A New Dawn for Domestic Work

Co-founder of digital household cleaning services app SweepSouth, Aisha Pandor shares her journey to establishing one of South Africa's most successful tech startups and its ethos of empowering women with entrepreneurial and tech-savvy mindsets.

BY FARAH KHALFE

Stemming from a working class background and raised in a household in which values of hard work, diligence, and social justice abound, Aisha Pandor, daughter of South Africa’s current Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, was encouraged by her apartheid-activist parents “to be different” – someone who never follows “sheep mentality” – and to always pursue and maintain the value of education in life. Her father in particular was adamant that his daughters were no less capable and intelligent than his sons and made a point of constantly instilling this notion.

Aisha went on to gain a PhD in Human Genetics and cultivated a solid background in the science sector, while simultaneously preparing herself for a corporate career. Despite pursuing a post-graduate degree in Business Administration, she says she never envisioned herself becoming an entrepreneur. “I was actually working as a business analyst when the idea for SweepSouth came about,” she recalls. “One thing I did know was that whatever I did, it should have a positive impact on South Africa,” she says.

While stuck and unfulfilled in the routine of a regular 9 to 5 job and struggling to balance the domestic responsibilities that came along with it, Aisha and her husband Alen shared a lightbulb moment in December 2013. “After struggling to find someone to help us manage our household over the holiday period, we realised how many inefficiencies there were in South Africa’s domestic services space, and how many people in the industry were desperately searching for work,” she says.

This was the spark that led to them founding SweepSouth, a digital platform allowing homeowners to request cleaning services at the touch of a button – fulfilling the need for both on-demand domestic work as well as the provision of long-term employment opportunities for South African job seekers.

Since launching in June 2014, the growth of SweepSouth has been phenomenal. Today, the company has operations in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria and (recently) Durban, while boasting over 3 000 registered domestic workers – referred to as SweepStars – on their platform.

A unique business model and never-beendone-before product offering are the core factors that have helped propel SweepSouth to its current level of success. “We’ve put a lot of work into professionalising an industry that has largely operated on an ad hoc basis for most of its history. We’ve also introduced convenience and seamlessness into a huge but previously fragmented industry. By bringing dignity to a profession that has historically been undervalued, we’ve cultivated a loyal base of entrepreneurially minded SweepStars and customers.”

When it comes to the most rewarding part of her job, Aisha highlights: “The way in which we are empowering women”. She takes pride in the fact that SweepSouth aids women from historically marginalised backgrounds to take control of their earning potential and become more digitally and financially literate. “This in turn, drives independence and agency, but most importantly, hope for a better personal future,” she reflects. “There are many women who have used the earning potential and flexibility of the platform to pay for studies and write exams to become nurses, teachers and social workers.”

With all female service providers (Sweep- Stars), a majority female customer base and an internal team made up of 60% women, SweepSouth’s composition is unconventional within the tech startup space – a reality, Aisha reveals, that has placed numerous hurdles in the midst of her path. “Visibility remains an issue. Especially early on, there were a number of occasions where people assumed that the founder of the company must be a white male and ignored me at events or spoke about SweepSouth without realising I was the co-founder.

While things are gradually improving, there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to making black female founders more visible, and involving more black, female investors in the ecosystem to help promote and support better diversity and inclusivity,” she says.

These obstacles have not hindered her, but have rather fueled her desire to refine and expand the business. Sweep- South has numerous projects and partnerships in the works, all of which are aimed at further empowering the women who use the platform. She also wants to bring additional home services, such as plumbing, gardening and electrical work into the mix, while infiltrating other markets and countries outside South Africa.

As a working mother and wife, Aisha’s role as a business owner is wedged between her home life and family responsibilities. She encourages women struggling to manage their time to take help where they can get it. “Needing and receiving help doesn’t make you a failure,” she says. A strategy she personally uses is to schedule family time into her calendar and ensuring she sticks to it. “I also block off regular thinking or strategy and planning time in my calendar, as well as ‘me-time’, or pamper time for myself every now and then,” she adds.

This period of ‘me-time’ usually occurs first thing in the morning when she wakes up 30 minutes before her kids “to reply to urgent emails and get into the right frame of mind for the day.” That all-important first cup of coffee is another staple she relies on to tackle the day ahead and ensure productivity.

“Productivity means finding the shortest but most effective route to achieving your goals and targets. It’s minimising procrastination and getting the most out of yourself and your team,” she explains.

Constantly striving for optimum productivity can seem overwhelming and create mounds of pressure, yet Aisha reveals she thrives off of eustress. As a naturally calm person, she is far more afraid of stasis, and always tries to rationalise a situation by thinking of the worst-case scenario and then planning ahead to prepare for anything that may befall.

Technology plays a vital role too in helping her remain organised and manage her day-to-day tasks. She reveals some of her favourite apps for busy people on-the-go: “I love the Slack app that keeps us in touch as a team when we’re out of office, on the run, or outside of normal working hours. I review the week I’ve just had to ensure I spend enough time on important tasks and projects. I use the SuperNote app for taking written and verbal notes, a scanning app for scanning from my phone and Asana for task and project management.”

When it comes to her business philosophies, Aisha has a few, but her mantra of “keep moving” is apt for her go-getter lifestyle. “Momentum, continuous change and innovation in business are absolutely key,” she says, as is turning intention into action. With considerable growth on the horizon, we can’t wait to see a new era come sweeping in for Aisha’s business journey, while she takes her game-changing digital domestic services to new heights.