A true entrepreneur, Gordon Twala* responds to the everyday needs of ordinary South Africans to provide hair and cosmetic care – and a bit more.

Gordon started his distribution and sales business from his hair salon, which is situated in a busy shopping complex. His offer to customers has since expanded from offering hair grooming to distributing hair products and his own line of cosmetics to other hair salons in the area. Aubrey runs a tight operation and looks for ways to improve his delivery route to save on petrol and other running costs.

But, like most South Africans today, HIV and AIDS has impacted on his venture. Gordon shares a story of a highly skilled stylist whose premature death from AIDS meant a loss of these valuable skills for the salon. Realising that other employees didn’t grasp the significance of this, Gordon took the initiative to invite a person living with AIDS (PLWA) to address his staff. This, he says, helped to raise his employees’ awareness that HIV and AIDS isn’t something that happens to other people, but that it can happen to anyone – and that discrimination against people who are living with HIV and AIDS is unnecessary and wrong.

Gordon says that the condom use training he received from BizAIDS was a useful element of the course. Although he has been distributing condoms to staff and customers for a while, he now has the right knowledge to promote the correct and consistent use of condoms. This adds to the information the salon received from the PLWA and Gordon hopes that these interventions will help staff and customers pursue healthy sexual practices.

BizAIDS training also helped him manage the finances and threats to his business better, says Gordon. He now has a will, should anything unplanned happen to him, and the training has opened up new business opportunities, such as lunch-time deliveries to office workers in the shopping centre.

* Not his real name