Whenever he faces hardship in his business, Sanele Gcumisa thinks back to how his father built up his small fleet of taxis out of nothing. There was not even precious little money for household basics as his dad battled to keep his old vehicles on the road.
Sanele, owner of Ocule IT in Kloof, has come a long way since then, but he finds that his father’s approach of grit and grind still holds value for him. Where his father spent countless days in the backyard turning written-off old cars into taxis, Sanele tries to find ways into South Africa’s corporate giants to convince them that his software innovations are worth a look at and like his father, Sanele’s grit is starting to pay off.
He and his team of twelve programmers, each of whom Sanele took on as interns and trained up, have built a Voyage Management System for the fuel giant Sasol to track and monitor the products they ship globally.
Building on this success, the Ocule IT team will soon start developing a resource platform for Sasol which will allow its buyers to shop for supplies on an Amazon-like site.
Sanele and his programmers constantly look out for opportunities in any corner of the business world where a cleverly designed piece of software can solve a problem or make things more efficient.
Once they’ve explored such an opportunity, the team starts working on a prototype, which Sanele then takes to the market. It is difficult to find and make contact with the right person in a large corporation to show what the prototype can do, says Sanele. When they manage to break through, Ocule IT will customise and adapt the prototype to fit the corporate’s specific needs.
Despite its successes with the likes of Sasol so far, Sanele says Ocule IT is still searching for and working towards a major break-through app – one that can be sold to multiple companies, and even globally.
Meanwhile, Ocule IT’s bread and butter lies in its training division, which is actually where the company started. In fact, education and training form the core of Sanele and Ocule IT’s ethos. After matriculating, Sanele spent some time working as an assistance telephone installer in the construction industry and had his sights set on becoming a builder, but then he landed a bursary from USAID to study IT at the Durban University of Technology.
He worked as a business analyst after graduating, which gave him critical insight into corporate systems, but also how corporations buy out smaller companies started by entrepreneurs. With this in mind, Sanele registered Ocule IT in 2004 but kept it dormant while his career shifted towards training. He ran IT courses for unemployed youth and worked on the development of interns for a training company for five years.
It was his own MBA studies that finally inspired him to take the leap towards entrepreneurship by reviving Ocule IT, taking on a host of IT interns to work on software solutions for businesses, while keeping the company going through training programmes.
Today, Sanele works with a network of freelance facilitators who provide training ranging from IT to electronic repairs – courses supported by the likes of Microsoft, Samsung and the sectoral education and training authorities.
Both Ocule IT’s training courses and its software development take place in the 28B Umzwilili Road in Kloof where Sanele has just signed an offer to purchase the unit that they have rented up to now. It will become his company’s home after years of moving around.
Sanele first approached the banks, who turned down his application and an estate agency referred Sanele to Business Partners Limited, who agreed to finance the property with no deposit required from Ocule IT. In return, Business Partners Ltd owns a minority share in the building which Ocule IT can buy back over time. Sanele says his interaction with Business Partners Ltd has helped him gain insights into property and business finance.
Firmly ensconced in their permanent base, Sanele is looking forward to Ocule IT’s next growth phase. He says although the company has solved all of its typical start-up problems, new growth challenges arise. Poaching of his programmers by larger IT firms is becoming a problem, says Sanele, even though it is a sign of the quality of the training and development that he has put them through, and a compliment of the industry to Ocule IT.
But growth also brings success, and Sanele believes that sooner or later Ocule IT will hit upon their break-though app. It could well be the stokvel prototype that he has developed and is currently negotiating with a major bank to customise.
A recent study has shown that billions of rands flow through stokvel savings cooperatives, most of which is manually administered by its participants. The time for a mobile app to help not only the stokvel participants, but also the bank, is ripe, believes Sanele.
A major challenge in developing the app was Ocule IT’s lack of a banking licence, without which one cannot take deposits from the public. It was therefore difficult to trial. But Sanele has overcome much greater challenges before, just like his father before him.
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