Engen Pitch & Polish winners announced

Engen Pitch & Polish is a lateral thinking national workshop and competition designed to give local entrepreneurs the opportunity to ‘polish’ their ‘pitch’ to equip young entrepreneurs with the tools to pitch for funding in order to advance their business or business idea. This year marked the sixth year of the annual programme which has grown over the years.

The programme features five stages: Round one, round two, SAfm Wild Card, semi-final and final.

The competition attracted young aspiring entrepreneurs across the country as they battled it out for weeks, pitching and training in order to get to the final round.

Group transformation of Engen, Unathi Njokweni-Magida said, “The Engen Pitch & Polish programme is an opportunity for entrepreneurs and also forms part of their journey, learning curve and story. To date, the annual event has changed thousands of lives and continues to measure the change by staying in touch with contestants and monitoring their progress.”

The competition’s finalists were questioned by a panel of judges on why investors should be interested in their business concepts and why they should be the Engen Pitch & Polish 2015 winner.

The winner was Sanele Shabalala with his travel magazine for long-distance bus commuters, winning R60 000. Shabalala was in the semi-final of the national competition as a result of winning the SAfm Wild Card Competition, which ran concurrently with the national programme.

During the SAfm Wild Card, Shabalala had to pitch his business idea live on air, competing against other contestants and it was then up to the listeners to vote for who they wanted to give a spot in the national semi-final.

In second place, winning R30 000, was Strawberry Mphore with her early childhood development centre business idea. Third place, winning R15 000, went to Hercules Kgaphola, with his finger mate plastic bag holder business idea.

Details: www.pitchandpolish.com; 011 566 2000.