Building a wealth-generating business from scratch is hard and doing it in such a way that you can pass it on to your children is even harder. Many entrepreneurs aspire to this, but few achieve it. Children often have their own aspirations, which usually don’t involve taking over the business where they witnessed their parent’s prolonged struggles.
Nocwaka Mazaleni, owner of the luxury Kwantu Guesthouses in Milnerton Ridge, Cape Town, is set to become one of those few entrepreneurs who can crown her entrepreneurial achievement with the act of handing over a thriving business to the next generation.
After spending her whole career toiling in her businesses, Nocwaka is in the process of handing over the running of her guesthouses to her two sons. “I have been blessed,” she says, “They are so much better educated than I ever was. They are professional, and they are ready to take the business to the next level.”
One of her sons is already running the day-to-day operations of Nokwantu, a 34-bed complex of luxury guesthouses that Nocwaka has steadily built, room by room, over the past 20 years. And her other son works part-time in the business while finishing his articles in one of Cape Town’s law firms.
It is an astounding achievement given Nocwaka’s childhood in the poverty-stricken Gugulethu township under the oppressive heel of apartheid. She started her first business sewing dresses in a single room, scarcely 15 km from where her Kwantu Guesthouses now stand.
She soon became known for her high-quality dresses that fused African style with modern fashion. When freedom came, Nocwaka was part of the vanguard of black entrepreneurs who moved out of the townships into South Africa’s central business districts from which they were barred for so long. She opened upmarket boutiques specialising in African fusion-style fashion in Cape Town’s tourism hotspots. No longer a survival entrepreneur, Nocwaka could for the first time develop her dream of building her own boutique hotel in the African fusion style which she became known for as a fashion designer.
The kind of finance required for building a hotel was out of her reach, so Nocwaka implemented a strategy of buying residential homes, one at a time within the same neighbourhood and gradually converting each house into a guest house. The result is akin to a hotel, but with rooms dispersed across multiple properties, offering a homely and peaceful ambiance that would be difficult to replicate in a single consolidated hotel.
One of the organisations that bought into Nocwaka’s vision was Business Partners Limited, which financed several of her property acquisitions over the years. Two factors made Business Partners Limited the ideal financier for Nocwaka’s venture. First, it is willing to consider 100% finance so that the entrepreneur does not have to drain the business of cash in order to scrape together a deposit. And secondly, instead of requiring full collateral to secure the loan, Business Partners Limited is prepared to consider the track record of the entrepreneur.
Nocwaka says her relationship with the financier has evolved and she prefers Business Partners Limited for financing. She finds their negotiations to be more direct and tailored, unlike the impersonal computerised systems of the banks.
Over the years, Kwantu Guesthouses’ clientele has also evolved. Early on, the business relied heavily on previous work acquaintances and medical tourism due to its proximity to a major private hospital in the area. Then Nocwaka made inroads into the corporate world by becoming preferred accommodation for traveling executives. Most recently, years of rave reviews about Kwantu as a top-quality stay in Cape Town have achieved a critical mass so that today most of its customers are overseas tourists.
Nocwaka says the recipe for her success is consistent quality service and relentless marketing. Now it has become a family recipe that can be passed down from generation to generation.
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