Outsourced CFO believes that providing support for entrepreneurs can change the world. With this in mind, we took part in 2018’s Global Entrepreneurship Week, from 12th to the 16th of November.
Cape Town saw many exciting events happening including AfricArena, Africa Com, Early Stage Investor Summit, and the Cape Town Founders Conference. So what is Global Entrepreneurship Week?
If we examine the Global Entrepreneurship Network Week Organisation’s mission, we can discover how it started. “In 2008 with an emphasis on inspiring young people to make their mark and has quickly grown to become a comprehensive effort that engages entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, researchers, support organizations and others collaborating to advance economic growth and innovation in more than 170 countries around the world. Roughly 35,000 events and competitions will take place during #GEW2018 – connecting nearly 10 million participants to potential collaborators, mentors and even investors. Dozens of world leaders on every continent and a network of more than 15,000 partner organizations support the initiative every year.”
The vision that inspired Global Entrepreneurship Week is an exciting one. It’s so important that entrepreneurs and founders know that they are supported, with mechanisms in place to assist them to scale up within the Cape Town ecosystem.
There needed to be a space during #GEW2018 where founders could connect with each other, hear talks from top local and global thought leaders and be able to share insights from their entrepreneurial journey. In the heart of Cape Town, on the 13th of November, at Workshop17 we launched the first Cape Town Founders Conference.
The Cape Town Founders Conference had two panels. An automation panel with Chantelle Bowyers, CEO of METIS Marketing Solutions, and Jacques Le Granges, a Director of Outsourced CFO. The second panel was a Stress and Resilience Management Panel with Co-Founders of Barnardt & Fleming Private Practice, Karen Fleming, Kirsten Barnardt, and Richard Sharp from Heritage Wealth Partners. The automation panel unpacked how certain processes and operations within your company can be automated in order to help you focus your efforts strategically on your strengths. The stress and management panel shared real insights into problems entrepreneurs face and what ways they can go about handling this stress.
Christoph Rohde from the Westerwelle Foundation spoke about emerging markets in entrepreneurship. Dana Pretorius, Co-Founder and Director of Outsourced CFO gave a keynote speech about the route to funding readiness. Mike Scott, the CEO of NONA Creative gave an inspiring speech about remote leadership. Mokena Makeka,took a deep dive into his journey as a Young Global Leader. Arnold Shapiro, CEO of Trematon Capital Investments shared insights on his lessons learnt when scaling a company.
We believe this is a great platform for founders to connect and share thoughts. Founders got great takeaways on how to scale up, get fundraising and align themselves with better digital systems and processes. Global Entrepreneurship Week 2018 was a success in Cape Town and we cannot wait to see it grow more next year in 2019. Look out for next year’s Cape Town Founders Conference. You don’t want to miss out!
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