Howard Blake talks about growing a business in South Africa
Blake & Associates was formed in 1990 with the intent to build a new generation value chain provider of contact centre services—one that is proudly South African.

Blake works to establish long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships with clients by delivering outsourced business services and results that are best in class. Blake’s value offering to the market include the provision of services such as customer acquisition and business development, customer lifecycle management, inbound and outbound customer services and sales, business intelligence based on data leveraging, call centre and e-commerce collections—Blake Online and Blake Direct—and surveys and market research.

Howard Blake started the company with a vision to fill a gap that he saw in the market at the time. He began the company with just a typewriter, a kitchen office and a scooter and has grown the company into a highly successful international Business Process Outsource leader. The company operates across three continents and has employed over 7,000 people since inception. Today, 3,000 people work for Blake & Associations—a company that presently has a profound impact on the growth of the South African economy.

TABJ’s Anna Guy had the opportunity to speak with the very passionate, very innovative founder, about his experience growing the company, and in turn, South Africa’s economy.

Anna Guy: Tell me about your business.

Howard Blake: Because we trade globally, we have a fair idea of the business standards that are required and the expectations of our customers, in Europe, the Americas and here in Africa. We see a tremendous opportunity expand our services into countries in Africa that are ready.

We take what we consider to be the best business in Europe, and the best business in other regions, which are very mature outsource markets, and see how we can make those benefit the businesses of Africa.

Africa will develop at such a rapid rate. That really puts us in a good position for service offerings. Instead of having to go through this traditional life cycle of customer service, we can accelerate really quickly into a sophisticated state, as each African country requires a service at a particular level. For us, that’s the one exciting thing.

The other exciting thing is the expectation of Internet protocol, as we believe a lot of call functionality will migrate from voice-oriented service to data-oriented service. Rather than call or speak to someone in person, there are a lot of things you can do through [online] chat and other technologies where you can resolve your queries. It’s a different medium, not having to pick up a telephone and phone into a traditional call centre environment. You can introduce some of your functions over Internet protocol, rather than choose to do it through voice or data interaction, and get the service that you require.

I don’t think you will see the loss of voice communication. I think that’s unrealistic. People always want to talk to human beings. But as instant protocol advances, people are more comfortable using them and we’ll see a greater uptake in that area.

AG: What is your business doing to reach your service goals?

HB: First of all, we have resources in the United States, based in Los Angeles. We’re going to be actively marketing economist-type products. Not just for our existing client base, but new clients as well. We’ll be able to offer them a reputable package solution that allows the economist side of their business to be represented in their Internet domain. A lot of companies don’t think of how they look on the web. Are they Twitter literate? Are they Facebook literate? Is the website representative of the services it offers? Can you interact directly with their platform, as opposed to going into the traditional retail environment and the traditional distribution of the business? Our website runs as a separate project and a dedicated resource, and we’ll be building another one shortly. We really plan our technology space, and that technology develops opportunities.

AG: What motivates you?

HB: The most exciting thing for me at this stage, and I think it’s always been this way since I started, is being part of the Ernest & Young entrepreneurs program, as we were nominated as finalists in 2008.

They asked the same question. What motivates me? Seeing the joy of something you’ve been able to conceive, and your intellect being delivered as a working business model that employs people, creates opportunity and adds value to the economy. That, at the end, of the day is the exciting part. I was talking to a guy the other day who was doing his PhD on entrepreneurs, and what I said to him is that there are a very few who are motivated by the financial reward.

It may well be a consequence, but it’s not always about the financial success, but rather to a large degree it’s an opportunity to see something you’re able to conceive in your mind [develop] into a realistic, viable business proposition.

We came up with this idea 20 years ago and [found] that it is a sustainable, viable business today and it employs a lot of people. If the business had not started, those opportunities may not have been there.

AG: There’s a lot of background on how you like to help disadvantaged people in your company. What do you look for in those people? Certainly there’s no shortage of people who could use a hand. On what basis do you select people?

HB: We do a basic aptitude test just to make sure that, from a linguistic point of view, their basic skills are there—that they understand the basic understandings of mathematics, or they can at least do a basic calculation.

But the most important thing is looking at people and seeing a hunger and a desire, and if they want to do something more with their life. It’s trying to move them out of the circumstances they are living in or what they grew up in, trying to move them out of that area emotionally, and giving them a feeling of hope rather than despair.

Often, it is the drive that an individual has, that he wants to take himself out of where he and wants to exploit an opportunity to advance. It’s always a challenge when people come from depressed communities to migrate them into opportunities where they can see recognize and appreciate that opportunity. We have people that we employed 15 years ago and they’ve moved up to directors of companies through pure effort to apply themselves, even if they didn’t begin with the skills. If you have your mind set on it, you can do anything.

AG: Who are your mentors? Who are people that you look up to in the business world?  Was your business patterned on anyone else’s or did you forge your own path?

HB: Unfortunately, that’s an embarrassing answer. I can’t say to you Henry Ford or Bill Gates, I didn’t hear of any of that, I just put my head down and believed in what I was going to produce and single-mindedly produce it. I really shied away from the opposition of other people because I really believed that I could do it. I never really look at others like, ‘I’ll be there one day’ or ‘the way they handled it is the way I want to handle it’.

AG: Do you have a favourite author or favourite book?

HB: I do. I’ve been doing a fair amount of frustrated studies since I graduated. I enjoy philosophy and I enjoy business philosophy. I know that’s not a fabulous stretch. There are some business philosophers out there; one is Thomas Homer-Dixon who I believe is a professor of philosophy at an Ontario university. I’m associated on his website, and I’ve read a couple of his books, one that was called The Ingenuity Gap, which showed why people sometimes don’t do the things they could do. That’s been a book I’ve used a lot to try to get the best out of people, including myself.

AG: What do you hope to achieve next?

HB: Achieving the successful migration of this business (that is still in the 1990s context) and moving it into the 2000s, and basing the context more on technology—we’ll move away from voice services and toward Internet protocol.

blake.co.za

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