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Introducing Olympia Holdings founders George Van Greunen and Manie Van Greunen

Any business owner knows that software can make or break a business. And when software is built by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs, the benefits are even clearer.

Like many great businesses, Olympia Engage was created to solve the challenges its founders faced in their previous businesses. With hands-on experience managing large teams and running performance and incentivisation programmes, brothers Manie and George Van Greunen set out to build digital solutions that address these challenges.

In episode 9 of The Finance Ghost Plugged in with Capitec, get ready to learn from these software ‘brogrammers’ about how Olympia Engage uses various techniques to improve adoption rates, create internal alignment and support measurable performance.

Episode 9 covers:

• The difficulties companies face when tackling performance management processes, including tasks like leader boards and performance reviews
• How Olympia Engage uses elements of CRM software and customer nurturing systems to align performance to measurable results
• Practical insights into implementation and the change management that comes with rolling out new systems
• The expected impact of AI on the software industry
• The debate between diversification and focus in SME service offerings

The Finance Ghost plugged in with Capitec is made possible by the support of Capitec Business. All the entrepreneurs featured on this podcast are clients of Capitec. Capitec is an authorised Financial Services Provider, FSP number 46669.

Listen to the podcast here:

Read the transcript:

The Finance Ghost: Welcome to this episode of the Finance Ghost Plugged in with Capitec. What a fantastic season we’ve had. I’ve gotten to speak to all kinds of different entrepreneurs, actually doing really interesting things. 

And in the most recent episode, I also got to chat to the executives at Capitec who have actually built Capitec Business from where it started as Mercantile Bank, which Capitec then acquired, into Capitec Business as we know it today. 

My guests on the show today have actually been with Capitec as their primary business bank since the Mercantile days – and now Capitec. So they’ve also walked quite a long road with the group, which probably says something. 

That’s Manie Van Greunen and George Van Greunen, both the co-founders of Olympia Holdings. Manie, George, thank you so much for doing this. 

George, I’m not sure where in the country you are at the moment. Manie mentioned that he’s currently in the Free State in what looks like a rather pretty, almost farmhouse-style kitchen. Very nice. So, probably a bit more interesting than where I’m sitting right now. So welcome to the show.

George Van Greunen: Thank you very much. I’m sitting in Durbanville in our head office in Cape Town, so thanks for that.

The Finance Ghost: Nice. And Manie, you’re in the Free State right now?

Manie Van Greunen: Yes, thank you very much. Because we’re with a client in the Free State on a farm. We’re actually assisting them with some implementation and services that we do over here. 

It’s actually awesome to be out and about in the farm area where it’s quiet, and you’ve got animals roaming around. So it’s just a totally different view. I’m very blessed to be here and very thankful as well. And thank you very much for the opportunity.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, fantastic. I love that. It’s good to have you guys here. Thank you and thanks, Manie, for making time while travelling as well. That really helps. 

I’m excited to dig into the story of Olympia because my understanding is that at the core of this thing, sits a problem that a lot of companies face. Which is stuff like making performance reviews interesting; to actually get it to really work for employees. And we’ll dig into a lot of these things. 

My experience working in corporates has been that when people hear “performance review”, there’s almost this audible groan in the room. I’ve seen all kinds of these things, ranging from very mundane tick-box exercises (where it is literally a tick box, and nothing actually ever really rides on it, let’s be honest), through to very spicy 360-reviews in a more bonus-driven environment (where you can get some nasty surprises through the performance process). 

You can also get a lot of validation for the effort you’ve put in in the past year. 

And of course, everything in between, from absolutely useless ones, to those ending in tears, and good outcomes where you actually get a chance to really learn and grow. So, it’s a pretty interesting space to be providing solutions. 

And you guys have got some adjacent businesses on the staffing side as well, which we’ll definitely dig into. Before we get to what Olympia does, just give us the backstory to this business, how it was started. That’s always a good place to begin.

Manie Van Greunen: Thank you, Ghost. Olympia was founded in 2017. We’re based in Cape Town like George mentioned at the head office, and we did it with a clear idea: technology could fundamentally change how organisations manage people, performance and customers. 

