What is Mentorship? The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines mentorship as the practice of helping and advising a less experienced person over a period of time, especially as part of a formal personal/professional growth programme in a company.

In our previous article, “New 51% Black-owned Mining Consulting Local Venture Launched”, we noted the staggering statistics of failure which a start-up company or young entrepreneurs in South Africa must go up against in order to succeed. In this article, we focus solely on the Construction Industry.

Any construction company, at its core, may be broken into two components namely, 1) providing construction material (retail function) and 2) providing construction services (service provider). These two components create a complex system to manage in a sustainable fashion.

Now, let us consider construction within the mining environment, which has its own complexity of managing any activity safely, through the obligatory application of the Mine Health and Safety Act (Act no. 29 of 1996). The result is a monumental challenge for any young, new construction entrepreneur or company.

Our company: Sehlare Sa Meetlwa (a locally based consultant within a major mining community) firmly understands the dynamics of the relationship between construction and mining. Although we are newly established, our combined history in mining, project– and capital management through our founding partners (VBKOM and AIKO) perfectly positions us to provide key mentorship to local SMME’s within the mining construction framework.

Image: Construction Life Cycle

We focus on mentorship, thus ensuring that the three critical elements to competency may be achieved namely: knowledge, skill and behaviour. We understand the essence of construction and have created a level of maturity assessment that compliments both construction and mining simultaneously. The level of maturity assessment provides a tangible road map to business maturity for any organization and becomes the heart of our mentorship process in which we assist in growing organisational competency.

Image: Three elements of Competency: Skill, Behaviour, Knowledge

Although we work with a mentee, our aim is to create independent organisations which are not key-man dependant, but rather well structured with processes and policies to guide an organisation, as a whole. This provides the basics for a proper foundation from which an organisation may work from.

At Sehlare Sa Meetlwa Mentorship is not just a service.  We assist in growing a sustainable mining and construction economy.