Sometime in the depths of the pandemic, in South Africa's Eastern Cape, a researcher sat down with the owner of a small construction business and asked him how he was surviving. The man's answer...
Sometime in the depths of the pandemic, in South Africa's Eastern Cape, a researcher sat down with the owner of a small construction business and asked him how he was surviving. The man's answer deserves to outlive the study it appeared in. "The pandemic has forced us to weigh what we need against what we think we need," he said. "I have had to be more circumspect in terms of spending. As a rule, all new purchases and orders are scrutinized more to avoid wastage."
He is recorded only as Participant 24, male, construction sector: one of twenty-five small construction and engineering business owners interviewed by the researcher Willie Chinyamurindi for the opening chapter of The Future of Entrepreneurship in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities Post-Pandemic, a 2023 Routledge collection edited by Anthony Abiodun Eniola, Chux Gervase Iwu, and Abdullah Promise Opute. Most of that book is literature review, but Chinyamurindi's chapter is the rarer thing: real African business owners, mid-crisis, speaking in their own words.
Two honest notes before we take the sentence further. These speakers are anonymized South African business owners in one 2021 interview study; the chapter never says they ran family enterprises, and we will not pretend it does. And the book as a whole is not a family-business book at all: it studies African entrepreneurship broadly, and every family application in this essay is our translation, made openly. We think Participant 24 would recognize his sentence in what follows. But the crossing from his firm to your family table is ours.
Here is the one idea this essay carries, in a single sentence. Every family and every business runs two budgets under one name, the things it needs and the things it thinks it needs, and the discipline of separating them, which crisis eventually forces on everyone, is worth adopting voluntarily, in calm times, as a standing habit rather than an emergency measure.
Listen again to the exact phrasing, because the man chose his words with a builder's precision. Not "we cut costs." Not "we tightened our belts." He said the pandemic forced him to weigh what we need against what we think we need. That is a claim about categories, not amounts. He discovered that his spending had been flowing from two different sources that his books had been treating as one: genuine requirements, and beliefs about requirements.
The second category is the dangerous one precisely because it does not feel like belief. It feels like fact. The business thinks it needs the office at that address, because it has always had it. It thinks it needs the newest model of the machine, because the competitor bought one. It thinks it needs to sponsor the event, stock the full range, keep the account that has not paid on time in two years. None of this registers as indulgence. It registers as "what a business like ours does." Felt needs wear the uniform of real ones, and in good years nobody asks for identification.
Then came his second sentence, which turns insight into system: "As a rule, all new purchases and orders are scrutinized more to avoid wastage." As a rule. Not as a mood, not until things improve: a standing procedure, applied to every purchase, that asks each expense to prove which budget it belongs to. The pandemic did not make Participant 24 stingier. It made him a better auditor of his own certainties. That distinction is the whole essay.
The same chapter records what happened when the cutting reached people, and here the interviews turn painful. One engineering-sector owner, Participant 10, described the worst of it: the tender system that fed his firm closed at the start of the pandemic, leaving no projects for his staff to work on. "Having to let go of your staff members was the most difficult experience for us," he said. "I had to let go of some of my best guys."
But another owner in the same study, Participant 3, facing the same collapse, found a different door. "I called all the employees together," he told Chinyamurindi. "We had to find innovative responses to the pandemic. One such means was work rotation. Yes, we were cutting back but at minimal damage. This was a better approach than retrenchments." Retrenchment is the Southern African word for layoffs, and his alternative was rotation: everyone works fewer shifts, everyone keeps a job, the payroll shrinks without a single family losing its whole income.
Put the two testimonies side by side and a principle emerges that the chapter itself gestures at through its paired tables of cutback quotes: there is an order to cutting, and the order is the ethics. Things before people. Comfort before capability. And when the cut finally reaches people, spread the pain thin across many rather than total across a few. "Minimal damage," Participant 3 called it. He was still cutting; nobody in that study escaped cutting. A third voice, Participant 17, a woman in construction, described lockdown phases that meant "periods of having little or no cash." The difference between the owners was never whether they cut. It was whether they cut with a principle or with a panic.
