Andrew we know that as
co-head of RMB Ventures,
you're literally in the
business of helping
other businesses, right?
And entrepreneurs often
reach a critical stage of
their growth where they
want to scale, scale, scale.
And growth is such a
critical thing there.
I'm quite keen to understand
what you've witnessed
through RMB Ventures as to
what some of the best
solutions are in order to
assist businesses to scale.
So our philosophy is we don't
think, capital is one element,
but it's so much
more than that.
And we really believe in
providing guidance on how
to capacitate that growth from
an execution perspective.
So we need to invest
in internal capacity.
More specifically, internal
capacity and capabilities
around people and teams.
Often businesses don't have
the luxury of being able to
allocate resources to some
of these growth initiatives
because they have
problems to solve.
Their clients, their existing
client base still needs
to be serviced.
And so what we try and do is,
is just try and help capacitate
this growth and sort of share
the load, so to speak.
By using our own resources
and skills and experience
to enable that growth strategy.
So we really think it's
important for founders
and management teams
to consider a partner that
can do more than
just provide capital.
And help them with
understanding how else,
what else they need to do
to unlock this growth that
they're looking for.
Yeah.
So beyond the money,
what else can you share
with us as true and accurate
examples as to how
it is that you assist these
businesses in terms of
achieving scale?
Sure.
So if I think about Vox Telecom,
which is one of our investments.
So we we sort of enabled the
initial Frogfoot acquisition,
which then pivoted the
business into the sort of
high growth fibre
infrastructure space.
That was just the start
of the journey.
And from there it needed
more capital and we facilitated
that by negotiating with
third party capital providers,
debt providers to provide
that capital for growth.
And more than that, we
needed to now incentivise
those management teams
appropriately to grow this
fibre business.
And, you know, we helped
them do that and capacitate
that very steep growth
curve that Vox is on
at the moment.
One can just imagine what
that's like for companies
in different sectors.
So does RMB Ventures again
provide a bespoke approach,
given additional examples
that you can share with us?
I suppose if we talk about
a business we invested in
back in 2018 called Gimelli.
Gimelli is a formidable
business that started in KZN
and consists of a clothing
manufacturing business,
a couple of clothing
manufacturing businesses,
and then a retail business
called Clothing Junction,
which some of you may
have heard about.
Now, they had just started.
We backed a founder here,
and he just started on this
journey to really, truly unlock
the retail potential that he
saw in Clothing Junction.
And it required a lot of help
to think about how do we
capacitate that growth in
the stores and looking at
the operating model, what
skills we need to bring in.
We needed to bring,
we created a whole bunch
of new jobs in terms of trying
to capacitate this growth.
And we are only partway
through that journey and
at the moment it's going
really, really well.
We've grown with them
significantly and hopefully
we can continue to do so
in a sort of measured,
considered fashion.
Yeah.
What I'm hearing here is
that it's a journey as well.
No quick, overnight fixes.
And that tells us something
about the commitment then
of RMB Ventures to its clients.
Gugu absolutely.
And I'm sure, as you know,
everything in life takes a lot
of hard work and we're
committed to that journey.
And sometimes that
journey takes a lot longer
than we anticipated.
Events like COVID and other
headwinds that you may face
in trying to execute the
strategy means that you
need to be invested
sometimes for longer to
really, truly unlock
that full potential that we
look for in a business.
We have the ability
to do that.