Winner of the Excellence in the Management of People award
for 2018, category for small enterprises
Our adjudicator Kenneth Mabilisa shares with us their experience of Air Blow Fans
How to use people’s strengths and avoid unproductive personality clashes
It takes different personalities and talents to build an effective, cohesive team but if the individuals in the team don’t understand each other’s differences, tension can result. Air Blow Fans has found a way to get the most out of a diverse bunch of people so that they complement rather than frustrate each other.
It starts with recognising the value that different personalities and viewpoints bring and, conversely, the dangers of attempting to stamp a culture of clone-like uniformity on business, says Gavin Ratner, managing member.
“If everyone
was like me, the place would fall apart. It takes all types to be successful,”
he says, explaining: “I’m not a detail person at all but my sales manager is
extremely detailed. He knows it’s not personal and that he has to make sure I
give him everything he needs to do his job properly. We understand each other.”
That
understanding is not based on telepathy or even years of working together. It
stems from the conscious effort that Air Blow Fans makes to ensure its people
are aware of each other’s different personalities and how to work together
productively despite – or perhaps because of – those differences.
The company
uses professional personality profilers to interview each and every team member
and then consolidate the results on a group graph that shows the team’s
collective strengths and weaknesses, as well as the personality dynamics at
play.
“We also use
profiling before we hire anyone to make sure there is the right fit between the
person and the position. If the position needs detail, then the person filling
the position must have detail,” says Gavin. “As Jim Collins said, you must get
the right people on the bus in the rights seat before you decide where the bus
is going.”
With the
right people on board, in the right positions, they tend to get on with the job
– and with each other. “It means you don’t have to manage people,” he says. “Technology
is simple and intuitive and growing the business is the easy part. People
management is the hardest thing in business. It takes just one bad apple to
create turmoil and dissension.”
The company
doesn’t claim to have all the answers but, judging from its staff turnover,
it’s doing something right. “We lost one person two years ago and we have
grown, gaining three people in the past year,” Gavin says. “Understanding each
other’s personalities helps me and others to interact well. It makes things a
lot simpler.”
Winner of the Excellence in the Management of People award for 2018, category for emerging enterprises
Our adjudicator Dr Mthandazo Ncube shares with us their experience of Passion4Performance.
Free to make mistakes and accountable for fixing them
On a good day, the
only person you can control is yourself, so attempting to control anyone else
is futile. Rather let people manage themselves, have the freedom to make
mistakes and be held accountable for their actions and decisions.
This is the essence
of people management at online learning assessment company Passion4Performance
– and while it might sound simple, it’s anything but.
“Our culture limits
us in terms of who can work for us. It’s really difficult to find people who
can work this way. At school and in their studies, people are not taught to
think. Then they come here and have this freedom, and it’s very uncomfortable,”
says Darryn Van Den Berg, founder and Visionary MD of Passion4Performance.
The uncomfortable
part is that there are only two golden rules for the company’s employees.
“First, you must be able to ask if you don’t know. Second, you must know if you
are about to drop a ball,” says Darryn. “Our culture is that if you drop the
ball, you have to pick it up.”
In other words, it’s
all about consequences and accountability. “We have lots of conversations about
our culture and we tend to dive into the consequences, and this is causing the
uncomfortable conversations to become closer to the norm.”
Darryn recalls the
time he and a young developer went to pitch for a large contract from a
prospective client. “This youngster saw me as the boss and he would never say
“no” if I asked him to complete a task. He said he could do the job we were
pitching for and we took the risk that he could. On the pitch day, we took him
with the potential client but the work was not completed and the pitch fell
apart. Holding him accountable in front of the client to fix the challenges –
as we were experiencing them.”
After the experience
of having to explain his misjudgement to the client, this particular employee
was no longer a people pleaser. “Immediately, he started saying no,” says
Darryn.
“Micromanaging is easy but I’m a firm believer
that people must manage themselves. As far as possible, we try to create an
environment where people set their own goals and targets and make their own
decisions. We like people to be free from fear to make mistakes, ask for help
and pick up the balls they drop.”
Netstar were the tt100 2018 winner of the Excellence in the Management of Technology award, for large enterprises.
Our adjudicator Ann Naicker shares with us their experience of Netstar, a subsidiary of Altron.
Pressing the
accelerator on innovation-led business
Slow and steady doesn’t always win the race. To survive in
today’s highly competitive environment, organisations need to be more agile and
innovative. A key driver in boosting such a culture is fuelled by a willingness
to invest in research and development, as well as the ability to learn from
previous wins and potholes along the way.
For many years, Netstar’s basic business has been stolen vehicle
recovery, and a solid business it is. Today it is also a driving force in Asset
Tracking and Insurance Telematics.
