Aisha Pandor, a digital innovator solving problems at scale — Lionesses of Africa

Lioness Weekender spoke to the impact driven Aisha R. Pandor to find out more about her unique entrepreneurial journey and her vision for the future of the business.

What does your company do?

SweepSouth is Africa’s first online end to-end platform for booking, managing and paying for home services. As a high growth startup venture, our mission is to create dignified work for home service providers, while also helping paying customers enjoy the experience of a happy home. The company is operational in South Africa and Kenya, and has helped over 25,000 unemployed or underemployed home service providers to find work. SweepSouth serves as an advocate for financial and digital inclusivity for women at grassroots level. Our partnerships include one with a financial services provider resulting in free life and disability insurance for women working on the platform, the majority of whom are single mothers and primary breadwinners. SweepSouth also publishes an annual survey on domestic workers’ pay and living and working conditions, which has become a credible and widely cited source of information nationally regarding the industry, which in South Africa employs over a million women per annum. SweepSouth co-launched the Warrior Project (with Caveat Legal), which is a resource for free legal advice and resources for women affected by gender based and domestic violence.

What inspired you to start your company?

We originally launched SweepSouth out of a personal need. We’d been stuck without help at home during a holiday period when we were working intensely on potential ideas. We were left fairly last minute without a nanny and helper, and the ensuing search revealed lots of existing challenges in the domestic work and home help industry. One the one hand, the search for well-vetted, relevant (right place, right time) home help can be very frustrating and inconvenient for those needing assistance, and on the other hand, many domestic workers and other home service providers are unemployed or underemployed, and struggle to find work. Our idea was to build a platform that would connect the two sides together, providing decent work, at decent rates, and with the flexibility of home service providers to determine when, where and under what conditions they wanted to work. Our mission is to use technology to help address unemployment and underemployment, and to bring fresh perspective to an industry that in many ways has remained unchanged for centuries.

Why should anyone use your service or product?

We are a mission driven company that believes that technology can and should be a tool for rapid change, for the better. We were the first of its kind on the continent, and in many ways are breaking barriers. This includes shifting entrenched attitudes in a very established industry, and being a female-led company with a majority female team, servicing mostly female customers and working with mostly female home service providers. We hope to be an inspiration for other women wanting to enter the tech space, and who want to be part of building for-profit businesses that also inherently have positive social impact baked into their mission and vision. Lastly, in building our company, we are also addressing adjacent issues to unemployment, including financial and digital inclusivity and female empowerment.

Tell us a little about your team

Our in-office team is made up of about 50 individuals in South Africa and Kenya who are passionate about our mission and making a positive impact on the lives of people around the continent. We are young, energetic, smart, and driven, with a healthy dose of fun and silliness thrown in. Our team is diverse, with over 50% of the company being female, and people joining from multiple backgrounds and disciplines. In addition to our in-house team of support and operations team members, marketers, engineers, and finance and admin staff, we have a base of about 25,000 home service providers, primarily women, and primarily single mothers and breadwinners, who have used the platform over the last almost 7 years to find work. Lastly, we have a base of really great shareholders and investors who have been very supportive over the last year in particular, including Naspers Foundry, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Smollan Group, FNB Vumela Fund (managed by Edge Growth), CRE VC, Identity Fund Managers (IDF), Flightmode Digital, and 500 Startups.

Share a little about your entrepreneurial journey. And do you come from an entrepreneurial background?

I wouldn’t have considered myself entrepreneurial 10 years ago. While my dad is definitely an entrepreneur, my mom, who in many ways is a role model, has built up a more traditional professional career in teaching academia, and later, politics. My husband and co-founder (and SweepSouth CTO) Alen Ribic has been a big influence in me thinking that it is doable to pursue our own venture. While I was studying towards my PhD, I knew virtually nothing about business. In thinking about what I would do after studying, I saw the appeal in being able to combine my studies and a business career to have great impact on the economy and ecosystem in South Africa and beyond. To this end, I enrolled in a postgraduate business course while concurrently writing up my PhD thesis in genetics, and absolutely loved studying and learning about strategy, finance, operations, and economics. The business bug had bitten and I worked as a management consultant after finishing my studies, but the corporate world and being an employee didn’t quite fit. This led me to think about entrepreneurship and the idea of building a tech enabled business to help solve problems at scale.

What are your future plans and aspirations for your company?

Our mission is to use technology to help people find decent work, at decent rates, and at the same time help customers enjoy their home spaces. As such, our future plans are to scale SweepSouth from what started off as a cleaning services platform, to a truly multi-vertical home services provider, offering everything from indoor and outdoor cleaning and maintenance, to artisanal services (handyman, plumbers, electricians), to financial services, to home products. The other axis of growth includes scaling to different geographies. We’re already present in Kenya in addition to South Africa, and will launch in Nigeria in the second half of 2021. Our aim is to build a solid footprint in emerging markets, scaling our tech to provide positive impact, and also helping to use the platform to increase digital literacy and inclusion. Ideally, we’d like home service providers to have a solid and trusted record of work and financial earnings, as well as the opportunity to uplift and up-skill themselves, via our platform

What gives you the most satisfaction being an entrepreneur?

I love the process of having an idea that could become something, and then putting in a huge amount of energy to turn that into a reality. It’s extremely gratifying to turn nothing into something, particularly when that something changes lives for the better. It’s also really awesome to be putting together a team of employees, investors, partners and other stakeholders, who all believe in this vision of a better way to do things. And when you are part of other people’s personal and career growth, that’s really meaningful. Lastly, there’s an energy I love about entrepreneurship. The thrill of being different and believing that you can challenge the status quo for greater good. It can become quite addictive.

What’s the biggest piece of advice you can give to other women looking to start-up?

There’s so much! But my biggest pieces of advice would be to settle on a solving a problem where you have high conviction of the problem and your potential solution adding value, and where you feel passionate about the problem space (not necessarily the solution, which may change over time), and then to just do it! Whether you start part-time or jump in both feet first, life is too short to not be doing work which is aligned to your purpose. Second, surround yourself with a great support system. Whether that’s your mentor, co-founder, early investors, other friends in the ecosystem who can champion and support you work, or even your support network at home that helps you build your company, it’s so important not to try and do this alone, it’s just too difficult. Third, if you’re not naturally confident (I’m not), work on your confidence and sense of self-worth. It will help you forge ahead when things are tough, but also not take the inevitable knocks too personally. And then lastly, once you do get started, remember to enjoy the journey, including the downs (which are always temporary). Building a company is as much about the journey and its learnings, and the positive impact you can make along the way, as much as it’s about the bigger milestones that get celebrated more publicly. If you enjoy the journey and can find meaning in every day, starting up a company is one of the most rewarding things you can do from a personal growth perspective.

To find out more about SweepSouth and its work, contact Aisha via email: aisha@sweepsouth.com or visit the company’s website and social media pages:

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