The Female Founder Effect with Divya Vasant
Female Founder Name: Divya Vasant
Business Name: AMAZI SHETribe
Industry: All things women
Instagram Handle: @amazishetribe
What inspired you to start your business?
The statistic that has haunted me for over a decade is: 10% of the South African population own 90-95% of our country’s asset base while 40% of the population own the remaining 5-10% and 50% of the population have no meaningful assets, no measurable wealth and no means to create wealth.
Access to opportunity was built for a few and certainly not for women. Our economy disregards women by failing to address the systemic issues that keep women excluded. The archetype for opportunity in South Africa remains male. The way we progress women is to pioneer a new system that from inception seeks to include women which is why I founded the AMAZI tribe. A women-owned, social business that creates opportunities for women to learn, to earn and to own the value that they create.
When did you start?
2015. I incorporated our first legal entity that offered accessible, affordable beauty treatments in our store spaces by women of colour who needed an opportunity to enter the wellness industry but did not have the financial means or support to acquire the skills. As I journeyed with the women in our store spaces, I realised that I didn’t start a beauty business, I started a movement, and I needed the structure of my company to reflect that. So, in 2018, I incorporated The AMAZI Group, The AMAZI Academy and the AMAZI Trust. The Group is our holding company which owns AMAZI Beauty (the company that runs our stores) and the AMAZI Academy (the non-profit arm that subsidizes learning opportunities for women) is a member of our Group. Our Trust owns a material stake in our Group and creates the opportunity for women who work with us to build our SheTribe to participate in the value they create. Essentially, our structure reflects an eco-system not just a company.
Why this specific industry
I don’t think about AMAZI as being industry-specific. When I founded AMAZI I didn’t choose an industry, I chose women. And I continue to choose women with every step our SheTribe takes. Every new opportunity we create for women to care for themselves, to learn, to grow, to share, to build community comes from the belief that when women thrive, everyone thrives.
What obstacles did you face starting up, and how did you overcome them?
At the outset, I didn’t believe I was enough. I didn’t believe I could learn, grow and find my way to the AMAZI SHETribe that is today. I sold my vision and my ideas to people who entrenched my feeling of unworthiness because I saw them running a big, established company and naively, I thought partnering with them would see my vision realise quicker, better, bigger. It turned out to be the complete opposite. After 2 years of being undermined and my vision for AMAZI fighting against overwhelming inertia, I decided to exit that partnership to take my vision independent. It was a harrowing experience, one that maybe I could have avoided if 28-year old me saw more young brown women being bold and backing themselves. But it also taught me that I am my best asset. We’ve navigated some crazy moments building AMAZI. From having close to R0 in the bank account more times than I can count and pushing our way back into a positive bank balance, to being chained out of premises by landlords that operate outside ethical bounds, to navigating burn out, whatever we come up against, I have learnt that the first place I look is within myself. I’ve proved that to myself that I am everything I ever need.
What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned since starting your business?
Your gut, your intuition is your compass. In many ways, we’ve been taught to silence our gut. Our intuition is such a visceral, animal instinct that serves a purpose in affirming our choices. I found that my time in corporate dulled my gut instincts and overrode that wiring with “corporate protocol”. It was only when I left that highly manicured environment and had to start making decisions with no frameworks, protocols or any other rule book guiding me that I realized how disconnected I was from my intuition. It’s taken me years to reconnect to my gut and even longer to trust it and use it to make decisions. The financial and emotional cost of not following my gut, not ending working relationships when my gut told me to, not following a lead my gut told me to is something I look back on and hope I never forget so that when my gut twinges today, I stop and take the time to listen to it.
Why work for yourself when there’s stability in working for others?
Simply put, because most work spaces were created without me in mind. When I say without me, I mean a young, brown, radical woman. Most South African companies, even start-ups are still founded by men and the reality is, we are wired to create, support and find community with what is familiar to us. We naturally create spaces which make us feel like we belong and there are still too few spaces being created by women of colour. So, we have to adjust ourselves in so many small ways to fit into companies that didn’t create with us in mind that a few years down the line, when we take a hard look in the mirror, there’s so much about our essence that we’ve dulled. Inadvertently, in spaces that weren’t made for us, we’ll hear that we are “too loud”, “too pushy”, “too demanding”, “too opinionated”, “too difficult”, “too aggressive” (all things I’ve been told about myself) and we’ll slowly be broken down, muted and reconfigured to be more “acceptable”. At some point there isn’t a big enough rand value that can justify constantly apologizing for being you.
What is the one characteristic that you possess that has helped make you so successful?
The importance I place on self-awareness, self-knowledge and the relationship I have with myself. I’ve been actively working on my relationship with me for over a decade through life-coaching, leadership coaching, therapy and self-discovery tools such as the Enneagram. I’ll never stop placing priority on learning myself because broken people build broken organisations. Your organisation is a mirror to your insecurities. Every time you are triggered, and you allow your inner victim to succumb to your insecurities, you will see those reflected back in how people engage with you and each other, in the anxiety they start carrying, in the toxicity that starts building. I’ve learnt that the most self-less act I can do for my tribe is to be curious about myself and investing in the tools and the professional support to deepen the relationship I have with me.
What’s your guiding business philosophy?
Numbers will always show you the truth, the reality. Numbers empower you to see how a dynamic system lives, they show you how decisions take away from some and add to others. They empower you to see the whole picture in a way few other frameworks can. To engage in the numbers is to confront the very real trade-offs that happen every day just for someone/something to survive. These trade-offs are often harsh, they’re often unkind, they’re often difficult to accept. I’m always aware of my own relationship with numbers and that an unwillingness to engage in the numbers has nothing to do with the lack of finance experience but the desperate want and need to exist in denial about our survival, which is the very time when you have to work past the fear and confront the story the numbers tell.
