In January of 1979, I was promoted to Food and Beverage Manager of the Bulawayo Holiday Inn in Rhodesia. The country was enduring a prolonged war, so I was privileged to work in a country at war for a year.
There are a remarkable amount of similarities between a war and a peacetime recession that we can benefit from understanding.
I arrived in the country with my young family, and instantly noticed a huge difference in the mentality and approach of people in a warring country. Most of us were armed most of the time, and we saw opportunities that would not normally be evident in a peacetime or relatively affluent society.
We had to become very creative in order to make it in business.
Things to Learn from a “War-time Mentality”
During a war, there is a heightened sense of awareness, and people live on the edge.
Our women and children were sent out of the country to safety during the transitional time when the terrorist Mugabe was put into power, and men kept trunks with guns, grenades, and other useful items under their beds. People were tough and serious about life and business.
- We didn’t take customers or luxuries for granted, and relationships were regarded as being very important.
- Thinking “out of the box” was what kept people out of other boxes, called coffins.
- People had to be resourceful and reciprocate when they received value, as opposed to the lackadaisical, lazy, and selfish attitude of entitlement that pervades a well-fed and spoiled society.
Getting Creative to Survive
Sanctions had been imposed on Rhodesia, so in order to provide shellfish, imported alcohol, cutlery, and many other commodities that are usually easily available and readily accessible to our hotel guests, we had to buy them on the black market or have them smuggled into the country. We had to bargain and wheel and deal to get good cooking oil, silver foil, and other regular things. Local businesses manufactured products we couldn’t get. One company created drinking glasses out of ketchup bottles. (Those glasses lasted forever!)
Barter as a Way of Life
Tourism all but collapsed. Barter and the trading of commodities, resources, products, and services, was the norm. We traded and sold financial currency, gold, antiques, food, and gasoline coupons, which were restricted and valuable. I traded a diamond ring for the deposit on a house, and swapped that house for a car when we left the country. That sounds crazy now, but the relative values at the time made these deals good.
Where Customers are Coming from… And Still Are.
People cut down on luxuries, and acquiring and keeping customers was not an easy matter, when many of the smart ones had already immigrated. Customers carefully considered the value they were buying before opening their wallets.
After that Year
At the end of my year-long contract with Holiday Inns, I resigned from the company and returned to South Africa, little knowing that it was destined to follow in Rhodesia’s footsteps. I will always have great respect and affection for Rhodesians of all races – I wouldn’t insult them by calling them Zimbabweans – and I learned a great deal about Joint Ventures and creative solutions to real business in the real world in that short and exciting year.
Sadly, the country has been ruined by its savage leadership, but the lessons learned there from those wonderfully creative and disciplined people have always been a benefit to me.
These were my most important lessons:
- Appreciate the customers and business you have, and realize that you have to work on continuing to earn their business by creating added value. You can lose them in a heartbeat.
- Be creative, and leverage resources through trade, barter, Joint Ventures, and alternatives to money.
- Focus on integrity, loyalty, and candor. Relationships is everything in business. Passive aggression, entitlement, and mediocrity, so evident in North America, is poison.
- Diversify, spread your risk, run clean, lean, and mean, and focus on profit instead of products. Remain liquid and ready to fold camp at any time.
- Always carry a (figurative) gun, and be prepared to use it. There are people that will steal the milk out of your tea with a smile, if you let them. React hard and fast.
- Think big picture and long term, and don’t sell your soul for a bowl of soup.
