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Dr. Aisha Pandor is an award-winning scientist with a PhD in Human Genetics, a business management graduate, and the co-founder of SweepSouth – an online platform for ordering and paying for and managing homes cleaning services from your laptop, phone or tablet. SweepSouth is the first company on the African continent to offer this Uber-like system and, connect professional, experienced and insured cleaners with homeowners. Through SweepSouth, she strives to give people access to dignified working opportunities.
Transcript
Today's Solutionist Thinker is Dr. Aisha Pandor.
She is the Co-founder and Chief Executive of Sweep South. She is an award-winning scientist. She got her PhD in Genetics from UC T. But, when she graduated in 2012, she did it twice in one day. Not only was she conferred with a PhD but she also received a diploma from The Graduate School of Business and Associate Management program.
“People first and foremost need access to work. Sweep South – when they built the business, was something that hadn't existed before, has now given 11000 people, who 70% of whom were not working at all, 30% of whom were under employed. So, were not making ends meet and, we've given that many people access to opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have had. And, so what we're trying to build and my personal legacy, is about trying to give people access to dignified working opportunities.”
I'm Bruce Whitfield and you're listening to RMB Solutionist Thinking.
Bruce: You come from a long line of under-achievers. Do you?
Yeah, no pressure at all in my life. Just definitely, coasting.
Bruce: How did it happen that you were getting your PhD and a business qualification at the same time, on the same day, from the same institution. You just did you have spare time?
No, actually not at all. So, I was doing a PhD in science. I'm very passionate about science. I love, I love the process of discovery, I love asking questions and I was focusing on gene therapy at the time. My thesis was focused on gene therapy for heredity blindness, and I loved what I was doing but I started to ask myself, in my early 20s about what, how will my work would align to what South Africa needed from young people. And, I felt like myself sitting in a lab doing research on something that is fascinating but effects, you know, 20, 30,000 people in South Africa, was not the best place for me to be applying my energy and my potential.
And, so I thought business was somewhere that probably would work a bit better. I felt like, you know, you start businesses you can grow economies and so that's where I wanted to study a bit of business. I knew nothing about business at the time. I remember, doing my first marketing class at UCT's Graduate School of Business and thinking what is this? I had absolutely no idea. And, so I yeah set about to try and find out a bit more about the business world and hopefully at the time the thinking was to use that to bring about a bit more positive impact. It was completely by chance that I ended up graduating from both on the same day made a nice little story that
Bruce: It's a good conversation starter. When it comes to creating Sweep South, I mean, great businesses are started by people whose identify a problem and then create the solution to the problem. You went on holiday and you suddenly found yourself with a need.
So, working as a Management Consultant post doing the business studies, I didn't like being an employee and so resigned from my job without having any backup and so we're sitting at home thinking about different business ideas and our helper told us with very short notice that she needed to go away on holiday. We had a four-year-old daughter at the time. I had family who are coming to stay with us. We were trying to figure out what we were going to do with our lives. And, so we thought you know, we can't be trying to clean up after everyone we needed help and so that process and trying to find someone short term to help us was the kind of early evolution of Sweep South and so we had two years prior to taking a Lyft ride in San Francisco and we like the idea of technology connecting two sides of a marketplace together and, we thought if we could use technology, if we could build a platform that connected busy people like ourselves with the many domestic workers in South Africa who are looking for work, then we would actually be trying to solve problems that really matter in this country.
Bruce: What year is this 2000?
This is 2013, end of 2013.
Bruce: And, 2013 the world of different place. I mean today, we take lift for granted, we take Uber for granted, we take AirBnb for granted because that is now normal in 2012-2013. It was the most remote thing smartphones were smart there weren't that many of them and they were expensive, very expensive.
So, my co-founders is my husband Alan who's our CTO and he's the, I suppose I'm the business oriented person now and he's a visionary. He's really the sort of person who, he was building apps before the App Store existed, he's always been passionate about building things and our thinking was that technology should be a way to level the playing field. So, we felt like that world was going to move towards all of these things becoming more accessible.
