I'm lucky enough to have been born into an entrepreneurial family. My dad, since he was kicked out of the Air Force as a young 21-year-old started his own business and I've been privileged enough to see him navigate the ups as well as the many, many downs of that.

The Heavy Chef Foundation was started as a nonprofit of Heavy Chef Pty Ltd, the company, the brand that you all know. We quickly realized there are many entrepreneurs who do not have the means to attend the events that we host or sign up to our education platform. That's why we referred to these entrepreneurs as 'disconnected entrepreneurs' because they were disconnected from any of the learning experiences that we were offering.

If we ask entrepreneurs what they think about formal education institutions that teach entrepreneurship to entrepreneurs, there are only a few names that are being held in high regard. Generally, entrepreneurs just do not feel that entrepreneur education - as it currently is - is good enough for them or is a bit disconnected from their needs.

The problem that the Heavy Chef Foundation is trying to solve is that there are just too many entrepreneurs, especially in the South African context, that are disconnected from resources, that have a direct impact on their own development.

If I were to summarize, the five learning habits of entrepreneurs is that they learn solo, they learn micro, they learn real, they learn critical, and they learn local.

In order to answer that question, you need to get into the psyche of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are short-term orientated. They focus on instant gratification, the things that will make the biggest impact on the business right now.

We've recently focused on the topic of e-commerce education, and we did this for various reasons. Obviously, the pandemic has led to many bricks and mortar types of businesses being forced to move online, either in part or fully. Or many people are just starting online businesses because they need to find a job and create their own thing and generate an income.

These micro and small online stores are an important part of the economy moving forward because you do want them to grow and you do want them to start employing one or two more people and contribute to the job creation in the country. So the big question that I'm very interested in and the Foundation is focusing on as well is, how do we support these micro and small online businesses? 

If you think about what the barriers to learning are for e-commerce entrepreneurs, you need to understand the context of the e-commerce space in its current form. The last two years have seen an exponential increase in the number of online stores coming onto the radar. So the challenge with that is that there hasn't been a sense of community that's formed around e-commerce entrepreneurs.

I think formal education institutions, in general, need to make more of a concerted effort to try and personalise learning and education, as best they can. Every single individual entrepreneur is unique and increasingly we are noticing as a grassroots organisation that we need to be responsive, even at the level of the individual, to what their learning needs are.