Leap of faith: Ndia Magadagela the co-founder of Everlectric, a South African company that provides electric vehicles to businesses through a leasing service. Photos: Supplied
As we near the end of the year, conversations around the dinner table and in WhatsApp groups are shifting to “How do I pivot to be in a better place next year”?
We are consolidating this year’s wins and losses to see how we can do even better next year. But one has to be careful not to use the word “pivot” carelessly, because it requires you to bet on yourself and, in many ways, take a leap of faith, which, for many, is easier said than done.Perhaps we can take a page out of Ndia Magadagela’s book.
She co-founded Everlectric, a South African company that pro-vides electric vehicles to businesses through a leasing service. She founded it alongside Paul Plummer and Wesley van der Walt in 2020, at the height of Covid-19.
It was a time when many of us were unsure about what the future held, yet Magadagela decided to bet on herself.
Having spent 15 years in a comfortable career in finance, with the security of a monthly salary, Magadagela began entertaining the idea that perhaps there was something else she was meant to do with her life.
“I got to the age of 35 and I started asking questions like: ‘Is this what I’m gonna do for the rest of my life?’” Having worked for major corporations such as Deloitte, the Industrial Development Corporation and Momentum Metropolitan, one would think she had reached the pinnacle of her career. However, the entrepreneurial streak she inherited from her parents kept nudging her as she climbed the corporate ladder. Growing up in Venda, Limpopo, she spent her school holidays and afternoons helping her parents run their convenience store, working at the till and watching a small business operate from the inside. At university, she sold bags and ran an events business. Even while pursuing a career in accounting, she kept finding ways to build a business of her own.
It sounds simple when she speaks about the early days but those lessons in taking risks and knowing when to pounce on the next opportunity would pay off when she decided to take a chance in an industry she knew very little about: building a company around electric mobility in a country struggling to keep the lights on.
“There were so many questions,” Magadagela says, recalling clients’ concerns about power outages and the practicalities of adopting electric vehicles. “But because of the IoT layer, the Internet of Things layer, the technology behind the solution, we are live and connected to the load-shedding schedule.”
There was a lot of learning involved in ensuring the business could run successfully, six years on. “The idea, be it good or bad, is a small part of it. The strategy to achieve it is the biggest part. But also, betting on yourself is the biggest part. I think being confident in your solution takes a lot of learning. I’m not an engineer; I’m far from it. I came from finance. All I understood was how to make the model but actually, a lot of it was very foreign,” she says, laughing.
She had to rely on specialists, learn about the logistics industry and develop enough technical understanding to explain the value of the business to people who had spent decades working with conventional vehicles.
“You have to just learn, learn,” she says. “Because people will poke holes into what you know because they know more than you.”
For Magadagela, this is where betting on yourself becomes more complicated than the motivational language surrounding entrepreneurship might suggest. Confidence is not necessarily something you possess before taking a risk. Sometimes, it is something you have to build while taking it.
She points out that you cannot pivot on belief alone.
For example, she and her co-founders knew that, for the business to have a chance, they needed capital, access to markets and a financial environment that would allow a promising idea to become a sustainable operation.
That meant knocking on every door they could and even digging into their own savings to make sure the idea materialised.
“We used our own savings and bonded our houses, like literally put in everything. And we were so fortunate to be able to do that. But then, once we had run the proof of concept with five vehicles, we required a lot more capital to now move to commercialisation.”
The difficulty, she says, is that businesses can receive support while developing and testing an idea, only to encounter a funding gap when they are ready to commercialise it.
“You prove the concept. But now you need someone who will take a bet on you, a funder who will take a bet on you. But they’re all saying: ‘You have not commercialised at all,’” she says.
It is a difficult position for a young business to occupy: it must demonstrate that its model works but proving that model requires the capital it cannot yet access.
It is usually at this point that many businesses throw in the towel. This is why persistence matters, as does modifying your ideas and finding a tested route to pivot.
Today, Everlectric works with clients across several sectors, including retail, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications and logistics. During the interview, Magadagela puts its fleet at about 300 vehicles and says the company is exploring opportunities in mining.
The growth is significant but she remains conscious of the distance between where the business is and where she hopes it will go.
Asked what frightens her about the future, she does not immediately point to competitors, funding or the uncertainties of the electric mobility market. Instead, she worries about whether she is developing enough capacity within herself to lead the business as it grows.
“The CEO of the five vehicles that we had five years ago and the thousand vehicles that we’re working towards is the same person but they need to have grown in themselves,” she says.I hope you realise that this story is not just about business. It is about how you always have time to reinvent yourself, to mould yourself into whoever you want to be.
Betting on yourself is not a declaration that you have all the answers. It is a willingness to begin without them, to learn what you do not know and to change course when necessary, just like Magadagela did.