But yeah, in 2013-2014. It was expensive to get a smartphone when we launched Sweep South we had to put up surety to get smartphones for every domestic worker who joined the platform. Luckily, we were right in our predictions that you know that these things would become cheaper and more accessible but that certainly wasn't the case back then.
Bruce: How did you spread the word? How did you spread the word to people who were unfamiliar with this idea of the smartphone who were in need of employment, vulnerable in some cases, maybe not entirely trusting?
So, initially we had let our domestic worker, when she came back our helper at home, know about what we were trying to build and she told a couple of people in the neighbourhood and that's actually the bulk of the marketing that we've done even to date around sweep South.
So, you know over four and a half years the network effects have been so strong that we put virtually nothing into marketing on that side and it speaks to reason. So, you've got a million registered domestic workers in the country. You have high unemployment rates. You have communities that are very close, speak to each other you're sitting, you know with 10 other people on a taxi and talking about work opportunities. So, there wasn't much that we needed to do on that side where we really had to put a lot of work as into the customer side. In the early days of starting Sweep South, people were not familiar and not yet comfortable with online payments. You know, there was the thinking that this was a scam, you know, is this this someone really going to show up do enough people have credit cards to be able to make online bookings and for this to be a sustainable industry in the country e-commerce is going to take off.
So, a lot of our work was on that side and actually trying to convince people that we weren't a scam and that there was actually someone who was going to show up after you make a booking on the platform
Bruce: In the same way as when you hit the Uber app icon will show up. There will be a photograph. There will be somebody with a grading and that person will be paid Uber will get its cut. The concept is eerily similar.
It is so some of it was influenced by Uber, some of it not it's not the same model as Uber. So, the majority of our business isn't, we're not actually an on-demand business although it feels like it and because it's a tech platform and it feels like it is.
But, actually if you think about domestic work in the way, it works in South Africa and in many other similar markets, there's a relationship. I don't have a relationship with my Uber driver apart from the five to twenty minutes that I'm in the car and then I don't mind who the next Uber driver is who comes and picks me up. This is very different.
Bruce: The drivers not driving into your garage.
Exactly, and parking there and then coming into your house and sitting at your tables. This is different. This is someone who's coming into your home, your personal space, who needs to know your preferences within your home, who's going to come again who hopefully they'll be continuity. So, they'll you know do different jobs on different weeks and have different tasks on different weeks. So, we had to build the platform differently from Uber that we had to cater for relationships and for repeat booking. There's a network like Uber has but, we wanted to focus on the Sweep Star side of things also. So, as a customer, we wanted to make sure that you're also being rated and that other customers or other Sweep Stars will be able to see what your ratings on this.
Bruce: There's this element of choice on both sides.
Yeah, but also, you know, you have to watch how you behave as a customer, right? There’s accountability as well, which isn't something that traditionally has been a feature of the domestic work industry in South Africa as an individual homeowner. You can treat your domestic work in a particular way and they may be repercussions. But, other domestic workers aren't necessarily going to find out about that and make decisions about whether they want to work at your home or not based on that.
Bruce: How do you ensure that you keep getting paid because once I might suit look for one of your Sweep Stars, your Sweep Star comes into my home and I go wow, you're incredible… Why don't you come and stay with us and he has a full-time job for you and Aisha and Sweep South lose out on future revenues. How do you protect yourself?
So, there are two things I mean, the one is that we use a carrot approach. So, for us, there has to be enough value for both the customer and the Sweep Star to stay on the platform. So, it can't just be about the earnings, which is a big it's a big value add, you know, the fact that you are firstly going to get paid when we say you're going to get paid you're going to get paid a good rates and those rates are guaranteed but over and above that we wanted to make sure that you know, there are additional things.
So, the scale of the platform. We now have 11,000 domestic workers who've worked with us. That means that we can go to Partners and we can talk about collaboration and those are partners also who wouldn't necessarily have been able to feel their business models without partners like us. So, we go to an insurance provider for example, and we say look we have 11,000 domestic workers. We would like you to provide free life and disability insurance. We know that a lot of these women are mothers are single mothers. A lot of them are primary breadwinners, they need income protection for their families. And so we'd be able to negotiate something like that which we have done free of charge to domestic workers to sweep stars on the platform. You know, those are things that are that you don't again typically find with a domestic-worker-employer-relationship and then on the employer side on the customer side, and we provide guarantees.