Although we’re a software development company, we built digital solutions – and we’ve seen all these recurring challenges that companies have. Especially when it comes to performance and how they manage their people, it’s a little bit challenging when they want to manage their clients. We look at how they manage them correctly and stay in touch to actually build a positive relationship with their clients. 

With building the company, we basically got to the point where we started Olympia to engage through this process. And that is our performance management and engagement platform with a built-in CRM component to it. 

So it sounds fairly funny with all the components together. But we’ll go through, in a bit more detail, how it actually fits (together) as a package. How it’s been assisting their clients through growing their business, making sure they manage their people correctly, even customer enablement, and how they can actually be closer to their clients and give them a better service. Which, in return, brings more profitability to the companies. 

At the same time, it also actually helps the internal people to manage the performance side – how the people can improve and do things better. 

We’ve learned a lot ourselves. Prior to this business, we had a 140-strong staff complement with people sitting all over South Africa, and some of them being based abroad. And our biggest challenge was how to make sure that our people felt engaged, and part of a team. And then also – how do we manage their performance reviews? 

It becomes a massive cost exercise to fly people all over, especially managers – to go and sit with the team and do performance management reviews one-on-one. That is how the engagement platform actually originated; how we started implementing it for ourselves internally – to make sure we can actually get that process to the point where we can save money. At the same time, giving the people the best outcome – both for the company and for the employee

It’s not a bias thing – it’s actually an interactive process where people can engage from the start through the 365 days. At the end of the day, when the review is done, they’re all on the same page, and are able to manage properly (prior to anything that might be a big concern or something that could be a big impact on the performance of the business or the employees themselves). 

That is where we as a company started from. We’re very, very excited about what we offer to our clients. At the same time, we’re also excited about what we offer as part of the internal process to our own people, and how we can manage them. We also see the results from implementing the system to support them as well. 

In a nutshell, that is who we are. It’s George and I, and then we’ve got a very nice staff complement that has been with the company for many years. And that’s a nice thing for us is how the people integrated into the business and worked with us. They grew and saw the vision of what we wanted to achieve, and that got us to the point where we are currently today.

The Finance Ghost: Fantastic. I’m so tempted to ask if it’s a “plumber’s tap-type” situation and if your own internal performance review process with your own staff works so well. No, I’m just kidding. 

Well, what is cool is to see how you went and built a business that feels like it solves problems that you had in your previous business, which I think is great. And it’s amazing how many entrepreneurial stories actually follow that kind of path, where it’s saying, “I wish this thing existed, hence I’m going to build it”. 

That’s basically what The Finance Ghost is. I looked at it and thought, well, I wish that people could have better access to investment insights and a more experienced business voice writing about the markets, as opposed to a lot of traditional-type media outlets. And here we are today. So that’s what you’ve got to do sometimes – you’ve just got to build the thing that you wish existed in the world. 

And the other point that you’ve raised there, Manie, which I like, is the concept of avoiding a negative surprise around the time of a performance review, because that is actually such a strong point. 

If you arrive for your performance review and that’s when you find out that all is not well, then it’s actually your manager’s fault more than it’s your fault. Because you just haven’t been given ongoing feedback, and you haven’t been given a chance to make it work. You’re probably being managed out of the organisation, if that’s happening to you. That’s the reality.

Manie Van Greunen: Correct. If one person could do everything in a business, that would have been the ultimate. But we know it’s not possible – and that’s why we need people in a business. The problem sometimes is that a manager or a person in the business doesn’t always give the feedback to management quickly enough, or to the staff itself. It creates a problem; it creates a negative impact when it comes to performance reviews. 

And we know that when people do say, yeah, we’re going to do a performance review, it’s like, “Oh, we’re really going to have to do this now again”. People don’t always believe in it because it’s most of the time a one-sided scenario. 

But in saying that, we’ve learned through this. And you rightly said that we actually went through the pitfalls of sending people all over doing things, trying to make sure we do performance management properly to make it a reciprocal thing, not just for the business, but for the employees as well. 

And it took us a bit of time, but we got to the point where we got a system that actually looked after both parties. They feel part of it – it’s not always for the purposes of getting people engaged in other systems or products or anything like that, but at the end of the day, it basically brings them closer to the business when they feel that you’re actually doing something to make sure they feel engaged. Helping them try to grow within the business and doing things that assist them as well.

