The faces behind SA business
A Marketing Director’s view
What this series is
Five South African business owners, five problems that hold growing businesses back, and where to start with each. The owners are illustrative personas, built from 2026 research with more than a thousand South African small businesses. A new face goes live every Tuesday.
Most of what we read about South African small businesses comes as percentages. 62% had cash-flow trouble last year. 56.9% say finding customers is what holds them back most. 84% would rather grow steadily than fast.
Behind each of those numbers is an owner trying to make payroll, win the next client, or decide whether to put prices up. So each Solas Framework in this series starts with a person.
Meet the five
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Solas Framework #2Thandi
Her order book has never been fuller, and she’s still waiting 90 days to be paid.
Busy on paper, broke in the bank.
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Solas Framework #3Pieter
Everyone who knows him uses him. Not enough people know him.
Great at the work, hard to find.
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Solas Framework #4Aisha
Butter, fuel and electricity have all gone up, and she’s dreading Black Friday.
Full shop, thin margin.
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Solas Framework #5Samuel
December is fully booked. February worries him.
Building revenue you can count on.
Coming 27 Oct
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Solas Framework #6Nerisha
She’s never turned a client away, and lately she’s not sure that’s a good thing.
Who your best customers really are.
Coming 3 Nov
How the personas were built
None of these people are real, and none of them are Solas Creative clients. Each one is a composite: their turnover, team size and problems come from what South African owners reported in three studies this year, listed below. They’re there so the numbers feel like the businesses they describe.
All five run established businesses turning over between R6 million and R18 million a year, the kind of business that has proved it can survive and is now working out how to grow.
Want personas for your own customers?
Thandi, Pieter, Aisha, Samuel and Nerisha were built the same way I build personas for businesses: start with real data, group people by what they need, then give each group a face.
Customer segmentation means splitting your customers into a few groups who want similar things and buy for similar reasons. A buyer persona is one realistic profile for each group: who they are, what keeps them up at night, where to find them and what makes them say yes.
For your business, we build them from your own sales figures and customer conversations, not guesswork. You get:
- Three to five customer segments, ranked by what each one is worth to you.
- A persona for each segment, with their problems, their objections and where to reach them.
- The message and channels for each one, so your marketing speaks to the right people in the right place.
- A clear call on who to chase, and who to stop spending money on.
It’s part of our marketing strategy work for SMEs, and it’s often the first thing we do, because every other marketing decision gets easier once you know who you’re talking to.
Recognise one of them? If one of these five sounds like your business, or you’d like personas built for your own customers, you don’t have to work it out alone.
Start with a free 30-minute consultation. We’ll look at where you are and what to do first.
Sources
- State of South African Small Business 2026 (Xero, 16 April 2026, 427 small businesses surveyed)
- Access to customers a barrier for SMME growth (TimesLive, 17 September 2026, on the Shoprite Group’s State of the SMME in South Africa 2026 report, research by World Wide Worx with 800 small businesses)
- Surging fuel costs force South Africa SMEs into survival mode as confidence cracks (Zawya, July 2026, on the Business Partners SME Confidence Index)