For Yolisa Kobo, the owner of a thriving occupational therapy business in Durban, her journey in entrepreneurship started in humble beginnings in the deep rural areas of the Eastern Cape, in a tiny village of Macosa where she grew up.
Her mother, the nurse in charge of the local clinic and her father, the principal of the local junior secondary school, were both towering figures in the development of the area where they still had to use horses to reach out to all corners of the district that 4x4s could not reach.
When she thinks about her career, Yolisa sees it as an uninterrupted continuation of the developmental work of her pioneering parents. Where they pioneered the first professional health and educational services in their region, Yolisa pioneered the integration of professional occupational therapy in the schooling system in KwaZulu-Natal, and brought the service to communities who previously had no access to it, before helping to blaze a trail for black professionals in the private sector.
Last month, Yolisa and her associate Mariam Meer moved the busy practice, Yolisa Occupational Therapist Inc, to a premises in Morningside, Durban, after more than a decade of working from rented premises in and around the city centre.
Yolisa bought a medical practitioners house with 100% finance from Business Partners Ltd, which subsequently required major renovation to suit her practice needs.
After matriculating in 1981, Yolisa studied teaching and taught for a number of years but yearned to do something medical. She found an almost perfect combination between her mother and father’s professions in occupational therapy, and after qualifying as an occupational therapist in 1997, she joined a team of diverse professionals at a school for children with cerebral palsy. From there she moved up the ranks in the education system, working on the development of professional therapy services in KwaZulu-Natal schools, but on Saturdays and after hours she treated patients privately in order to gain as much experience as she could.
She was also driven by the immense satisfaction of unlocking the abilities of children with barriers to learning, some of whom have gone on to achieve at higher tertiary skilled levels in various fields e.g., accountants, attorneys, actuaries.
In 2008, there was significant growth in her part time private practice while she was still working full time as a Provincial Assistant Director for education therapists (occupational therapists, speech therapists and physiotherapists within Department of Education) and having acted as a chief education specialist of KwaZulu-Natal’s special schools.
She decided that private practice was a better fit for her pioneering nature and her desire to explore new avenues and develop new skills. It was a high economical risk to leave the security of a salary, she says, but she never looked back. Soon her schedule in her small consultation room in a medical complex in the Durban city centre was full to the brim.
She also found that her range of cases started expanding from her previous focus on children’s learning and education disabilities, and she quickly gained experience with adults in workplace assessments and interventions and medical cases, especially from the Road Accident Fund.
A prominent feature of Yolisa’s business and career is her emphasis on training. Both she and her associate Mariam view their qualification as occupational therapists as merely the starting point of their professional development. Mariam has qualified with a post-graduate Diploma in Vocational Rehabilitation. Yolisa is constantly busy updating and expanding her skills by doing courses in paediatric therapy (neurodevelopmental therapy), work performance evaluation, and ergonomic analysis of workplaces, among others.
Her increasing involvement as an expert in legal suits that stem from road and workplace accidents has piqued her interest in medical law and professional advanced mediation services, and, true to her life-long habit, she has enrolled in courses in both fields.
Her emphasis on skills development extends to everyone in her practice, including her practice manager who has completed project management certifications (in addition to her Social Science Degree) and her administrator who recently completed a Diploma in Business Management.
Yolisa says the limiting factor in the growth of her practice had always been premises. Every time she moved to a bigger site, the practice experienced a growth spurt, even though the moves took her further away from medical hubs.
With her new premises in Lennox Road, Morningside, she is expecting a rapid and varied expansion of the practice. Furthermore, the fact that she owns the premises allows her to shape and expand it as she wants.
In the longer term, says Yolisa, she plans to look further afield at ways in which she can get involved in bringing professional services to the disadvantaged rural areas of the Eastern Cape, where it all began for her.
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