Because we know – if people are successful, the company is successful – it’s a reciprocal thing. And I think that is where we’re very excited about how we can help people – by achieving that in the long term.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, I like that. So Manie, I can see you kind of naturally step into the spokesperson role. But George, I don’t doubt that you’ve been absolutely integral to this journey. Maybe give me a sense, George, of the roles you each play and why you feel like it’s been a good team. Was your previous business also the two of you together? Have you been doing this for a long time?

George Van Greunen: We’ve been doing this since 2002. I think why we work so well together, as you mentioned, is that Manie is more from a sales perspective; a spokesperson role. I’m more on a technical side, driving the back end. I think that’s what’s helping us to grow the business in the way we do. 

If we were the same type of people, we might have bumped heads a bit. But in this case, we’ve got good, defined roles – so we can actually achieve what we need to achieve.

The Finance Ghost: I wanted to say the clearly defined role aspect is actually something that’s come through on this podcast season before, because we’ve had, for example, married couples who have done businesses together, siblings, friends, business partners – whatever the case may be, it always feels like the road to success is to have these clearly defined roles rather than if you both bring exactly the same skills. Then all you’re doing is: same skill set, double the overhead. You’re not actually building something complementary.

You need someone who fixes your blind spots. That’s what inevitably makes a good team. 

And of course, so much of that comes through in performance reviews, right? It’s about saying, “What are your KPIs, what is your job, what do you bring to this machine – and how do you make it better?” and then you get judged accordingly. That’s how this entire thing works. That’s how organisations function. 

I think in understanding more about Olympia, I want to move into how you guys are very much a technology company, first and foremost. Software seems to be central to what you do. Exciting space. But my feed on X (previously Twitter) at the moment is AI slop after AI slop after AI slop. And a whole lot of posts about how software is about to get eaten by AI, and Software-as-a-Service is dead. I’m sure, like with most things, it’s an extreme view and, whilst there might be a little bit of truth to it, I do think that it’s way more complex than that. 

I want to talk about that later, but in order to get to that conversation, I need to ask you more about some of the solutions, specifically around the digital solutions that you offer.

You’ve touched on some of the problems that you solve. But maybe for someone listening to this, who’s going, “Oh, that’s interesting”, can you just give us a bit of a lay of the land in terms of the actual software solutions that you do offer? And then, I’m super keen to understand how you do that and the role that AI might play in that, in years to come. So let’s start with the solutions themselves.

Manie Van Greunen: 100%. We describe ourselves as a technology company first because of the software at the core of everything we do. We have a team doing different things in the business. But we build digital platforms, develop custom software, and help organisations implement systems that drive measurable performance and outcomes. 

We want to make sure that the systems we do take out to clients are user-friendly. Things where people can see the value – that they can use and immediately get results from – that can actually make a huge impact in the business and the system as well. 

So a key differentiator for us is the combination of the CRM system and the customer nurturing part of the app itself – built-in with the performance management and the reward system. So we know there are a lot of companies doing CRM, and there are a lot of companies doing performance management. There are people doing reward systems. But we’ve actually put this all together in one. 

So it helps to manage the staff performance goals and productivity in real time. It sounds too good to be true, but we try to get something where people can instantly, on a leaderboard, on the dashboard, see how it actually tracks within a business from a company perspective. 

To be able to visually see where these pain areas, or areas that they need to address, makes a huge difference. Especially if you want to grow your business in a positive way, make sure that your revenue improves, and that everything that you do is benefitting both parties. 

We also offer software development, testing, implementation consulting, and ongoing platform support. We do a lot of various things in the software area.

Testing is quite critical as well. You have to test something before you take it live. And most companies will know that if they’ve done internal projects. If you do not test properly and you go live, and something happens, you will 99% of the time lose people’s interest or the customer’s interest, because they don’t want to sit with the app or anything they use that’s not working (or it’s giving them problems the whole time) or anything like that. Then it becomes a negative. So we try to move away from it. 

So we do proper testing, and we’ve got a massive amount of experience in that area. And then we’ve got very good developers (from a development perspective) to support the process, but also support our customers. So it becomes a nice family-type team business that we hand to our clients, and we actually give them the benefit of it as well. 

Moving companies from a manual, fragmented process to real-time, data-driven performance across both people and customers is ultimately one of our big goals. To make sure we assist customers in achieving that as well.

