#YouthMonth: The youth of South Africa is alive with possibility

Who is Rendani Nevhulaudzi?

Rendani Nevhulaudzi is an entrepreneur, passionate about the web and born in Thohoyandou, Limpopo. He is married and lives with his wife in Pretoria.

Jören is quite a unique name - can you elaborate on the story of your brand name and what your brand is all about?

Jören started as Joren Communications, which was a combination of the founders of the company, JORdan and RENdani. We decided to choose the first three letters of our names to name the company. Even though Jordan has now left the company, I decided to continue with the name - then also decided to align the name with German writing by adding the two dots on top of the O to make it more visually unique.

My passion for the web led me to start my own business to bring premium web services at affordable prices to small and medium-sized businesses.

What were some of the challenges you faced to get Jören off the ground and how did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge initially was finding business; however, we overcame this by providing premium services which led to many of our clients referring new clients to us.

Number two was cash flow, this was due to late payment and delayed projects. We were, however, lucky to receive additional funding from our banks through an overdraft and credit card, which helped a lot in managing our cashflow and paying our bills on time.

The third was growth - which we are still dealing with - getting bigger contracts that would enable us to employ skilled workers and also be able to pay them a competitive salary. We are working on this through marketing and cold sales. We also continuously ask our clients to pay us better rates in line with the premium services that we offer.

Is there enough support for youth development and entrepreneurship in South Africa? How can we improve and who needs to come to the party?

I don't think there is enough support for youth development and entrepreneurship in South Africa. You have to be lucky or staying in urban areas to access many of the youth development centers.

I believe more could be done by building office infrastructure in remote areas and providing youth-owned businesses with business opportunities. Our company makes less than a million year, but we employ eight people - imagine if we were making R10m a year; we would be able to employ at least 100 people, who are mostly youth, in the creative and technology space.

The private sector should open up more opportunities for youth-owned businesses and this will lead to many small businesses employing more people.

What does Youth Month mean to you and your team at Jören?

For me, youth month should be a time that we, the youth, have a conversation about how to deal with unemployment and how we can pull our resources together to at least employ more people. We should also have a conversation about how we can get more youth educated beyond the first degree - we need an educated generation to move this country forward.

The Youth of South Africa...

The Youth of South Africa is alive with possibility.