Durban’s quiet comeback (and why now’s the time to speak up)

I want to start this month’s newsletter with something genuinely good, because we don’t get to say that often enough.

eThekwini’s unemployment rate has fallen to 21.2%, this is the lowest of any metro in South Africa.  We are ahead of Cape Town and well below the national rate of 33.6%. That’s a 5.6 percentage point drop from the same time last year, and eThekwini was the only metro in the country to record declines both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. Transport and logistics alone added around 44,000 jobs over the past nine months, with finance and business services adding a further 25,000*.

Durban is outperforming

Whichever way you cut it, that’s not noise in the numbers. That’s Durban quietly outperforming Johannesburg and Cape Town, in a year when good economic news has been hard to come by.

I’ve been in enough boardrooms and coffee meetings this year to know that most business owners haven’t caught up with this yet. The last few years trained all of us to keep our heads down, cut spending, wait it out. That instinct made sense at the time. But there’s a real cost to holding that posture once the ground has shifted under you: the businesses that stay quiet through a recovery are the ones nobody remembers when the opportunities start moving again.

I say this every year around this time, but it bears repeating, confidence doesn’t return to the loudest business in the room. It returns to the one that was still visible, still communicating, still building relationships, while everyone else was waiting for certainty. By the time certainty arrives, it’s too late to start.

Are you visible?

So, my suggestion this month is a simple one. Take five minutes and ask yourself: when did you last put something out into the world?  A story, an update, a piece of news about your business  that wasn’t purely transactional?  If the honest answer is “a while,” this is a good moment to change that. Not because the economy has suddenly fixed itself (it hasn’t, and KwaZulu-Natal still has real headwinds), but because a genuine local good-news story is a rare and useful thing, and your clients and prospects are more receptive to hearing from you when the mood is lifting than when it’s flat.

On a personal note: it’s been a busy month for us here, catching up with old clients and a few interesting new conversations, including with a longtime engineering consultant in the city who’s rethinking how he tells his own story after 20 years in business. More on that another time.

As always, if you’d like to talk through what any of this means for how your business is showing up right now, my door (and my inbox) is open.

Photograph courtesy of Roy Reed Photography