For a family, this order translates directly, and we mark this as our translation. When money tightens, the first column to face the auditor is the think-we-need column: the ceremony scaled for the neighbors' expectations, the upgrade timed to the cousin's upgrade, the school chosen for its name rather than its teaching. The last column, defended to the end, is people: fees, food, health, the salaries of anyone the family employs. Families in crisis too often invert this, protecting appearances first because appearances are public and sacrifices are private. The Eastern Cape owners, with everything on the line, ran the order the right way around.
Here is the uncomfortable question hiding in Participant 24's grammar: why did it take a global pandemic to make a competent businessman weigh need against felt need? Not because he was careless. Because in ordinary times, nothing forces the two budgets apart. Revenue covers both, so both feel earned. The think-we-need column grows quietly, one reasonable-sounding line at a time, and every line hires its own defender inside the mind. Only when the cash stopped did each expense have to stand up and answer for itself.
This is where we go beyond the book, and we say so plainly: the chapter documents what owners did under force; it does not ask what they should keep doing when the force lifts. History suggests the honest answer. Disciplines adopted under pressure tend to expire with the pressure, and the felt-need column regrows in recovery like grass after rain. The families and firms that stay strong are the ones that keep the wartime audit running in peacetime, on a calendar instead of a catastrophe.
It is worth adding that Chinyamurindi's owners did not survive on cutting alone. The second theme of his interviews was what he called cushions: the buffers that absorbed what the cuts could not. Some owners leaned on government relief and unemployment insurance; one credited membership in a business forum, peers who shared information and encouragement through the worst months; others renegotiated contracts, like cellular agreements, to fit the new shape of work. The pairing is the lesson. An audit tells you what to stop spending; a cushion is what you built, before the crisis, out of what the audit saved. Families that run the two-budget discipline in good years are not just trimming waste. They are manufacturing their own cushion, month by month, so that when their version of the lockdown arrives, the family borrows from its past self instead of from a lender.
The mechanism costs one evening. At a set rhythm, monthly for the household, quarterly for the enterprise, take the actual list of what was spent and sort every line into the two columns by asking one question: if this vanished, what would actually break? Not "would we miss it": what would break? A need, removed, breaks something real within the month: someone's health, someone's schooling, the machine the income depends on, the family's word to somebody. A felt need, removed, breaks nothing but a feeling, and usually a feeling about being observed. You will misjudge some lines; sort them again next quarter. The value is not in perfect sorting. It is in making every expense report for inspection while inspection is still cheap.
New parents, take special note, because you are entering the years when the think-we-need budget shouts loudest. An entire industry exists to convert your love into purchases, and it will tell you the baby needs what the baby's cousins have. The baby needs the need column: food, health, safety, your presence, and the savings that become choices later. Participant 24's rule, applied at the crib, will fund a childhood's worth of the real thing.
Why do felt needs beat real needs so consistently, in businesses and families alike? Because they are never asked to compete in the open. The school fees and the ceremony budget never appear on the same page, so the trade-off between them is never actually decided; it just happens, and the ceremony usually wins because its deadline is louder. The single most powerful move a family can make, and this is our extension of the Eastern Cape findings, not the book's claim, is simply to put both budgets on one page, in writing, where the whole household can see which column is feeding on which.
Written budgets have a second, quieter power in a family: they turn refusal from rejection into arithmetic. "We cannot afford it" starts a quarrel about love and status. "Look at the page; if this goes in, what comes out?" starts a conversation about choices. The page absorbs the blame that would otherwise land on a parent or a spouse. Households that argue about money mostly argue in the dark; the page is the light switch. And children who grow up watching expenses face the two-column question are receiving, free, the exact discipline a pandemic had to force on a grown businessman with a payroll.
Here is the one thing to do this month. Sit down once, with your spouse or your family's money-minders, and run Participant 24's audit on last month's actual spending: every line into one of two columns, what we need and what we think we need, using the what-would-break test, and total each column so the proportion stops being a guess. Then adopt his rule going forward: every new purchase above a threshold you choose must answer the question before the money moves. Build both columns into the Budget Planner in LegacyPot, so the two budgets stay visibly separate month after month and the whole family can watch the balance shift, because what that planner is really tracking is not spending. It is the honesty of the household with itself.
A man in the Eastern Cape, bleeding cash in the worst year of his business life, found one sentence sharp enough to cut his costs without cutting his people. The sentence is now yours, and you get to use it without the pandemic. Weigh what you need against what you think you need. Then fund the first column like a steward, and make the second column earn its place every single month.