Over the last ten years I believe many small businesses have seen their customer base shrink or not grow as it did in the previous ten years. Let’s say your customer base was growing by 10% per year ten years ago. But now it looks like 3-4% growth per years, your customer base is shrinking.
The situation in SA, is this. We have around 1 million new school starters each year.
This means we should have 1 million new job seekers each year
Which means we should have 1 million new job starters each year
Which means there are 1 million more people earning an income each year
which means you should have a never ending supply of new customers year after year.
As this is not happening and we are only seeing around 250 thousand new income earners each year.
That means you are getting less that a quarter of the customers you should be getting and this number keeps dropping.