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Kalnisha Singh is a development economist who specialises in strategic industrial and economic transformation. The founding director of KD Strategies, she currently consults within the financial, mining, and renewable energy sectors. Kalnisha has received numerous industry accolades, including Most Impactful Strategic & Operational Support Company (2024 MEA Markets African Excellence Awards) and Women In Energy Award (2023 South African National Energy Development Initiative). Kalnisha was kind enough to share her success story with us, plus advice for other business owners on the importance of strategy, planning, and intentionality.
I started as an independent consultant in 2003, and that evolved into KD Strategies. We have a core team of staff, and our model is collaborative, so we work through a series of associates. We’ve tried to keep it non-traditional.
I started working very early in my life. My first job, while I was still at school, was in the debtors department of a big pharmaceutical manufacturing company during the holidays. Nobody in their department wanted to work over Christmas. Around the time I was 16 or 17, my mom started a business. I’d help her with admin, so I got lots of informal work experience.
I fell into independent consulting, which is the basis for KD Strategies and my business now, completely by accident. When I was studying, I was on a scholarship. One of the conditions was that I could be sent into projects to repay the bursary. Usually, it was to make tea and do manual stuff like filing, but by the time I was in my third year, I was doing research, data gathering, and data analysis. In my final year, I was sent into a project that was sponsored by an international development agency. There was a funding proposal, and my work was a line item that was budgeted for. They only realised that I wasn’t being paid when they were doing the quarterly reconciliation, which was obviously a big problem. The work had been done, but the money hadn’t been spent, so that’s when I drew my first invoice. And that’s how it all started.
I’m very idealistic, and time can run away with me in any direction, but I learnt very early on that I need to block out time, which is easiest for me on a week-by-week basis. It gives me room to manoeuvre and be spontaneous.
We’re an advisory business, so our work revolves around designing and executing diverse projects for clients. I spend three days during the traditional week doing this work, and then I try to keep one day for engagement with our staff and associates, and another for training and professional development – understanding what’s going on in our ecosystem, and new methods, models, knowledge, and tools that are available. We spend a day on that every week, quite consistently.
And then I spend a day on admin and working on the business: designing new products, services or methods of engagement, and revisiting strategy. (Yes, that’s six days in a week!)
I have a lot of spinoff initiatives that usually come out of this thinking: a couple of not-for-profit initiatives, and some revenue-generating models as well.
There’s always merit in studying. But university-level qualifications around very generic topics are less relevant now than ever before. If you don’t know where you want to end up, there’s very little point in signing up for a general course and hoping for the best. Rather explore your curiosities in individual modules or courses, and then find what you’re most interested in or good at. Find your purpose that way.
My parents were hustlers, essentially. My dad didn’t really have an education. He always said he was unemployable, so he hustled his way with little businesses, mostly in the informal sector. But we still had a really good life: he managed to pay school fees, and we were still fed. And my mom’s story is very similar. She did finish high school, but I remember her studying for her undergraduate when I was already an older child. Then she started climbing the corporate ladder.
At university, when I was studying finance, economics, and even entrepreneurship, they were just theoretical constructs. Concepts like making a budget only started making sense to me much later. But still to this day, I refer back to my strategic management textbook from 20 years ago. That will be the starting point, and then I’ll Google for updated information.
That’s such a difficult question to answer because there really is no balance! I’m very, very passionate about the work that we do, so I find it consuming. As a mother, that’s difficult. Especially when I was a young mother, I was wracked with guilt. If I wasn’t super stressed about work, I was stressing because of maternal guilt. I had a conversation with my therapist at the time, and her advice was, “Define for yourself the kind of life that you want your kids to live. Not today, but eventually. What kind of adults do you want them to be? And based on that vision, make decisions on a day-to-day basis.”
I want my kids to be productive members of society; I want them to contribute. The most empowering thing is to take them along. So if we’re implementing a community project in rural Northern Cape, they come with me for a weekend.
If I have afternoon meetings, instead of doing them at the office, I’ll do them at a coffee shop and I’ll bring them along and put them in a corner, so we’re in the same space at the same time. What’s lovely now is that my oldest son is more curious. He’ll ask, “How did that meeting go? What did you talk about?” So if he goes on to study business, he’ll have had exposure to some of these concepts.
Instead of me trying to adjust who I am to fit into these very specific containers of “this is what work needs to look like, this is what home needs to look like, this is what my personal stuff needs to look like”, I’ve tried to integrate everything so it works together.
The devastating reality of our transformation ecosystem right now is that a lot of the decisions that small and growing businesses make are made from a place of fear. People are afraid of the legislation; they’re afraid of what it means for their business. And then there’s the narrative in the media about everything that’s gone wrong with BEE and all this negativity. A lot of business owners are sold solutions that aren’t necessarily fit for their purpose, or they end up spending too much money because they choose the wrong partners.
So my first piece of advice is to ask: “Why do you want to embark on this journey?” It can be a completely non-judgemental conversation. If you’re running a little poultry business and selling eggs to your neighbours, it’s not commercially relevant for you. So what’s your motivation? Then design a strategy from that point of intention.
If you still want to transform because you want to empower your employees, then that’s a very different strategy that you need, compared to someone selling ICT services to telecoms who have a commercial mandate to achieve a certain BEE level.
If we deal with your transformation from a risk mitigation or compliance perspective, then it becomes a line item in your financial statement every year: this was an operating expense.
Or if you invest time, effort, energy, R&D and capital in it, it can be designed to be an asset for your business.
It’s as simple as that, but small business owners are not offered those alternatives because people sell products rather than solutions.
I have to be super-intentional about making time to work on the business and reflect on strategic intentions. It’s very easy to become consumed by the work itself. If you spend too much time on that, the opportunity cost is that you’re not spending time on strategy and growing. So that’s an ongoing challenge.
The markets have shifted significantly in the last 20 years. The market today is completely different to two years ago, which was completely different to before Covid. So we’re expecting that pace of change to accelerate, and that’s a perpetual challenge. It means that a focus on strategic intent is more important now than ever.
Do you have intentions that need capital to realise? A dedicated business funding analyst is available to help you make it happen. Contact us to discuss your funding goals.