At what moment did this venture become real for you?
When my co-founder left a stable job in a big company to join me in building AMAZI. All I had to offer at the time was my vision. And that was enough to convince a woman to walk this journey with me. Since then, as we’ve continued building our tribe, women have chosen to walk with us. Not because we can offer the biggest salaries but because they believe in what we are building. There’s no greater affirmation for our movement than women choosing to build with us. And every day we add a woman to our team, I’m reminded of how important our movement is.
What is the most challenging part about being an entrepreneur?
Not having a blueprint that tells you how to go about things. There’s no blueprint to building a womens’ movement. There’s no blueprint that can give you the A,B,C on how to get to where you need to. You have accept that you learn through making mistakes and for many of us, women especially, making mistakes comes with a lot of self-criticism and self-inflicted guilt so accepting those mistakes; those re-directs as part of the journey is important to not getting yourself stuck.
What makes it all worth it?
Seeing women thrive. Nothing warms my insides more than seeing a woman come into our AMAZI tribe and grow. Seeing her command her space, own a meeting, smash a presentation. Seeing the magic that women create when they are given the space to be everything that they are and they are backed to realize their potential. It is exhilarating.
What advice do you have for someone just starting out?
Back yourself. Start. Try. We’ve fallen victim to thinking we needed a fancy business plan or an investment before we can even start talking to other people about our idea when in fact, starting to talk to people is the only way to get your idea going. A viable business is built on solving a problem. There are 4 leading questions I use anytime I innovate a new arm to our SheTribe:
Is there a problem that you believe you can (and want to) solve?
Do you have a sense of how many people are affected by this problem & would benefit from your solution?
How many people would you need to reach in order for you to earn enough money to cover your costs?
What do you think you’re going to need to make this solution available, in its simplest form to a group of people willing to pay for it?
When you answer these questions, send surveys/questions to your networks and get their opinion on whether your solution is something they would also find useful. If someone responds with a “no”, use that as an opportunity to ask why so that you can think through how to tailor your solution.
How do you define success?
Having enough, feeling enough, being enough. For me, success isn’t about reaching for more. More money, more recognition, more opportunity. I don’t want to be constantly reaching for my “enough”. I want to know for myself that I earn enough to live comfortably, I feel that I am enough for myself, my partner, my organisation and that I live life where I can be happy with that “enough”. Success is being happy with what I have and not postponing my happiness for some future date when I tell myself I will then have enough of everything to be able to enjoy my life.
What did you do differently from the rest of us?
I don’t think I do anything differently to any other woman who is trying to live authentically. I don’t really pay attention to the lists that are published about what “successful people do” because frankly everyone’s version of success is so different and I’d rather focus on introspecting: taking the time to look within and see where I am at, what I feel I need and follow whatever comes from those internal conversations.
What do you believe is the female founder effect?
Community. I think innately, women build communities. We’re wired to be natural social entrepreneurs. When women build businesses, we are actually building communities.
What do you believe is the most impactful and immediate action society needs to move closer to Generation Equality goals?
We are all economically worse off when women, especially brown and black women, aren’t included as equal participants in our economy.
If women and men stood on identical footing in terms of participation in the economy through paid work and entrepreneurship, the world could see as much as 28 trillion dollars in global growth by 2025- imagine that it would be the GDP of US and China put together!
It’s simple, for us all to live in a better world, more women need to start businesses, take up decision making seats. And for women to do that, we need global funding to be redirected to women. The proportion of global dollars to female-only founders sits at just over to 2% in 2020. And with just 2% of global funds, women as a collective have contributed to a 30% reduction in extreme poverty globally in the last decade. Imagine what women can do when we allocate 50% of global funds to actively support women-led initiatives!
Which woman has positively impacted you in your career/business? And what is the one lesson she taught you?
I have been fortunate to build a community of women along my journey who I have drawn inspiration from and who have rooted for me. I love learning from like-minded women, there’s nothing quite like the endorphin release you experience when you have a real conversation with a woman who you find alignment with. However, the most powerful conversations I’ve had that have pushed me to be brave are those with the women that lie within me. I found the source of my bravery sits deep within and is made up of generations of women who came before me that each fought in their own way to give way to my being. I am always appreciative of the inspiration I can draw externally from other women but the power of the generations of women within me give me the invitation I need to be brave, to be bold and to do it all unapologetically. Building a movement for women in a patriarchal country is a challenge to be brave daily.
What is your superpower?
Laughing at myself. I can be so incredibly silly and I love that about myself. Just letting go and indulging my inner-child.
What centres you?
Meditation. I meditate every day. Sometimes it’s only 5 minutes other times it’s an hour but every day I take a few minutes to still myself and talk to the women that live within me, especially my grandmother who passed away when I was very young but who still feels alive and vivid in my mind & heart.
What is your next adventure?
Writing my story. I remember when I started AMAZI, I tried attending talks, workshops, book launches by entrepreneurs so that I could find inspiration to start what I knew would be the most challenging journey of my life. It deflated me to encounter mostly men standing up and sharing their stories. If I look back, I can see the timid, unsure yet wildly passionate young woman sitting at the back of these talks desperate to connect to someone’s story. Our reality as women, especially women of colour, is so under-documented, it’s no surprise we are left out of history. This thought has been sitting uncomfortably in the back of my mind for a long time.
