At the age of 63, Delia Cupido’s amazing entrepreneurial drive shows no signs of slowing down, but her business – the Chameleon Group comprising four preschools and two junior schools in Cape Town – has come to a crossroads.
She has received an offer from a very large institutional investor to buy her schools, which has developed a sterling reputation of successfully including children with learning difficulties into its mainstream classes.
From one perspective, the offer of the corporation to buy 70% of the ownership of the Chameleon Group (the group) is the culmination of an astounding entrepreneurial career: at age 13 Delia had to leave school to work in factories to put food on the family table. Through sheer grit, determination and night school she worked her way into management, wrote matric at 39, became a property entrepreneur and found her true passion when she bought the tiny Chameleon preschool in Sybrand Park. Over the last two decades, she built it into a group of 6 schools with 400 children, 54 teachers and 15 support staff members, and so far there seems to be no limit to the demand for and growth potential of the group.
For a large corporation to want to buy it is a true acknowledgement of the excellence of the business she had built.
But for Delia, the experience is far from straight-forward and she finds herself filled with profound doubts over such a deal. Of course it would solve so many of the problems that she had been grappling with as a self-made entrepreneur growing her business organically. With corporate resources, the Chameleon Group would at last be able to institute its own transport system. The junior school in Goodwood would be able to acquire a state-of-the-art playground and sports facilities. The group could grow twice as fast as it currently does.
Yet Delia baulks at the idea that her staff members and teachers, some of whom had been with her since she bought the tiny playschool in Sybrandt Park in the early 2000s, would be at the mercy of corporate downsizing and rightsizing imperatives.
Fitting her schools into a much bigger structure where distant committees decide on things like teacher-pupil ratios might as well ruin the careful balance that she had established over the years between running the Chameleon Group as a successful business and providing a much-needed social service.
The bottom line is that the Chameleon Group is much more than just a business for her, says Delia. The first Chameleon playschool that she bought already had systems in place to include children who learn differently, based on the needs of the founder, whose own child was an atypical learner. Delia took the model and expanded it into all of her schools, building a formidable team of specialist teachers and creating an enriching learning environment for all the children, mainstream learners as well as those who learn differently. This emphasis, which could easily evaporate if the focus of running the school is pure profit, has exposed a huge need in the community.
Yet there is no doubt that Delia has also managed to grow the Chameleon Group with a keen business sense. Her schools in Goodwood and Kenwyn have doubled in size since the Covid-19 pandemic, which Chameleon survived with minimal damage due to the careful management of resources generated and saved up from the business’s own revenues.
Delia even managed to keep on paying the full instalment on her loan from Business Partners Limited without having to make use of the financier’s repayment holiday during the pandemic.
In fact, her long relationship with Business Partners Ltd is probably the clearest sign that a solid business model underlies Chameleon’s social role. Including the financing of the purchase of her first school, Delia has taken out no fewer than five loans from Business Partners Ltd to expand her group.
The latest loan, which she is currently paying off, was for the purchase of the building housing her fast-growing junior school in Goodwood.
When considering the momentous decisions facing Delia over the future of the Chameleon Group, one of her obvious choices is to continue to grow the group incrementally and organically. Her priorities for 2024 would be to start a transport system for the schools and to find property for sports facilities for Chameleon Goodwood.
Another option that Delia is keenly looking at is the possibility of franchising her model. It would allow her to grow steadily and carefully vet the franchisees to ensure that the ethos of the group remains focused on social service.
And financing her expansion? “It would be nice to know that the business is now established enough for the banks to take it seriously, but I don’t know. What I do know for certain is that if I need them, Business Partners Ltd will be there for me, just like they’ve always been,” says Delia.
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