When founders gather, the conversation usually circles around immediate metrics like cash flow, sales targets, or short-term strategy. A true leader must have a deep grip on the macroeconomic levers that move both the world and their business.

There are two distinct layers to this. You have the macroeconomics on the inside of your business, which boils down to accounting, resource allocation, and cash management; then you also have the macroeconomics on the outside.

External macroeconomics is about assessing the lay of the land. You have to look at the landscape and ask a fundamental question: Am I putting my products out into an environment where there is genuine growth, or am I swimming in a stagnant pond?

Reading the Landscape

When the economy is flourishing, people rarely think about macroeconomics. But tough times force you to look up and read the indicators. When you travel, what do you see? Do you see construction cranes on the horizon? Do you see people ploughing farmlands? Do you see new roads being built?

These are not just signs of construction; they are indicators of hope. Massive investments like an airport, a dam, or a new city district create a macroeconomic filter effect. When a new corporate hub like Century City goes up, a population moves in. When people move, they need internet, cellular networks, food, fuel, schools, and shops. As an entrepreneur, your job is to spot how your business fits into that emerging puzzle.

What happens when the external landscape looks bleak?

When growth stalls, you are no longer catching the wave of a expanding market. Instead, you enter a negative cycle where you are just churning existing business, picking up pieces that a competitor dropped because they couldn’t survive. That isn't true growth; it is just survival.

Short-Term Fixes vs. Building Cathedrals

External macroeconomics is largely driven by government policy. When decisions are fuelled by corruption or a lack of economic knowledge, the infrastructure begins to degrade. We see this contrast playing out vividly across South Africa right now, where Cape Town is growing while Johannesburg faces severe failure due to neglected municipalities.

When leadership lacks macroeconomic understanding, they default to short-term thinking. Instead of fixing the broken water pipes, they create jobs for people to drive water tanks to houses. It is a fake solution. It creates a temporary transaction instead of building a permanent cathedral. A real leader fixes the infrastructure and teaches the person to become a plumber.

This brings us to a fundamental law of business and physics: entropy. If you do not actively maintain your systems and infrastructure, degradation is inevitable.

Falling in Love with the Problem

When the macro environment around you is broken, you have to look for opportunities within the dysfunction. Uri Levine, the founder of Waze, wrote a brilliant book titled Falling in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution. At a time when massive corporations owned the static mapping charts and pulled all the shots, Waze redefined the industry by focusing entirely on the driver's problem. They defied the odds by getting real-time information directly from users on the road, turning the traditional mapping world completely upside down.

As a business owner, when the domestic macro environment is failing, you cannot fix the national infrastructure yourself, you can control where you play. You have to find the fields where there is growth.

If your current environment is shrinking, you must be prepared to look outside your borders. In 2019, we made the strategic decision to diversify outside of South Africa. While we have focused internally recently, the lessons we learned during that international expansion have prepared us to go back out again.

You cannot control government policy, but you can control your horizon. When the local pond gets stagnant, a leader doesn't wait for the water to dry up.