The Finance Ghost: Interesting. That was quite cool to hear. I think there was a farm vehicle reversing in the background there? But you are literally on a farm. You are there getting to know their businesses, for better or worse, for farm vehicles or otherwise. 

And I love that Venn diagram that you referenced there. CRM, customer-nurturing came through, performance management, rewards. I can tell that this is software by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. It speaks directly to the lifeblood of any business, which is revenue. Anyone who has run a business is very, very aware that you manage from revenue down, because if there’s no revenue, then you don’t need any of the other stuff.

So if your performance management is not directly addressing how you either make money or actively support someone making money, then it just doesn’t make sense in a small business. Big organisations can get away with huge compliance teams that are very far away from the customers, which is necessary for many of those organisations. They’re either highly-regulated, or multinational. They have a lot of complexities that create that need. 

But for a lot of SMEs and entrepreneurs, they need stuff that is actually linked to revenue. So I think that’s a pretty interesting take on it. Trying to link the software to the actual lifeblood of the business. Right?

Manie Van Greunen: You’re 100% spot on there, I must say, apologies – like we say, business has to go on, and people need to make sure that they’re productive and actually get their business growing. So it’s an interesting journey for us, being part of the farming industry, helping them as well.

You’re absolutely right in saying that there are so many things that impact any business from a growth perspective. And if you don’t make money, what’s the future of the business? The main thing is, people need to believe in the future – and obviously be part of that growth to make sure that both themselves and the company are successful.

The Finance Ghost: You did warn me that a bokkie might find its way into this podcast. That would be an unusual interruption. So far, we’ve only had a farm vehicle, but it’s certainly authentic.

Let’s move on then, into gamification, which is one of the tools that you do use to drive engagement. And this tells me that companies struggle to actually get employees to use these digital tools. 

Again, I have got experience in really big corporates and they would go to great lengths to get people to adopt the tools, et cetera. There is a carrot and stick approach, right? There’s the “You will do this, or…” approach, which is one way to run a business, I guess, and the other way is to try to make it a bit more enjoyable.

There’s a spectrum. I would argue that either end is probably wrong. You want to be somewhere in the middle, but it’s obviously nicer if you can add some gamification elements and that kind of thing. Maybe walk us through the leaderboards, for example, which speaks to competitive organisations, which I think drives better performance. 

Maybe just talk us through some of the tools that you use to actually improve adoption in these organisations, which sounds like it’s one of your key selling points of the system.?

Manie Van Greunen: The biggest challenge is adoption. I used to be in different industries before; always been in sales as well. How do you measure people? From a sales perspective, I want to sell, I don’t want to work on systems. And my response was, “Please don’t give me something easier to do if I have to spend more time with it, I sell less” – whatever the case might be.

But what we’ve tried to do is bring a system together for the people to be able to do things quickly and efficiently. They don’t have to spend all day on it. 

We’re not replacing the current systems they have. We actually either integrate with them or actually complement them. But what we do is, we try to make it a quick, very easy process where they can just log, and do what they need to do, and go and do the sales at the company, and actually promote themselves and grow. 

That forms part of any partner business – a finance role, HR, or any part in the business – will get the benefit of doing it in a very quick, easy way. From a performance perspective on the daily task, from a work perspective, they need to do so.

We know that companies invest in digital tools, but employees and teams don’t always use these consistently.

So we’ve had that same problem where people say, you know, “We’re not going to take part of this because we don’t feel the benefit of this”. The adoption rate sometimes is a bit slow, but what we try to do is to make it a little bit exciting, but also at the same time try to get all these things together that it makes sense for somebody to use it. So some of our customers, in the beginning gave a lot of pushback, and said, “Oh no, we’re not going to use this because you know what, we know what we’re doing”. 

And funnily enough… what helps is if you have a leaderboard placed in a strategic place in a company (a boardroom or in a cafeteria, wherever people are usually getting together to talk a bit, and everybody’s faces are on that leaderboard). If the person who’s not really wanting to engage is not there, at a point they get to the stage where say, “You know what? I would actually like to have my face up there. I would like to participate because I feel a little bit left out now”.

