Stay true to your purpose – founder of Discovery tells entrepreneurs

Riversands Incubation Hub hosted its 10th edition of the monthly Business Club event with Themba Baloyi, founder and executive director of Discovery Insure, as the guest speaker.

His talk was titled, A Journey of Discovery, and he decided to subtitle it ‘personal experiences in pursuit of purpose to realise the Discovery Insure dream’. Baloyi stressed that entrepreneurs must identify their purpose, then have the self-awareness and control and resolution to live it and achieve it.

“If you lack self-control, you’ll find yourself with your hands in the cookie jar one day and you’ll lose it all,” he said. To stay on course, he advised entrepreneurs to develop something he called, a personal professional objective statement to clearly outline their direction and vision. He explained that in the course of their journeys, entrepreneurs would come across many people who were not aligned to their purpose, there would be obstacles as well as pain and heartache and if one was not resolute and true to their purpose, they would be derailed.

Baloyi has been described as a visionary, strategic thinker and innovator dedicated to seeking collaborative solutions to today’s challenges – and judging by his talk, one could see why. He told those in attendance that it was not the absence of ideas that prevented greatness. Entrepreneurs needed to have conviction and see thousands of opportunities instead of seeing a thousand problems.

The entrepreneur, who is also a long-distance runner, emphasised to his audience that the business world was not a sprint, it was an ultra-marathon. And he has lived through this and saw it first hand with the establishment of Discovery Insure, which took seven years to bring to life. Nowadays, the short-term insurance company, launched in 2011, makes billions every year and Baloyi revealed that he was relentless in his pursuit because he was driven by finding a solution to protect people’s lives.

Baloyi asked entrepreneurs to consider the following questions as they build their businesses:

• Who am I and why am I doing these things? – Self-governance
• Where do I want to go and what are my steps to get closer to this vision? – Destiny
• How am I going to deal with doubt, fear and rejection? – Embracing failure
• What am I doing right now to get where I want to be? – Getting started.

In closing, he encouraged entrepreneurs to break barriers by doing greater works, act on their convictions, stay focused and most importantly, always remember who they are.