“Netstar, a subsidiary of Altron, delivers innovation that matters”,
says Pierre Bruwer, Group Managing Director for Netstar. “One of our key
strategic objectives is to grow our market share within the IoT and Data
Analytics space. With Netstar’s Insurance Telematics, insurance companies can
now perform accurate driver behaviour analysis allowing them to manage their
risk more effectively. Both solutions rely on our IoT and Data Analytics
platforms”, he continued.
The automotive
industry is multi-layered and offers an array of business opportunities.
“Netstar provides protection to over 700 000 vehicles and
have recovered in excess of 80 000 stolen and hijacked vehicles,” says Quintin
de Kok, cloud solutions architect at Netstar. “Every day, our devices stream between
250 million and 300 million messages to our insurance clients – some of whom
base their whole insurance model on the data we provide.”
Usage-based insurance is one of the fastest-growing
data-driven trends. This is where drivers are rewarded or penalised according
to their driving behaviour.
Giving drivers
incentives to drive better
“According to an analysis we did for one large company, the
behaviour score of drivers who were incentivised improved by 4% to 5% on
average, and 17% more had a 100% score,” Quintin says. “Incentivised drivers
drove better than those who knew their score but were not incentivised and
those who did not know their score and were not incentivised.”
Netstar has been making major inroads into the user-based
insurance market on the strength of a combination of factors including: the
huge number of Netstar devices installed in South African cars, its highly
scalable technology platform, the ability to attract and retain top technology
skills and their strong investment in R&D.
“We are constantly investing in new technology, spending 3.6%
of our annual turnover on Research and Development,” Pierre says. “Our
technology strategy is tied to our business strategy of improving revenue
growth, profitability and customer experience, as well as employee excellence.
To this end, we have entered into new markets in terms of our local technology
offering and global presence. Our Asset Tracking solutions allow our customers
to monitor more than just vehicles, but their high value possessions as well.”
Cycling is a growing sport in South Africa with cyclists on
expensive bicycles becoming easy targets for criminals. To help foil them, Netstar has partnered with
CycleSense to offer cyclists a tracking and recovery solution for their
bicycles. A first in the South African market.
Further to local technology growth, Netstar recently entered
the Indian car market.
“As stated in McKinsey’s July 2018 report profiling India’s passenger-vehicle market, the country is predicted to become the world’s third-largest passenger-vehicle market by 2021; and we intend on maximizing this opportunity from both a consumer and commercial perspective.”, Pierre concludes. There’s little chance that Netstar will be pressing the brakes any time soon.
Accsys were the tt100 2018 winner of the Excellence in the Management of Technology award, for medium enterprises.
Our adjudicator Marilze Schwar shares with us their experience of Accsys.
Six out of six is hard to beat
Talk about making a clean sweep.
Payroll and people management company Accsys entered six tt100 award categories
in 2018 and walked away with all six, including excellence in the management of
technology.
“We were surprised,” admits CEO
Teryl Schroenn. This is not because Accsys is a newcomer to winning awards – it
received one tt100 award in 2017 and four in 2016 – but rather because it had
just emerged from a challenging period.
Transaction Capital acquired Accsys
in December 2017 after it had spent several years in the Telkom/BCX fold. “As a
subsidiary, we had been hampered by corporate restrictions and it was only
quite recently that we felt we were back on track,” says Teryl.
Six tt100 awards seem to confirm
that, but truth be told, Accsys’s business and technology model is built for
resilience across short-term wobbles. As payroll veterans who have seen more
change than most, Teryl and her COO Cathie Webb know that nothing is more
important to people than their salaries. Being paid the right amount, on time,
is non-negotiable, and a payroll provider worth its salt makes sure that if
there’s one thing its clients’ employees can bank on, it’s their salaries.
So the backbone of Accsys’s
business is extremely reliable technology. However, that’s not enough. This
technology also has to be highly flexible so that all those deductions can be
made, error-free, and salaries paid via whatever channels the client and its
employees prefer. For the most part, 21st century employees receive
their salaries electronically but there are still many unbanked people in
Africa (Accsys’s clients are active in 19 African countries) whose salaries are
paid in cash.
Teryl says Accsys is able to adapt
its proprietary software relatively quickly and easily to cater for those
preferences, not to mention the differences in various countries’ tax
frameworks, employment laws and data privacy requirements.
The company is also keeping a close
eye on the rapid changes in the world of work, where digitisation is ushering
in new types of employment, embodied by the gig worker who chooses to work
here, there and everywhere. Such trends are bound to change what, when and how
people are paid, with major implications for the future of payroll.
Here, systems integration and data
protection are key requirements, she says. “Software, while having to be
protected to ensure data confidentiality, must still be able to contribute data
to other products and accept data from other products.”
