The ICT charter is unlikely to succeed in growing black-owned ICT unless it emphasises creating opportunities for small businesses, says Liquid Thought MD Zulfiq Isaacs.
Isaacs says future growth is going to come from today`s start-ups and small businesses, and opportunities need to be created for them to enter the government and large corporate supply chain by disaggregating tenders and simplifying tender processes.
"If the charter can achieve that one thing, it could potentially have a huge impact," he says.
Isaacs points to Liquid Thought as a case in point. Established in 2001 to exploit a gap in the market for supplying specialised IT consulting services and technology to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), it now has corporate clients such as Vodacom, Foschini and Absa.
It has grown from a two-person start-up to a R5 million company that employs 13 permanent staff. Isaacs credits the Shuttleworth Foundation, Liquid Thought`s first high-profile client, with helping the company to make its breakthrough.
Liquid Thought was introduced to the Shuttleworth Foundation via the Cape IT Initiative, whose Bandwidth Barn incubator provided Liquid Thought`s first office space.
"At the Barn we were fortunate to have access to some very skilled and passionate mentors who understood SMEs and how to empower them," Isaacs says. "We also benefited from being one of very few black-owned companies in the Barn when it was getting a great deal of media attention. It was a great boost at a time when the world IT economy was in the post-11 September doldrums."
Liquid Thought says it has experienced over 100% annual sales growth since its inception and aims to achieve turnover of R100 million per annum within the next five years.
"It`s very important to be schooling new black IT entrepreneurs," Isaacs says. "We`ve graduated from being a start-up to a phase of long-term sustainable growth, but I can only think of a handful of similar black-owned companies in the Western Cape that have succeeded in this space. Too few black entrepreneurs have the necessary competence, skill and confidence to take on the market - all the BEE activity is in the large corporates."
Isaacs believes this will begin to change only when more attention is paid to developing entrepreneurial confidence and skill - and to creating real opportunities for small, growth-oriented young IT companies.
"Simply surviving in the early days was very, very hard. Having the right BEE credentials made very little difference."
An emphasis in the ICT charter on creating procurement opportunities - including shortening payment cycles for SMEs - could help make things easier for the next generation of start-ups, he says.
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