The CESA Youth Best Practice Webinar - Leadership & Entrepreneurship - Engineering My Business My Story, took place on Thursday, 2 December, and it was an insightful online engagement for attendees. Facilitating this online session was CESA Young Professionals Forum national chairperson, Renee Petersen who thanked attendees for joining and sponsors for their contributions towards YPF initiatives in 2021.

The guest speaker was Jamal Sahib, a business coach, business strategist and expert negotiator at Africa32 Business Consulting. In his opening address, he talked about his journey from the small town of Estcourt in KwaZulu-Natal and how he chose the engineering field over medicine despite his father’s concerns over his career choice.

In his presentation titled ‘Engineering my business my story’, Sahib spoke about entrepreneurship in South Africa and stated that the reality is that government should not be creating jobs in this country because it is not the role of government to create jobs. “It is the role of government to create an environment for entrepreneurs to create jobs because when government creates jobs, those salaries need to be paid for through tax,” stated Sahib.

According to Sahib, there is a huge difference between an entrepreneur and a hustler. “An entrepreneur is actually the ultimate level. Now, if you had to picture an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur would be somebody like Jeff Bezos, an entrepreneur would be somebody like Mike Teke, an entrepreneur right now would be a Patrice Motsepe.”

Sahib also mentioned that we have engineers that go out there, they start their own consultancies. “They've learned for many years how to be consultants, and how to be engineers, but they don't take the time to learn how to run a business,” he stated.

In his closing remarks, Sahib stated: “You need to learn how to lead. You need to learn how to implement the right systems in your organization, how to recruit the right people, how to have the right systems for them to follow the system to be able to deliver the result that you need.”

Providing the closing remarks was Uzair Osman, CESA YPF Vice Chairperson who thanked everyone for joining this insightful webinar.