“The digital economy is still in
the embryo stage but we need to be agile enough to adapt to whatever it
brings,” says Teryl. “We have a team of bright young people adding depth to our
very experienced team, looking at things
to add on or take off what we are already doing and making it cutting edge.”
No one knows quite how payroll will change or
even what currencies will exist in the digital future, but when people need to
be paid, Accsys is putting its money where its mouth is.
Winner of the Excellence in the Management of Technology
award for 2018, category for emerging enterprises
Our adjudicator Chipa Maimela shares with us his experience of FetchThem
Find and fetch
customers who are most likely to close the deal
It’s a scenario with which every business is familiar: many
potential customers express interest in a product or service but only a small
percentage of those queries are converted into actual sales. Finding and
fetching customers who are more likely to close the deal is the forte of Cape
Town-based digital data marketing company FetchThem.
“In a subtle and non-intrusive way, we influence the
purchasing decisions of our clients’ customers by making sure the brand is
exposed to their decision-makers,” says FetchThem CEO Chris Witthoft.
Here’s an example.
Company A wants exposure to certain chartered accountants in
Johannesburg. Company A then gives FetchThem a list of the names of CAs it
wants to reach. FetchThem locates them and makes sure that Company A’s display
adverts are in front of the selected CAs wherever they go online.
“The important thing is that we integrate all the digital
touch points and have a central view. The ads don’t pop up only when the person
is on Facebook or Google, but everywhere they go online – across social media
and other platforms,” Chris says. “This enhances the brand and keeps it top of
mind.”
It’s important not to bombard the target audience, though,
so the ads will run for a limited period and frequency, usually between seven
and 20 times a month – often enough to be noticed but without becoming
irritating.
Converting interest
into sales
FetchThem’s technology model is cloud based, integrated into
the leading digital platforms and running off Google Infrastructure. It
connects to the cloud and clients through its own application programme interface
(API), which Chris says can interface with almost any software tool.
One of FetchThem’s biggest successes to date has for a large retail distributor in South Africa, which is 2018 was experiencing that familiar challenge of converting quotations into sales.
“They receive thousands of requests for quotations every month, and were looking for an innovative way to increase quotes to sales,” Chris says. “So we took their offline data online and, within a month, they reported a dramatic increase in sales.”
FetchThem can take at least some of the credit for such
successes as its reporting tools track the progress of each campaign and its
return on investment (ROI). “Because our API can be integrated into point of
sales, we can pick it up when someone is reached online and has actually bought
the product.”
He refers to FetchThem’s business model as “account-based
remarketing” because it is so targeted. While Chris would not call it a trend
yet as account-based remarketing is still in its early stages worldwide, he
sees it as one of the ways to solve the marketing challenges of the digital
era.
“Digital touch points are all over the place and
business lacks a central view of what is working best. This helps us to solve
that problem; it’s one of the ways that helps integrate all those touch
points.”
Winner of the 2018 award for Excellence in the Management of Technology, category for small enterprises
Our adjudicator Jayesh Reddy shares with us his experience of how Air Blow Fans effectively manage their technology
Fan specialists take the risk up front and blow competitors away
A small company facing stiff competition from major multinationals has to do things differently, especially in a niche market where a competitive edge can quickly vanish into thin air.
Air Blow Fans have carved out a nice slice of the African industrial fans business for itself in the past 15 years, but it knows better than to settle into a comfort zone. In fact, there’s nothing like taking risk upfront to keep an enterprise on its toes, says Gavin Ratner, its managing member.
“We go out to the site, find out what the problem is and do
the investigation for free,” he says. “This really means putting our money
where our mouth is, and clients appreciate it that we take the risk upfront.”
The Kempton Park-based company’s clients are usually mining
houses, power plants and manufacturers that use industrial-strength fans for
ventilation and can ill afford the production downtime that goes with faulty or
poorly functioning fans.
Their problems typically revolve around fans that someone
else supplied and installed, so Air Blow Fan’s arrival is a breath of fresh
air; it has a talent for fixing legacy problems.
While the fan concerned might not be brand new, Air Blow
Fans’ approach is stat-of-the-art.
“We are continually improving our skills and solutions, and
are very strong on the engineering side,” says Gavin. Air Blow Fans – which won
no fewer than five tt100 awards in 2018 – has invested heavily in engineering
software for analysis, design and systems monitoring, and is one of a handful
of small South African companies with ISO 9001:2015 accreditation.
It should not come as a complete surprise that
the company is also a fan of the TIPS™ framework. “What I like about TIPS is the way
it ties everything together,” Gavin says. “There is no one component of
business you can focus on in isolation. You have to look at all of it. That’s
what TIPS helps you to do.”
