By: Tebogo Mokwena
For Fikile Ndaba, being a single mother and wanting the best life for her child, encouraged her to the point where she now owns two businesses. Her desire to create jobs also played a part in her forming her businesses. Ndaba started her accounting firm Fifi Ndaba in 2015 and opened a pie shop this year. “I was motivated by the growth the accounting firm is experiencing and channelled the growth into another company,” she told Vutivi News.
Although the Rustenburg businesswoman opened her firm in 2015, she only started focusing on it full-time in 2020 after losing her job. “My love for the firm grew as I continued working my job at corporate,” Ndaba said. She was a financial analyst assisting SMMEs to get funding and helping them develop. Her businesses currently employ 13 people and are based in Rustenburg. Ndaba said that in the early days of her accounting firm, one of the tough choices she had to deal with was pricing her services appropriately.
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“My target market was township businesses and I had to come up with less pricing and this was a challenge because many small businesses cannot afford bookkeeping services,” she said. “I had to come up with a tailor-made package for them and I allow them to pay me on a monthly basis as opposed to for each service.” She has big plans for her pie business, Fifi and Son Pies.
“I love pies with all of my heart and I have a client who runs a bakery and who steered me on how to start the business,” she said. “I am thinking of expanding and opening a branch in Mabopane because it is where I’m from and there has been a growing demand for my pies in that area.” According to Ndaba, one of her biggest achievements was having the South African Music Awards as a client for two years. She was also involved in managing the project of opening the first upside-down school in the world, the Surprise Shondlane Upside Down School, which is also based in Rustenburg.
The school does not function as as a regular, everyday school, but invites education institutions to bring their learners for an innovative day. It is designed to give children a practical example of thinking outside the box and focuses on engineering, sciences and ICT. “I love how when I put a plan together for a business and the plan is followed to the letter, and when there is success the client shares their joy with me,” said Ndaba. “I see myself with at least six franchises for the pie business in the next five years, as well as contributing to eradicating unemployment by encouraging the businesses I work with to hire locally for their projects.”