And then they see it’s not saying they have to do this. It’s about trying to be part of a team, wanting to do things together. And the way we achieve this, through gamification, provides a very broad spectrum of how you can do things. 

We know that there are different ways of doing gamification. What we do from our side to help the client, help the employee to actually achieve this, is to use leaderboards. Leaderboards provide an effective tool to see how people are progressing, how they’re competing with each other, and how they’re achieving things – where there are quick problem areas you can address. 

Because you’ll see if somebody’s not engaging, they’re not going to be on a leaderboard – or they’re going to have a 0% on the leaderboard. Those are the things you target and work on to uplift that employee and make sure they achieve what they need to, and see where there’s a problem you can fix. 

We do goal tracking,so there are certain goals they have to achieve. We use team and collaboration tools within our product. They can work as teams together; achieve certain goals together. That makes it so much more attractive when people can see they’ve done something and they can see the result visually as well. 

This is active management – we have the management looking into this, assisting and driving support to the employee to say, “You know what, I’m management, but I’m also getting measured on this”. So, you know, we work together, we made this successful, and then we’ve got a reward mechanism built into it. So if you achieve certain goals and certain targets, there is a reward system that’s built into it. 

But it’s totally up to the company side how they manage it. So we don’t dictate and say you have to do this as a reward. We advise, and we can guide, but we have certain reward processes built into it. It’s a cash reward system. And there are different ways of just giving a thumbs-up or even a gold badge or a silver badge or whatever they achieve. 

People don’t always just need a financial reward; they sometimes need recognition. And unbelievably to say, people sometimes sit in the business, they never get an “Oh, thank you, you’ve done a good job”, or “Thank you for this”, or “You know what, well done, you’ve achieved this”. They actually appreciate that. So we try to improve and enhance and help people to get to that, to be able to help the staff in different ways from a reward perspective as well. 

That’s trying to make sure that we keep the staff and the business motivated and aligned. And it is sometimes difficult, but once you’ve got that process embedded, it’s a free-flowing system people get used to, and work on it very quickly and very easily as well. 

And on the other side, the workflow and the engagement tracking help ensure that the customers are actively nurtured rather than passively managed. With the CRM site, we’ve picked up a lot of clients sitting with a huge amount of Excel sheets with line data. 

It’s not helping them much because all the data is sitting on Excel. We know how it works. You know, you’re not always an Excel expert or getting onto the system and trying to remember things, when was the last dated birthday or anything like that. 

You can import that into the system and immediately you’ve got access to all those clients. 

You can nurture them, and you can work with them, and it tracks what you’ve done with the client and you could ease through it. So there’s a lot of things that give that benefit for how you grow yourself in the business, how you grow your clients and actually make everybody successful. 

And ultimately it’s about making performance, both employee and customer, visible, measurable and actionable in real time. And that is the key thing. If you have that combination right, it boils down to the bottom line, and you actually achieve better performance and reward, at the end of the day. 

George Van Greunen: I just wanted to add to what Manie was saying. Once you’ve got that leaderboard on, it becomes healthy competition because it’s a human thing. If you first and I’m second and we’ve got a Mauritius trip that’s coming up, I want to push to be first and you want to stay first because you want to get it. So suddenly the employee scores and the company scores.

The Finance Ghost: My cousin married an ex-air force pilot. He now flies commercial internationally and he had this great comment about surviving the air force where he said: “The best way to survive is don’t come first, don’t come last and don’t attract attention”. Good survival instinct there. Although I’ve got to say, if coming first gets you to Mauritius, then maybe people would see that a little bit differently. They might aim for the top of the leaderboard. 

Another fun story is one of my first bosses in my financial services career, he had this great line where he said to me, “Since money was invented, there’s only one way to say thank you”. Which has basically stayed with me for life. 

It’s pretty funny, but it’s also not how a lot of people want to be managed. If you’re in a very money driven environment like investment banking, then sure, I don’t think it’s about gold stars and recognition, I think it’s about bonuses. 

But for most industries, a lot of it is about how you feel at work and the amount that you’re contributing and everything else. And it’s a mix of these things and it’s about managing the human being. That’s what makes it so interesting, is people are different.

Maybe that’s a good point for me to bring this new world of AI into this. AI is very different to people. AI doesn’t need to get a pat on the head and for you to say “well done” and get a bonus. Although a lot of the way these models are written, they seem to flourish actually from basically blowing smoke up your own you-know-what and then getting it back from you. That’s a story for another day. 

