Polo Leteka is CEO and director of Identity Development Fund, which offers institutional and corporate investors an opportunity to invest in growth entrepreneurial businesses. She talks to Thriving about the qualities needed to draw investment. She is also a Dragon on Dragon’s Den SA.
Tell us a little bit about where you come from and how you started as an entrepreneur?
I grew up in a number of areas but primarily in Lesotho and later on Mafhikeng where I spent most of my childhood and that’s where home is, still today. I have always been entrepreneurial. I started selling sweets at school because my mother refused to give me pocket money and I wanted to be independent. I was about 13 years old at the time. I have always been involved in one form of entrepreneurial venture or another. At the time I did not think of it as entrepreneurship, it was more about survival.
Give us an overview of your current business?
Essentially we go out to institutional investors and corporate investors to sell them an idea about how we see ourselves helping them invest in high growth entrepreneurial businesses. Most investors are not able to reach that market.
What do you find difficult to tolerate when considering to back an entrepreneur with an investment?
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they’ve got a unique idea and that they had been the only ones who could come up with this idea. Wisdom tells you that if you’ve thought about it, probably a thousand other people have also thought about it. If you’ve done research and you’ve sacrificed nights and weekends and you have put in your money, and you’ve developed some form of a gadget, just to try and show me what this thing will look like… even though you haven’t sold a single one. I have a lot of respect for that.
What would be your biggest failure lesson since starting in business?
I failed on so many things, my goodness, on almost anything, or everything you can think of. I have made very big mistakes and some have cost me huge amounts of money but some have not cost me too much but there were still very important lessons learnt. For me the biggest mistake has been hiring the wrong people… because people are a very important resource.
What have you learnt from entrepreneurs whom you backed with investment from Dragon’s Den?
Don’t judge a book by its cover. People will package things and dress them up and you will be sold. In a show like Dragon’s Den you have little time to ask all the important questions and have to rely on your sixth sense and gut. You also need to be careful how people package a pitch. It is amazing what you discover when detailed due diligence is done. Sometimes what people say and the reality are two very different things.
