Za Difference Case Study

Why didn’t ZA Difference succeed?

Though ZA Difference sounds and looks as if it was pretty big, it wasn’t. It was a small entrepreneurial effort driven by passion and personal funds, including loans from friends and family, innumerable unpaid man-hours and, unfortunately, a number of individuals and businesses that ended up not getting paid. Being small and entrepreneurial meant that the project had to do without the luxuries of adequate start-up funding and the diverse, multi-skilled team it really needed. Being under-funded from the start also meant that publishing was interrupted and inconsistent, undermining the publication’s credibility with advertisers, readers and sellers. And then, we made numerous mistakes: instead of printing 30,000
We discovered towards the end of that year that the shelf-company we had acquired with the help of an accountant, was not allowed to trade, part of a host of restrictions that would normally apply to traditional non-profits, but that wouldn’t work given that we were selling a magazine! We were advised to start from scratch and register a Non-Profit Company. Through no fault of our own, it took until July 2012 before the NPC was registered. During this time we learned to our dismay that we now needed two sets of books: one for ZA Group and one for the non-profit – something we could ill
The Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities (DWCPD) pledged to fund the printing of this issue. We duly registered as a vendor with the DWCPD; changed our layout to include a message from the Minister; sold advertising space to and created advertising for organisations involved in disability month (November) – only to be told at the last moment, that the DWCPD’s finance department demanded that the job must be tendered. Even if we won the tender, it would have been too late to publish the magazine in time for disability month. Needless to say, we could not charge for any of the work we had done