Blue Label Telecoms believes it can help South Africans take their businesses mainstream through its accelerator fund, Blue Label Ventures.
"A lot of people come out of the incubation phase, have developed a product but have no way of taking it mainstream. I think that is something that Blue Label can help with, in this economy, in this country, helping people grow these businesses and scale them up," said joint-CEO Mark Levy.
The JSE-listed company and Blue Pencil Management Architects jointly launched the business accelerator programme last November, and Levy, for the first time, gave details around what the accelerator is doing at the group's annual financial results presentation last week.
Blue Label Ventures aims to provide high-potential South African businesses with access to the funding, market opportunities, channels and skills they need to take their commercial success to the next level. It is headed up by co-founder Tallies Taljaard, who is also the MD of Blue Pencil, and former Cell C CIO, Maria Pienaar, who was appointed as founding director in March 2017.
Levy would not disclose how much Blue Label plans to spend on accelerating these businesses.
"It's not a business that has a budget per se, it has two people that are designed to look for opportunities. First prize is that these people can be integrated seamlessly into what Blue Label does - so that your speed to market is instantaneous," Levy said.
"So I think funding is the lesser of two evils at the moment, because what we need is to ensure that these businesses succeed. Because, literally, there are tens of thousands of people that are coming out of what we call the incubation phase.
"While everyone is throwing money at the incubation phase, I think they are missing a trick a bit in the sense that, for example, a guy comes up with an idea, like he builds an app, and they pay for it but then he has no idea how to run a business; how to take it mainstream; how to get economies of scale and how to take it internationally - and that is really where our skill sets lie," Levy explained.
He noted that at the moment "it's a game of kissing lots of frogs and finding something that works". He added the company likes the Internet of things (IOT) space and sees a lot of opportunity there to grow local IOT-focused companies through Blue Label Ventures. He says first prize would be finding businesses over time that can leverage off Blue Label and its subsidiaries and associates.
"This is about slowly going through what is out there and picking a few [start-ups]; less is more in this game for Blue Label."
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