I recently had a baby.
I’ve always wondered what kind of parent I’d be one day. As much as we all love our parents, I think we sometimes punish them harshly for their mistakes and forget that it was also their first time.
Yes, you may not be the firstborn… but you are unique compared to your siblings, which means whatever parenting method worked for the older ones probably didn’t work for you.
Maybe that frustrated your parents, and like anyone trying something for the first time, they made mistakes… as you would have, in their shoes.
Same thing with companies. Most founders take a few bumps before the ship steadies… even when it’s an industry they know well.
So I recently had my own baby. My own company, not the human version just yet… haha
And to call it tough would be a massive understatement. The hardest thing I’ve consistently done in my life is working out. Starting a company is a very close second.
It’s always fascinating to me how “uncomplicated” most things look until you have to do them yourself.
Easy to admire – or dismiss – someone with a fit body, until you have to muster the discipline to wake up every single day, dread the prospect of running and picking up weights, and still do it anyway.
Easy to criticise how someone presents until you have to stand in front of a crowd yourself and show us what you’ve got.
Easy to have opinions about how people spend their millions until you have to make your own.
One thing I love about doing things is the respect you develop for people who are actually in it, in the trenches… not the crowd talking about it.
Like most things I’ve tried in my life, starting this company has given me a deep new respect for people who bet on themselves and create value from nothing.
The admin alone. Sending endless emails. Payments. More payments on top of your many payments. It’s incredibly tough, and sometimes you just want a hug, a gentle tap on the shoulder and someone to tell you it will all work out.
Why am I calling this journey my baby?
Because it literally is.
There’s a 2017 study by Finnish researchers titled Entrepreneurial and Parental Love — Are They the Same?
Using fMRI scans, they measured brain activity in male entrepreneurs while showing them pictures of their own companies, and compared it to the brain activity of fathers looking at pictures of their own children.
And for entrepreneurs who said they felt deeply attached to their companies, the brain lit up in almost the same way.
So the “my company is my baby” thing is not just a figure of speech; there’s neuroscience behind it.
And honestly, I feel it. The level of fussiness I have about everything working exactly how it should is something I did not fully anticipate about myself.
This is not my first stint at entrepreneurship, though it’s probably my most serious and meticulous attempt.
I’ve tried many things that failed. The most recent was a recycling company I registered in 2019 with friends from varsity – at the peak of load-shedding, we thought we had a solution, but that idea tanked quickly.
Other ventures before that were more hustles than companies, and those failed spectacularly in their own right.
Entrepreneurship has always felt inevitable for me. I like the freedom of doing things on my own terms, which is probably true for most people with a “creative disposition”.
It’s exactly why I built this platform. The joy of designing it how I want, writing about whatever I feel like – that’s freedom I don’t take lightly.
I also grew up in a household where my parents were always selling something: airtime, electricity, chips, sweets, livestock. People passing by would sometimes ask, “Akhonto ithengiswayo ikhoyo?” – “Isn’t there something I can buy?” – because the community knew us as the family that was always counting coins.
To be fair, it wasn’t glamorous. My parents needed those side hustles because of real financial pressure.
In high school, I teamed up with one of my closest female friends to sell chips called ‘Mamas.’ I had a crush on her best friend and figured that investing in their business would get me closer to this girl.
The boy’s got rizz so the plan worked… my business partner and I ended up dating, and the business became a family affair. Ok, I’m exaggerating slightly, but we did date and our friend did most of the selling since she was easily the most well-known person in the school.
Good times man!
My first time getting robbed was actually with this same partner, sitting at our favourite spot one night.
Those guys took everything… including my shoes. Imagine walking barefoot on a tar road like you’re some free-spirited woke fella.
Writing this just brought back a flood of memories from my teens.
I want to document this journey, which is why I created a new category here: Business and Lifestyle.
As tough as carrying this baby has been over the past few weeks and months, I would not change a thing. I imagine it’s the same for parents.
As hard as raising children is, very few would trade the experience – knowing they gave everything they had, with all the constraints stacked against them.
I’ll be the first to admit this is scary. I genuinely don’t know how this relationship with my new baby will go.
But my mindset has always been: what’s worse – not acting because you’re afraid and being in the exact same place a year from now, or taking the leap and seeing where it goes? Pretty obvious which camp I’m in.
© Phumzile