Xero surveyed 427 South African small businesses at the start of this year, and one set of answers contradicts the other in a way nobody seems to have noticed.
Eighty percent grew their revenue over the past year. Seventy-five percent made more profit. By any honest measure that’s a good year in a country where good years have been thin on the ground.
Then eighty-four percent said they’ll prioritise steady growth and stability over expansion in 2026.
So the patient is recovering and has decided to stay in bed.
This is scar tissue, not strategy
It’s not hard to understand. We’ve had load shedding, a pandemic, rates that climbed and stayed, a currency with a sense of humour, and years of learning that whatever is working now can be taken away by something nobody saw coming. Caution isn’t stupid. It’s what you get when a market has been kicked repeatedly and has developed a flinch.
But a flinch is a reflex, not a decision. And the interesting thing about a whole market flinching at once is what it does to the price of everything.
What happens when everyone bids less
Attention is bought at auction, whether or not you think of it that way. Google Ads is literally an auction. So is the fight for the top of a search page, the space in a customer’s week, the slot in their memory where they store who to call about roofs.
When most of your competitors decide this is a year for consolidating, they stop bidding. Not dramatically, just quietly. The budget gets held back a quarter. The website refresh slips to next year. The ads get paused to see how things go. Multiply that by eighty-four percent of a market and the cost of being visible drops, because the people you were competing against for that visibility have politely stepped aside.
This is the bit worth sitting with. Nothing about your market got easier. There are the same number of customers with the same problems and the same wallets. The only thing that changed is how many businesses are actively trying to be the one they think of.
The share you hold versus the share you shout
There’s a finding in advertising research that has held up for decades, which is that businesses whose share of voice runs ahead of their share of market tend to grow, and businesses that let it fall behind tend to shrink. It’s slow, it’s boring, and it works in exactly the way compounding does.
Quiet years are when share of voice is cheapest to buy. You don’t have to outspend anyone. You just have to keep going while others stop, which is a much smaller act of courage and a much cheaper one.
The uncomfortable corollary is that this cuts both ways. If you’re one of the eighty-four percent going quiet, someone else is currently buying the attention you released, at a discount, and they’ll still have it when the market decides it’s safe again.
Not an argument for spending more
Now the honest part, because “be bold, spend money” is the oldest and laziest pitch in this industry, and a cautious business owner is right to be suspicious of anyone making it in a year like this.
This is not a case for a bigger budget. It’s a case for a steadier one. Consistency beats size here, and lumpy spending, three good months then nothing, is how most small businesses accidentally give up their position twice a year.
And before any of it, fix the leaks. We’ve spent the last month on those, so briefly: the visitors you already get are fewer and better than they used to be, most of them are on a phone, and a fair number of them are bouncing off a slow site or a checkout built for a wallet. Buying more attention while that’s true is pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. The cheapest growth available to you this year is almost certainly conversion, not reach.
Then hold your visibility steady. One channel done properly, every month, beats four channels done in a panic in October.
The recovery will be crowded
Here’s what happens next, and it happens every cycle. Conditions improve, confidence returns, and everyone who spent this year waiting starts spending at the same time. Attention gets expensive again, all at once, and the businesses arriving late pay a premium for ground they could have taken cheaply while nobody was looking.
You can join that queue. Or you can be the business that was already there when it formed, having spent an ordinary amount of money in a year when everyone else was being careful.
If you’d rather use the quiet than wait it out, come and talk to us.