You are driving through the Manzini CBD, dodging a kombi and trying to remember if you sent that quote to the client in Sidvokodvo. Then you see it. High above the street, a massive, glossy billboard for one of the big banks or the local telco. It’s perfect. The lighting is professional, the message is slick, and the brand looks like it owns the atmosphere.
Suddenly, your own business feels small. You think about the office you’re renting—the one where the printer jams twice a day and the carpet has a permanent tea stain from 2022. You think about your social media page with its handful of likes and your “marketing budget” that is basically whatever is left after you pay the electricity bill.
You tell yourself you’re failing. You tell yourself that if you were a “real” business, you’d have the marble foyer and the nationwide radio spots.
But here is the truth that will save your sanity: Your business is not failing. Your benchmark is just completely, dangerously wrong.
The Tent in the Dust
Let me take you back to a different scene. Imagine a goldfield camp in 1886. The sun is scorching, the red earth has been baked into a fine powder that chokes every breath, and the air is thick with the smell of sweat and expectation. You are looking for a specific destination. You find a weathered tent—larger than the others, perhaps, but still just sun-bleached canvas flapping in the heat.
There is no sign outside. No glass doors. No air conditioning.
Inside, your boots crunch on bare, dusty earth because there is no floor. The “service counters” are nothing more than wooden packing crates pushed together, with the shipping marks from London still visible on the rough timber. A young clerk in a sweat-stained collar sits on a smaller box, squinting at a massive ledger. The only hint of security is a heavy iron strongbox tucked against a tent pole.
That was a major financial institution twenty-six years after it was founded.
Today, that same institution operates in Eswatini with glass-fronted buildings and global digital systems. But they didn’t start with the marble. They started in the dust. They showed up with a strongbox and a ledger because that is where the opportunity was.
When you look at their billboard today, you are looking at Year 140 of their story. When you look at your own office, you might be at Day 1 or Year 3. Comparing your back end to their front end is a recipe for clinical depression and bad business decisions.
The Illusion of the Giant’s Shadow
We suffer from a specific local affliction I call “The Giant’s Shadow.” In Eswatini, we see the giants every day. We see the big banks, the insurance firms, and the mobile operators. We see their polished campaigns and we assume that this is what marketing is supposed to look like.
Recommended: The Giant’s Shadow and the Myth of the Marble Foyer
We forget that many of these companies arrived in our market already “made.” They brought capital, tested formulas, and in some cases, legal protections that guaranteed they would have no competition for decades. One major network operator here enjoyed a monopoly for twenty years. They didn’t win the market through clever Facebook ads; they owned the market because, by law, nobody else was allowed to be there.
You, however, are building from zero. You are fighting for every lead and every lilangeni.
When you try to copy the giants, you end up “performing” business instead of building one. You spend E10,000 on a print ad to look important, when that money should have been spent on a direct activation that actually puts your product in a customer’s hand. You are trying to buy the marble floors before you’ve even mastered the art of sitting on the packing crate.
The Cost of Comparison
The comparison isn’t just a waste of time; it’s costing you money. It drains your confidence and makes you hesitant. You don’t want to post that video because “it doesn’t look as professional as the bank’s video.” You don’t want to host that small community event because “it’s not a stadium sponsorship.”
So you do nothing. Or worse, you do the expensive, “glossy” things that don’t actually work for a business of your size.
A giant is simply a small business that grew older. They didn’t start with the billboards; they started with the equivalent of a megaphone on a truck or a yellow umbrella at a bus rank. They were scrappy. They were direct. They were in the dust, just like you.
The problem isn’t your business. The problem is that you are measuring your beginning against someone else’s middle—or their century-long history.
In my book, Get Customers Every Day, I talk about the “Loop” system for customer acquisition. It’s not about having the biggest budget; it’s about having a repeatable system that works regardless of your size. If you want to see how to build that system without needing a million-lilangeni billboard budget, you can download the free preview to see the framework.
Stop looking at the billboards. Look at your customers. The giants are busy maintaining their marble floors; you have the advantage of being in the tent where the real work happens.
Your yardstick is wrong. Fix the benchmark, and you’ll realize you’re much further along than you think.
If you’re ready to stop performing and start building, grab your copy of the full book at this link.