What I want to understand is, as a software business, which is what you guys are at the end of the day – I keep reading as an investor about how AI is going to cause a lot of trouble in this world, etc.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. You guys are the experts here. I’m dead keen to get your insights because I think it’s relevant to anyone listening to the show.

What’s your view on how AI might either impact or improve your business, perhaps? And what are you seeing from clients? Are they asking you about it, or is it a bubble on my social media that hasn’t quite made it into SMEs yet?

Manie van Greunen: AI is going to shift software from being a system of record to a system of intelligence. Your question right at the end is from a client perspective, wherever we go, that’s on the tip of their tongue. They always want to ask, “Have you got AI integrated in the system? What can AI bring to the party?”

It is inevitable that they have to basically adapt from a business perspective because that is the way of the future. We still believe that AI can’t replace everything. So it’s always going to have to be that human touch. There’s going to be things that we as people think of differently, and that will evolve over time. It’s a big thing on everybody’s mind, and if you’re not going to go that route, you’re probably going to be left out in the dry. 

In performance management, AI will definitely predict this engagement, recommend interventions and automate coaching insights. So you can just imagine the value of that when people can use some of these AI tools to actually assist them with a performance journey, if you want to call it that. Where they can get the systems to implement, and at the same time roll it out to the staff in a very positive way. 

You know, we’re not saying AI must replace it. AI doesn’t know your business; you know your business. You need to have a lot of input in that to actually achieve that. But it will definitely help.

In the CRM system; customer management AI will definitely personalise, nurture, predict and optimise sales pipelines. And it will be a quick way to try and get the people to understand where there are gaps and where there are seeds they need to look at and enhance. 

Unfortunately, AI… I’ve had my thoughts about AI for a long time in positive and negative ways. It’s not something where we as a company can say, “Okay, I know we’re not going to go that route, we’d be fools not to do that”. We’re actually (to a certain extent) very excited about it – because we’ve seen (its value) in small things when we did use it – and it did make a huge difference. And that excites me.

Where it’s going to end up, that’s a different question. The technology evolves so quickly, and these AI tools are actually amazing.

SaaS companies that integrate AI deeply into workflows will thrive, and the people that are really doing it are seeing the results on a daily basis. Those that remain static with dashboards eetc. will struggle. We try to be in tune with the times and wherever that journey takes us, it’s always exciting because it gives us an opportunity to look at things differently. 

The current market reflects uncertainty about business models. Intelligent software is only increasing, and bringing AI into it is just going to give the market that opportunity to actually do things quicker and do things differently. Being in business for quite a while, when it started off, I just said, “AI – what is this going to be?”. 

Looking into what the companies achieved and how it’s actually helped personally, not just even in our app and business and certain things that I needed to get some insight into, it was amazing the quickness of it, now it can actually help you. So ya, from that point of view it’s inevitable. 

My view is that we have to adapt to that, and any company out there has to adapt.

And I’d love to flip this back to you a little bit. What do you see? How is AI changing the way leaders manage people and customers in the future?

The Finance Ghost: It is interesting. In my world, I’ve been trying to use it more for research because it helps a lot – the natural language questions versus searching by keyword, I think that just comes more naturally. That’s why it’s called natural language, right? It’s because you’re asking a question to the machine that you would have asked your friend next to you. Now you can just ask your AI. 

Quality of answers varies, I have found. I gave myself two days where I basically tried to work almost exclusively with Copilot in Microsoft. It just makes sense in my business to use Copilot.

I fed it a whole lot of my writing – my intention is never that it does the output because then I’m going to lose interest in my own business very quickly. My writing will start to sound like AI, which sounds like everyone else, which is exactly the way to make yourself redundant. But I did want to see what it was actually capable of.

I see it as a research tool, and it was a little bit exhausting to use, to be honest. For that day, I found that I got maybe some additional insights. But you have to sift through so much stuff, and no matter how much you tell it to just give you quick answers and to not put all the fluff and everything else (into it), you can see how much design has gone into trying to make this thing sound like the nicest person you’ve ever spoken to in your whole life. “And aren’t you just great? And of course you would ask that question, because you’re so clever”. 

