A look at episode 20 of our Talking Success Podcast: Paul Kent, CEO of Adumo.
In this episode, Stacey and Paul discuss his FinTech journey. He shares how he disrupted a rapidly changing industry by providing simple solutions for novel problems, and built on this to leverage much bigger opportunities in the South African card payments space.
Deciding what to outsource vs insource
The first step is to identify what your business does well, and outsource what others can do better. Outsourcing has distinct cost advantages, especially initially, as building capacity inhouse can require significant capital investment.
Why is client centricity so important, and how to build and grow a customer base
Understanding your customers is key. Empathy is a critical part of this. It is important that you give your clients opportunities to communicate with you. Ideally by insourcing client services, and providing the communication channels that the customer wants. It is important to consider customer demographics, and many people still want to be able to speak to an actual person.
How to rapidly expand a business, and to ensure that the founder does not get in the way
Sometimes businesses expand so rapidly that the founders can be unaware that the potential to expand is exponentially larger than the founder himself can imagine. Frequently it is the founder who limits the business’s growth. Founders need to actively work to develop and upskill themselves in order to not hold the business back. Early on in a disruptive business there is little competition, and this is the time to be aggressive.
What to consider in the acquisitions process
There are two primary strategic considerations and questions to ask in the acquisitions process. Firstly, will the acquisition help in differentiating the product offering? And secondly, will the acquisition ensure access to additional scale, or to ensure access to new customer base not currently served?
