepreneurial talent. We
have to identify that fifth and develop and
encourage that talent.”
An RBM colleague writes: “A key factor
contributing to the business advice centre’s
success is the ability of the director to
understand the problems facing his clients and to
identify practical ways of empowering them to
develop.”
“The BAC has become one of South Africa’s
leading privately-sponsored business advice
centres, and much of the credit belongs to Peter
Morrison.
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