4.EDITORIAL A warm welcome to our June issue
7. LEVI ROOTS Business digest talks to Levi Roots on how he rose to the top
11. HOW TO START YOUR OWN BUSINESS WITH AS LITTLE AS £100 By Fanele Moyo
We examine different ways of deploying yourself and creating your own job
18. LINDA BEKOE Adapting her company to the new playing field
21. HOW STARTUPS ARE GETTING FUNDING DURING COVID-19 By
Money cannot be the excuse of not starting your business
Russell Turner
14. 5 SKILLS THAT ARE ESSENTIAL FOR RUNNING AN ONLINE BUSINESS By Fanele Moyo
24. SOCIAL DISTANCING: THE COMPANIES THAT ARE HELPING PEOPLE By Russell Turner
Working remotely presents a number of challenges. We look at the skills that are essential.
Startup funding solutions
We analyse companies that adapted to change and changed to adapt
17. THREE WAYS TO CREATE YOUR 28. MARK WRIGHT A View From The Top OWN JOB By Fanele Moyo
Every crisis produces an opportunity. Some already starting their own businesses. But running a business isn't child ‘s play. It is nerve shredding and all-consuming. At the same time it is fulfilling. Business Digest Magazine is here to assist you in your journey. Out Of Work Into Entrepreneurship. The pandemic has pushed people to the limit and left many feeling isolated and vulnerable and others jobless and shutting up their businesses.
In this issue we feature an established and successful businessman, reggae star, television personality and celebrity chef, Levi Roots, whose life has turned out the way he wanted, but not without challenges.
INTERVIEW WITH LEVI ROOTS Growing up in the seventies in Brixton, London, talent alone didn’t guarantee a breakthrough for a young black man neither did labouring under considerable ignorance. Levi Roots, with a strategy and an alert mind, navigated his way to success.
What’s the biggest factor that has helped you to be successful? Levi Roots: The ability to change my mindset and to adapt has helped me. We are all born with this entrepreneurial ability even if one can further it with studies. You have to be able to adapt to situations as they come. Because of the situation that you are brought up in even myself when I was growing up in South London in the seventies when it was difficult for anybody to be black much more when you were a Jamaican boy without any education. The key thing was being able to adapt to the situation that faced you and being able to make the best out of it.
What were the major challenges that you had to overcome? There were many challenges that I had to come against especially getting a job as a black young man and the post code I lived in. Those were massive obstacles and I had to work much harder than somebody else coming from a better background than me. It was difficult, knowing you were just as good as the person riding high or driving past you in a fancy car or even somebody in the same line of work that you are doing in a higher position and you know within yourself that you could be there with him or even better but bearing in mind the situation you are in, you are not able to compete. Those things are frustrating but this is the point of adapting. You still want change and have to fight for that but at the same time there is way to do that and
that is not kicking down the doors. The situation was about the doors that I faced before Dragon’s Den. Sometimes people from my background would want to kick those doors down because they know they are unjust. You know you deserve to be beyond those doors. So, you get angry and want to kick down the doors. But for me it wasn’t about kicking down those doors. I wanted to strategically work my way to convince whoever was behind the doors to open them up for me. I had to educate myself about the person behind those closed doors, so that when the doors opened, I was ready to have a fruitful conversation with them.
INTER What advice would you give to unemployed black youth? Always work out what you want to do. When you are younger that is a bit difficult because it may change several times. After you have finished your education, hopefully you know what you want to do. Secondly, have a business plan. If you don’t have a business plan it’s called hustling and I did that for many years. Hustling is for short term. Business takes care of you for a long time and that needs planning. Thirdly, educate yourself. Stand out. Make sure you are ready to carry out the business plan. Sometimes the idea falls through, not because it was a bad idea but because of the person behind the idea. They are not quite ready to take the business forward. Evaluate your own skills and if there is a gap, upskill yourself. Fourthly, work out who your mentor is. No matter how much you think you know something, there is always somebody who knows more than you. Even, I had to do that. My first mentor was Nadia Jones, a fantastic lady that I found in Brixton. She helped me on how to sell the sauce and how to sell Levi Roots. You need a mentor to tweak the
business plan, to tweak your presentations with what it would be like in those rooms, beyond the closed doors. Lastly, it’s getting the funding or investors. The investors, above all, invest in the person no matter how good the product. People invest in people. I had a great story, a great product and an excellent niche with regards to Caribbean food. The Levi Roots brand continues to grow and Levi is venturing into the film industry. Levi remains a humble, accessible mentor who hasn’t forgotten his roots.
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Fanele Moyo Author, Entrepreneur Business Director.
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By Russell Turner
Russell Turner Marketing and Strategic Partnerships Director at Business Digest Magazine
MEMORIES FROM YOUR FUTURE
By Russell Turner
Free EBOOK available from wwww.bestbusinessdigest.com
INTER
Mark Wright is an award-winning and self-taught digital marketing specialist. He is a noteworthy winn UK’s fastest growing digital marketing agencies ‘Climb Online’, in partnership with Lord Sugar. Climb quarters is in London and it boasts a multi-million-pound turnover. Mark now plan
A VIEW FROM THE TOP
Q》What was your biggest mistake and what did you learn from it? Hiring the wrong people. In my time in business I have hired some very poor staff. I was once told that customers are never the problem in business. I is, it’s always the staff and& that one bad apple can rot the whole tree. I have learnt that good people cost good money and that all staff need is continued development at all levels.
Q》Who or what has been most influential in your career and why?
Mark Wright, An Award-Winning Entrepreneur.
My Mum and & Dad were both business owners and that was what made me want to run my own company (to be like them). From there I would say that Lord Sugar has more recently played a huge part in shaping my career. I guess that's what The Apprentice is all about.
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ner of BBC’s, The Apprentice. In securing the winner’s title, Mark went on to found and develop one of the Online is the most successful business to have been founded by an Apprentice winner to date. Its headns to transform Climb Online into a global brand – with Australia firmly in his plans.
Q》If you could eat dinner with 3 people living or deceased who would it be? The three people I would want to eat dinner with are: * Andrew Carnegie * Barack Obama * Ricky Gervais I admire all three of these people for different reasons, but what brings them together is their innovative approach to their careers and goals.
Q 》What advice can you give to small business owners on how to take their business to the next level regarding raising finance? The first thing is, you must want to take your business to the next level. So many people run “lifestyle businesses” and get caught up being small time. You would be surprised how easy it is to scale a business when you have the right systems and processes in place with the correct business system to scale up. You need a good core leadership team staff,, a quality product and/or service delivering and consistent sales and marketing strategy. Systems then it’s a matter of increasing sales. Once you have runs on
the board (i.e. sales/ profit), it’s MUCH easier to gain investment
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