Month: May 2026

By Mfundo Mavimbela

A guy in one of my workshops put his hand up mid-session and said it straight:

“Mfundo, I think you are wrong.”

I love when this happens.

He runs a hardware store in Manzini. Been in business for eleven years. Sharp guy — the kind who has figured things out through trial and error rather than theory. He leaned forward and made his case.

“I put an ad in the newspaper last month. E15,000. The phone rang. Customers came in. I made money. That looks like a straight line to me — and it worked perfectly fine.”

The room shifted. A few heads nodded. Some people who had been writing notes quietly put their pens down. This was the question they all wanted to ask but had not.

He was right. And I told him so.

The Straight Line Does Work

I want to be honest with you the same way I was honest with him.

A straight line works. You put an ad out. Some people see it. Some of them buy. Real money. Real customers. Real validation. I am not going to stand in front of a room and tell a man with eleven years of business and a healthy till that he is wrong.

The straight line works.

What I told him next is the part that changed the energy in that room.

“What you are describing,” I said, “is something I call marketing scalping. And I borrowed that word from forex trading — because what you are doing is almost identical to what forex scalpers do.”

The Forex Scalper

In forex trading, scalping is a legitimate strategy. You get in, you take a small profit from a quick price movement, and you get out immediately. You are not building a position. You are not compounding. You are not invested in what happens tomorrow. You take what is available right now — and you exit.

It works. Forex scalpers make real money. Ask anyone who has done it successfully.

But here is what every serious forex trader will also tell you: scalping is expensive, exhausting, and the moment you stop actively trading, the income stops completely. There is no position growing in the background. No investment compounding while you sleep. Just — get in, take, get out, repeat. Forever.

The man with the hardware store had been scalping his market for eleven years.

Every time he needed customers, he spent. The ad ran. The ready buyers came in. The ad stopped. The customers dried up. Next time he needed a boost, he spent again. Eleven years of entering the market, taking what was immediately available, and exiting. No compounding. No customer base building quietly in the background. Just a business that needed a fresh injection every time it needed to grow.

“Does that sound familiar?” I asked him.

He did not answer immediately. But he stopped leaning forward.

Who Actually Responds To That Ad

Here is what the E15,000 print ad actually buys you.

It puts you in front of a large audience. Most of them are not ready to buy today — they have the problem your product solves, but the timing is not right, the budget is not there yet, or they simply need more than one encounter with your name before they trust you enough to spend. Research across industries shows that at any given moment, only 1 to 3 percent of any audience is ready to buy immediately.

The straight line captures that 1 to 3 percent. The ones who happened to be at exactly the right stage of readiness on exactly the right day. Your ad was visible at the precise moment their need, their money, and their trust aligned.

That is not strategy. That is timing. You were lucky — in the best possible way.

The other 97 percent passed through. Some were interested. Some even paused. Some thought about calling. But there was nothing to hold them — no follow-up, no reason to stay connected, no system to bring them back when their moment of readiness arrived. They moved on. And they took their money with them.

You paid E15,000 to reach all of them. You converted the lucky 3 percent. You left the rest on the table — permanently — and went back to work.

The Loop Is The Long Position

Going back to forex — because the metaphor earns its place here.

The serious forex investor does not only scalp. They also build positions. They identify something with long-term value and they invest in it patiently — compounding returns over time, building something that grows even when they are not actively in the market.

The loop is the long position.

It takes the same audience your ad reaches and builds a relationship with the 97 percent who were not ready yet. It stays in front of them — with value, with presence, with the right offer at the right time — until their moment of readiness arrives. And when it does, you are already there. Not as a stranger with a newspaper ad. As the business they have been hearing from for three months and have already decided to trust.

In Get Customers Every Day, the loop is laid out in six stages — each one building what the next one needs. The ad is Stage 1. What you build behind it determines everything else.

The man from the hardware store bought the book.

Start with the free preview here — and see what eleven years of scalping could look like if the loop was running behind it.

By Mfundo Mavimbela

In 2005 I walked into a bank. Young, ambitious, building something. The relationship manager sat across from me, smiled, and said the magic words: E50 a month in bank charges. That was it. That was the pitch. E50. I could handle E50.

I signed. I walked out. I got on with my life.

Twenty years later — if I sit down and calculate every bank charge, every loan interest, every service fee, every product I have moved through across those two decades — the number is uncomfortable. We are talking well over E1 million. From one customer. From me. The person who walked in thinking about E50 a month.

And here is the part that should keep every small business owner up at night: that bank never had to advertise to get that million from me. They got it by keeping me. By having a system. By knowing exactly what to offer me, and when — from the day I walked in until today.

That is not luck. That is a loop.

The Relationship Manager You Never Knew You Had

That bank had people — actual human beings — whose entire job was to understand where I was in my financial life and move me towards the next product at the right time.

Student account. First job upgrade. Car finance. Home loan. Business banking. Retirement planning.

They never lost me. Not because I was loyal by nature — but because they were deliberate by design. They qualified me. They moved me through their product ecosystem stage by stage, year by year. And while all of this was happening, I thought I was just banking.

They were building a million-rand relationship from a E50-a-month entry point.

Now Let Me Tell You About Sipho

Sipho runs a small events company. Good work ethic, reliable, creative. He landed a contract with a corporate client — their annual year-end function. He delivered beautifully. The client was impressed.

Two weeks later, Sipho was already chasing a new client. What he did not do: call that corporate in January about their Q1 sessions. Mention his boardroom lunch offering. Introduce his new team building package.

Three months later, that corporate hired someone else for their AGM. Not because they did not rate Sipho — they loved Sipho. But he had gone quiet. And in business, quiet sounds exactly like not interested.

Sipho spent months acquiring that client. That client was potentially worth E60,000 a year. Sipho took E9,000 from one event and handed the rest to a competitor without even realising it.

This is the ice cream problem. We lick the top — the most visible, most satisfying part — and throw the rest away. Then we go work hard to buy another ice cream, just to lick the top again.

The real value was always deeper in the cone.

The Loop They Are Running That You Are Not

Do you think MTN Bushfire gets entirely new attendees every year? My bet is more than 80% have been before. The festival does not survive on new audiences. It survives on returning ones — people who had an experience so complete they came back the following year and brought someone new.

That is a loop.

Every corporate giant you admire runs it. They do not spend the majority of their budget hunting strangers. They spend it deepening relationships with people who already said yes.

Most small businesses in this market run a straight line. Win a client. Deliver. Exit. Hunt again. The line never closes. The loop never forms. And the money that should be compounding inside a relationship gets spent advertising to the next stranger.

This is exactly what I unpack in Get Customers Every Day — the full six-stage loop that turns a first-time customer into a lifetime one. Start with the free preview here and see the system that has been running in corporate boardrooms for decades, now built for small businesses like yours.

The Number That Changes Everything

Take one of your best customers from the last two years. Someone who bought from you, had a good experience, and you have not spoken to since. Answer these honestly:

What did they spend with you? What could they have spent — if you had stayed in the relationship, introduced them to your other offerings, asked for referrals at the right time?

The gap between those two numbers is your loop gap. That is the money sitting quietly in your old client list right now — not because those clients left angry, but because you stopped showing up.

That bank understood this about me in 2005. I was worth E50 a month on day one. Over a million rands over a lifetime. They knew that before I did. And they built a system — deliberately, patiently — to realise that value over time.

Your customers carry that same lifetime value. The question is whether you have built the system to realise it.

Download the free preview of Get Customers Every Day and see the full Loop — built specifically for small businesses in this market.