Those fingers can still do the walking

According to the president, you lot are a lazy bunch of work-shy beggars with an entitlement complex.

Which is a bit rich coming from Mr Safety Pool, but Zuma-bashing is not really the point of today's column - I leave that to the likes of Justice Malala.

What I wanted to tell you today was that a young woman called Tshepiso Phaho would beg to differ with the Big Man's assessment of our national work ethic. At least as far as it relates to those wonderful people - the self-employed.

Phaho is an account manager at Leads Machine. In case you've never heard of them, they belong to a company you also might never have heard of, Trudon.

Trudon are the people who publish a thing you've definitely heard of, called the Yellow Pages.

Nowadays, the Yellow Pages is not what it used to be. Until not that long ago the biggest book in most people's homes was the Yellow Pages (at least the people who lived in Joburg, Cape Town or Durban). Then a thing called the internet came along and rather disrupted Trudon's business. These days, some people still let their fingers do the walking and look for an electrician in the much-slimmed-down yellow book but most revert to things called search engines.

So Trudon has had to adapt its business model, very much embracing the internet. These days they offer lots of search options and, in South Africa, they have Leads Machine. Leads Machine employs clever young women like Phaho to design and execute digital strategies for SMEs - to get them business leads.

I know Phaho because recently I got her and her colleagues to do some work for my itsy-bitsy little business. The brief was very simple: get me downloads of the app I'd developed. (I'd love to tell you what it's called but then I would get into trouble with the editor for self-promotion.)

After I mentioned that I had a particular interest in small business, Phaho shared with me some information she thought I might be interested in. While Leads Machine are busy promoting little businesses for a fee, they're also busy promoting themselves, to little businesses that need promoting. So they have a website. One of the interesting things Leads Machine noticed about its website was when (what hours of the day) entrepreneurs were looking at it.

According to Phaho, 10.3% of people check them out between 6am and 7am and 20.5% do so after 7pm. Only 2.6% of visits are between 8am and 11am.

In other words, SME owners are working their backsides off during normal office hours, laying bricks, washing dogs, bending bits of steel or whatever it takes to make a buck.

Then, at lunchtime (20.5% of Leads Machine's eyeballs), they tackle their business's marketing while munching a cheese sandwich in between making deliveries and sending out invoices. And they particularly go looking for marketing help late at night, when the lazy people with real jobs are watching MasterChef.

Thanks to Phaho my arsenal of acronyms has a new addition. Entrepreneurs, she tells me, aren't DIY types; the clever ones are DIFM, which, I now know, is the exact opposite of DIY. When it comes to marketing, entrepreneurs don't want to be sold software and marketing tools they simply don't have the time to learn how to use. They might rather fancy having agency people with throwing them tequila parties and sending them spreadsheets about their companies' appreciating brand equity but they don't have the time and the money for such stuff. So they approach people like Leads Machine and tell them: "DIFM - do it for me".

Which is exactly where I was coming from when I approached them; I had absolutely no intention of ever learning about the ins and outs of online marketing and nor did my client. But when, the other day, I saw the CEO of the company that had paid for the app I developed for them (and which Leads Machine marketed through Facebook), I thought the man was going to kiss me. And he's just given me more money to make another one for him. Much more money than I gave Leads Machine.

This internet thing is here to stay and nowadays non-lazy entrepreneurs can actually afford to exploit it.

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