So, I've never outside of sweep sauce done a criminal background check on a domestic worker who's come into my home. It's we have a very easy mechanism for people to provide constant feedback - so, through ratings. If there is an issue, we have a team who takes care of it. So, all of those are again value as over and above just the linking of the two sides together and I think that's important because otherwise as you say people are completely free to go and have a private relationship and we wouldn't have a sustainable business.
Bruce: Some criticism over the levels of pay. At least, one story where somebody complained that they weren't paid a new world of social media these things do get amplified quite substantially. Is it possible for me as a domestic worker to come onto a platform to go and do a job and not be paid?
So, it is if you have incorrect bank details or if you haven't given us banking details or if something's gone wrong from a system point of view. It's not possible for our system not to pay you for work that you've done.
Bruce: You're not the conduit for the money?
No, no, so it's I mean it's going through our platform but it's all systematized. It's not being leaked back to Sweep South or whatever. The case is its. Yeah, we wouldn't be able to handle we're doing over 40,000 bookings a month. We wouldn't be able to manually handle for you, you know 40 plus thousand payments. So, it's all systematised and it's all you know, ledgered and so if anyone does miss a payment for whatever reason as soon as that issues sorted out that that payment goes into the correct bank account.
Bruce: And what about payment rates? I mean South Africa the history of domestic work in South Africa as one often associated with abuse with very low rates of pay with contributing to South Africa's inequality crisis.
Well, the reality is that wages aren't as high as they should be in South Africa and I don't think that we currently have the economy to sustain what I would call a living or decent wage and, particularly in the domestic work industry. You have very high fragmentation. So, people don't know what constitutes a good wage for domestic workers. And also, there's a lot of discrepancy between what people are paid on the lower and higher end.
We are satisfied is that we know that we're paying above what an average middle-class South African is paying in an urban area and, in some cases Sweep Stars are getting paid double that.
Bruce: If I was a domestic worker working five days a week on your platform for eight hours a day. That's a proper full time.
On average, about R3500 a month, we have Sweep Stars who are earning up to R8000 a month on the platform. So, and that compared to South Africa's minimum wage for domestic workers is about R1500, R1600 and a month in rural areas and urban areas about two thousand R2600 a month on average in an area like Green Point or Sandton or you know, in an upper-middle-class area people are paying around R3000 a month.
Bruce: It's astonishing that people think that they can sustain a life on that sort of level.
Absolutely, yeah. So, you know the women who are doing this work are mothers, they are single mothers, they on average have three dependents. So, this is at least four-person household and are sustaining all of these people on R4000 and R3000 a month. Fortunately, many people do have social grants and we've obviously pulled our Sweep Stars. But yeah, it's an incredibly low amount and you know, I think our part of our work is to try and push that up. We had a rate increase earlier last year which increased sweep star rates by 18 percent. But yeah, there's pushback and and we started off the platform at I think 50 or and an hour had absolutely no business had to decrease that 238 Rand per hour and we now sort of incrementally trying to work our way back to the initial rates.
Bruce: Your great-grandfather was one of the people who dropped the Freedom Charter. How does this fit in with the Freedom Charter philosophy?
Sweep South’s broader vision, I think people first and foremost need access to work. I think they need free access to work. I think if you're able and if you have skills that you can provide, I think you have the right to earn for those skills.
And, then I think the next stage of that is to earn what we would call a living wage or a decent wage. But, I think, you know, family history and where that ties in is just around impact and, Sweep South when we build the business with something that hadn't existed before, has now given 11,000 people who, 70% of whom were not working at all 30% of whom were under employed. So, we're not making ends meet and we've given that many people access to opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have had. And, so what we're trying to build, and my personal Legacy is about trying to give people access to dignified working opportunities.
Bruce: And, how many jobs have you created in the creation of Sweep South?
