Her first business was Fuse Academy for Girls with DJ Zinhle.
After sunsetting the woman-centered DJ school in 2019, she continued to pursue other ventures.
Now, with more than a decade as an entrepreneur, Nomndeni Mdakhi embodies the essence of selflessness and empowerment.
She has learned the magnitude of running two businesses before settling into Agenda Women, which she tells us was in the works for some time before coming into fruition.
Donning many hats as a keynote speaker, businesswoman and more, the Newcastle-born entrepreneur speaks to TRUELOVE about her journey in business and more.
Meet businesswoman Nomndeni Mdakhi.
Tell us a bit more about you and your educational background?
I was born in Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) [and] I went to school there from Grade 1 up until Grade 12. I matriculated in 2000, so I left and came to Johannesburg in 2001 to pursue my studies. I did marketing management with WITS Technikon at the time.
When did your career kickstart?
I worked for MultiChoice and Discovery Health, I did a year in each of the companies. In 2008, I resigned from Discovery Health. I started my first business in 2009, which was Fuse Academy for Girls with DJ Zinhle. My second business was in 2011, which was Edits Communications, a marketing consultancy and my third business, which is the one that I'm doing now, I registered in 2020, but I started developing it in 2016.
We ran Fuse Academy from 2009 to 2019, and we stopped in 2019.
I ran [Edits Communications] up until 2018, if I'm not mistaken. And I've been running Agenda Women since 2020. I always say, if Fuse Academy and Edits Communications had a baby, it would be the business that I'm doing now, which is why I dissolved the second one, because I was full owner in that one. The work I do in this one is what I was doing at Edits Communications [but] I just focus on women as a demographic.
Can you share the thought behind Women Agenda and its purpose?
Initially, when I started Agenda Women, I was in a space of a lot of reflection around my own personal journey as a female founder. I was not necessarily targeting corporate women. I was specifically trying to solve for support, tools and resources for female founders. And that started around 2018 for it to become Agenda Women. Before it was Agenda Women, I wanted to create a space.
Our purpose is to give women the confidence to own their future and everything that we really do around content and community is underpinned by how do we make women more confident, whether it's in their financial decisions, career decisions, choosing a partner, negotiating contracts, or how they feel in their own bodies, how they feel in their ability to articulate what they're thinking and where they want to go. So, everything we do is really underpinned by this purpose, which is to give women the confidence to own their future.
READ MORE | Meet Santam WOTF Rising Star winner Amanda Sibiya - 'Entrepreneurship is a calling for me'
What is the biggest achievement for you that Agenda Women has accomplished?
It's the testimonials. The stories of how women's lives continue to change by just interfacing with the platform. That's one thing we haven't done a great job at, [which is] collecting those stories. But as we grow, develop, and build systems, we will be integrating some kind of feedback loop where the larger community sees the impact of the work that we do.
What are the challenges and lessons you've learned as a business founder?
I've been an entrepreneur since 2009 and I think entrepreneurial challenges are somewhat similar with all businesses, and fundamentally you're always solving financial problems. So, a lot of businesses who sometimes have a lot of demand, sometimes struggle with supplying the demand because they don't have the capital to make the products that people want.
For us, because we're a service business, the challenge is always going to be figuring out how to grow and how quickly to grow. So, it's the speed at which you grow and the capacity at which you're able to take on opportunities.
How did the initiative Ask a Mentor come about?
I've always wanted to figure out how to solve the mentorship problem. I think every successful woman or every woman with a prominent personality is constantly bombarded by mentorship requests on their DMs.
And what I wanted to do with Ask a Mentor, it's an idea that I've had for a very long time, was to be able to answer those questions in a way that is scalable, where it's not just about a one-on-one encounter. One-on-one encounters are very challenging for me, but I thought about ‘how do you solve the mentorship problem in a scalable way?’ and Ask a Mentor is a small iteration of a product that we're developing that's going to show the scale at which we can solve mentorship problems.
And what mentorship has done for me particularly is it allowed me to make decisions quickly.
So, when I talk about the resourcing issue, when you don't have people to call on, you can be stuck with a problem for a very long time that you could have solved in five minutes if you had access to the right minds or the right solutions.
I want it to be an archive where people can go and find solutions and answers to the questions that are frequently asked by mentees to mentors. Every week that we post, we see people engaging more and more in it. I think we get an average of like 5 000 to 10 000 views per video, but we want to put it out on more platforms, LinkedIn, YouTube, and invite other people to also answer the questions. I don't want it to be just me.
Tell us about being a keynote speaker and a host?
I've always spoken. I've never called myself a speaker. I think I finally had the guts to just go ahead and say, ‘this is what I do love doing’. I fundamentally believe that my gift is my voice and I borrow that to Agenda Woman. And I get paid sometimes to just use it in my personal capacity.
But I always imagined myself not just as an independent speaker, but more an ambassador for entrepreneurs and the work that I do.
So, essentially what I speak about is the stuff that I speak about on the Agenda Women platform, personal branding is a big one that I get requested to speak about a lot, particularly to working people and not just women. I want everyone who has an encounter with me to walk away feeling like I can do the thing that I've been thinking about.
That's how I want to be impactful and that's what I want my legacy to be. And that's the area that I fundamentally believe I can contribute when it comes to society and the way that it moves forward, because I've seen that that's how I've succeeded.
The minute I become confident, and I am affirmed, and I'm given tools and resources, I can start to pave my way to where I want to go. And I want to do that for as many people as I can in my lifetime.
What advice would give to female entrepreneurs?
You must be intentional. You're not going to achieve anything unless you know what you want to achieve and sometimes the thing that you want to achieve is potentially what you want to achieve for the next year or two or five. I want to be impactful in making people see the possibilities around their lives. It doesn't have to be as big as that, it can just be this year.
This is what I want to achieve and I'm hoping that by achieving this, it will mean this for the following year. But without that intentionality, you will not be able to even look back and reflect on whether you took the right steps to get to where you are, because you are not even sure about where you want to go.
What avenues are you looking to expand within your career?
For me, the world has always been my oyster. Everything I've always done; I've always thought about what it looks like in the world. I never want to be limited geographically when it comes to my personal brand, particularly, and my business brand. I have big plans for Agenda Women around the world, and I'm deliberate and very patient in building.
The reason I'm deliberate and patient is I want to be able to fail on a small scale. So, the small failures that I experience when I'm building at small scale, give me confidence to better understand what this thing looks like at a big scale.
So, you must also be [able] to build a healthy relationship with failure because failure is a touch point and a data point that gives you information around how you can do things better or how not to do things. I have no doubt in my mind that 10 years, 20 years from now, that's the level that you will see my personal brand and my business operating in.
