Nataliey BitatureEmpowering Africa's Next Generation: Leadership, Innovation, and Impact with Dr Nataliey.

How to Land Life-Changing Deals

29 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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1:00

In this segment, the speaker tells the story of a social‑enterprise woman who runs an orphanage where teenage girls craft colorful bags from recycled straws. When a Coca‑Cola executive requests 10,000 bags for a sustainability campaign, the entrepreneur discovers that fulfilling the order requires a straw‑flattening machine she cannot afford. The speaker explains how asset‑financing from a partner like Absa Bank can purchase the needed equipment, allowing the business to scale, meet the large order, and repay the loan as revenue grows. The core message is that the barrier to life‑changing deals is often a simple piece of machinery, not lack of skill or passion, and that appropriate financing can bridge that gap.

Chapters

What do you do when what is stopping you from making a life-changing business deal is a simple machine? There was this very entrepreneurial lady in the early days of her working women. She had this wonderful orphanage and she had all these teenage girls, so they used to make bags out of recycled straws. They made all kinds of cute little bags in all kinds of colors. And one day an executive from Coca-Cola came and loved the bags and he said, can I get 10,000 of these bags? We can use it for our sustainability initiative. We can sell them and give them out and it would be amazing. She was like, wow. But the only way to make that of big order, you'd need a machine to be flattening all these straws so that they can weave them, and she didn't have the money for it. This is where you need partners like Absa Bank to give you asset financing. They pay for the asset, the machine, they buy it for you, and then you pay back slowly as your business grows, as you fulfill orders, as you get paid. Because it really sucks when what is standing between you and a deal isn't skill, it isn't passion, it's just a machine.