Apart from the 11000, we've our in-house team is 40 people. We have to know we have more than 2. We have 3 former sweep Stars. You've joined the team to in our operations team won as a developer outside of that Network what excites me and what excites Allen and what excites the team is the opportunities outside of that. So, you have these beautiful stories. We had a sweep star who because of the flexibility of the platform was studying for a law degree. She completed her degree at the end of last year and you know, the story went public and I think one of her customers tweeted about the fact that she'd finished a law degree and then she now has access to interviews from law firms people are interested to find out if they can speak to her and if she wants to do articles with them and without having those open networks those stories don't necessarily get out. So, I think you know, there's obviously the Sweep Stars, there’s sweep star families, there's our media team, but I think the power of these networks that speak to each other and are open and share information and I think that's where the beauty of the platform and where the opportunities outside of just the work that's been done in homes lies.
Bruce: So often politicians would like people to believe that domestic work is demeaning, you talk about it as deeply empowering.
Well, I think it should give you opportunities to be more than if you would like I don't I mean I don't think any form of work where you feel like your dignity is protected and where you have agency is demeaning. If you have the power to say I would like to do it this way and I would not like to do it that way that's not demeaning being able to earn for yourself is not demeaning. I think what is demeaning and what's a shame in South Africa is the fact that we have so many people who don't have access to work and who can't make a living for themselves and you have to go cap in hand every month to get money from the government and who don't have opportunities to uplift themselves above that. I think, the most depressing thing about our country and I think it will be the most depressing thing, if people become hopeless and they don't feel like their opportunities. So, what I think is great about what we're doing an important about what we're doing is yes, the domestic work, but the access to over and above that.
Bruce: This has taking you about as far away from your PhD as you could possibly get. The mum and dad said pay back the money?
No, so fortunately I was a good student by the time I was a graduate student and so I had I was on scholarships. And so, and that was the agreement with them or says that if I wasn't going to work after graduating, I would have to perform well and get scholarship. So, there's no money to pay back at this point. I think yeah. I initially it was very hard for them to see that I'd gone from something that was academic and cerebral to something that in their minds and the early stages was essentially a domestic work company, but I think they've seen the impact that we've had and they've seen the impact that we've had on our team and on other people and they've seen, you know, some of the media and how we've been able to inspire other young people who want to start technology companies. We're in the minority as a woman lead and woman run tech company in South Africa internationally as well. And so, I think got to a point where they were just resigned to the fact that this is what we wanted to do, and I think.
I always say, so my mom was quite opposed to starting the business and you know, we cashed in our pension and sold the house eventually to fund the business and obviously they weren't happy about that. And, I think 2015-2016. We were on the cover of Forbes and I think that's when my mom said. Okay, this is actually not that bad. Maybe this is going somewhere someone else. You know, who's reputable is thinking I'm gonna have to work to support these children, who just, you know, resigning from jobs.
Bruce: Is it scalable when you look at it? There's a go beyond South Africa's borders because it answers a need in so many economies where there are great levels of inequality.
Yeah. So absolutely I think other markets that are attractive for us our places where they are high levels of inequality within many people who are unskilled who are unemployed, who are looking for work opportunities and who through technology may be given opportunities to upskill themselves. I also think there's a lot of skill in South Africa. So, we work with domestic workers currently, but you know, if you drive in Joburg, yeah any sort of Builders Warehouse or any tilers on calls exactly bricklayers on calls, these people are standing outside who are trying to advertise their services and there's the opportunity for sweep sales to connect those people to earnings opportunities as well. So yeah, there's a lot of scale both within the country but also internationally.
Bruce: But, it answers our deepest need and, our deepest need is dignity.
Yeah. It's to feel like you're adding value and I think that's what everyone wants. I remember watching an interview where Oprah was talking about her career and she said every single person that she's interviewed after that interview asks, how did I do, and we all want to know that we're adding value that we've done a good job. And so, I think this speaks to that need.
Bruce: The amazing story of Sweep South, our Solutionist Thinker is a doctor – well, she doesn't call herself that anymore because she’s not that anymore... Aisha Pandor, she is the Co-Founder the Chief Executive of Sweep South.