Persevering Through Challenges
Johanna Mukoki is a co-founder and CEO of Travel with Flair a leading black-owned South African travel Management Company. The company was founded in 1996 in Pretoria with only three employees. The company now is a multi-million rand company that employs over 800 people nationwide.
When Mukoki started the company, she says funding was a nightmare. Constantly being rejected by banks and possible investors, Mukoki and her partners experienced the funding nightmare until one of her partner’s parents provided a huge capital injection. The Rhodes University accounting graduate says in spite of the trials and tribulations before acquiring capital, they continued because they were inspired by a great business plan and idea that they knew would change the travel industry.
Failure is a lesson learned
“I never see failures by the way I just see learning’s, I just see opportunities for one to overcome and do better. Once we managed to get the formula right on our business scale, we scaled very rapidly so when you do that and do not have the capacity to be able to match that, that for itself is very difficult. And a lot of people say you are lucky but let me tell you it is very stressful so we needed to find a way so that we can be able to have great capacity in terms of good staff that can be able to continuously match our service.”