It’s a bit gross, actually, in some respects. And I know that the different systems will do different things, and you can obviously tell it to do different things and everything.

I’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff online. Claude seems to be super powerful (what people are doing with integrations into Excel and PowerPoint). I think back to how much of my time as a junior analyst in investment banking was spent on that stuff and how much of that might now go away. 

And I guess my overarching worry is around junior staff. And I just hope that we don’t get to a world where 20-somethings – who have gone the route of becoming a professional in something – actually can’t find work because no one is hiring them (because they’re hiring AI instead). 

Where will tomorrow’s professionals then come from? That would be a big mess. And I think there is going to be quite a big mess that will have to get sorted out from a regulatory perspective. No one really knows. 

But I also don’t buy the story that someone in a finance team somewhere is going to sit and “vibe code” a solution instead of using their accepted enterprise-level, SaaS solution for finance. I think there are a lot of skunk-work-type projects going on out there that are driving this demand for AI. 

We know that a lot of it is just this big circular reference right now of Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia and friends. How much of it is real? No one really knows. 

I can see that there will be some application of this thing. I actually saw a meme on the socials this morning because obviously my feed is just full of AI now. And it was a cartoon of a farmer speaking to a horse. He said to the horse, “Don’t worry, you won’t be replaced by the tractor. You’ll be replaced by the horse that learns how to use the tractor”.

Didn’t help the horse so much, did it? Humans are not horses, of course. We’re hopefully a bit more adaptable. It’s a lot to think about. It’s a hectic thought process to go through.

Manie Van Greunen: I agree with you. The big thing is, there’s the other side of it as well that enhances people, to make sure that they grow. Because a lot of people want to be stagnant in one position. This is sometimes going to force people to get out of that comfort zone and actually start growing. So, there’s a negative side and a positive side. I think that’s more the positive side.

And within our application, we’re starting to use that to actually build people, not just user-tested AI replacing people, if I can put it that way.

The Finance Ghost: That’s the right way to think about it.

Obviously the two of you are very focused on systems and people, and I think just doing things the right way. I think that comes through a lot. And in your choice of bank, I do want to touch on that.

You were previously with Mercantile and then you obviously stayed with them as Capitec acquired Mercantile. Again, for someone listening to this, go back and listen to the previous episode in this series where I got to speak to top execs at Capitec Business about building that bank. Some fascinating stories and some really deep insights into Capitec’s DNA. 

And let’s face it, Capitec is the best business story in democratic South Africa. The numbers are what they are. That’s the reality. So you guys have stuck with them from the Mercantile days into Capitec business and all the success they’ve had.

I’m just curious, as systems-type people, you’ve obviously liked what you’ve seen, right?

Manie Van Greunen: Yes. As far as that goes, I must say it’s actually been a pleasurable journey for us.

When we actually signed up with Mercantile right in the beginning, we knew that they were a business bank, something different from the traditional ABSA and the rest of the banking out there. We never envisioned that Capitec was going to take over Mercantile Bank. But the journey just grew better and better. 

From Mercantile moving to Capitec bank, that was a pleasurable, enjoyable move for us. The way that Capitec manages the bank, the Capitec app itself – it’s all so user-friendly. The way they treated us – we probably wouldn’t have grown our business to the point where we are without them. They were a big part of our business. They were a big part of how we actually achieved things. 

I’m sitting here in the Free State with a farmer – we had the same discussion just before the podcast about Capitec and said how easy it is actually to go and open a bank account with them, how to do a business account, and the way the system just fits in together. 

We’re doing system applications and software that people can use. I think they can learn a lot from the Capitec Bank’s platform itself. It is so user-friendly, it’s actually so nice to use. 

And then it comes down to the people. We’ve had a lot of dealings with different people within Capitec Bank, from a personal perspective on just Capitec and then in Capitec Business. And the service has been great. All the banks are following them. I think they are leaders in what they do. 

And personally, (in my experience with) Capitec, with a Global One account in the personal side and how they do it on the business side, they stay ahead of the bunch. They do things differently; they’re innovative. And we like that because that’s what we want to do. We try to be innovative and do things differently. And we learn a lot from them as well in that regard.

The Finance Ghost: Absolutely. I’ve read T.J. Strydom’s book about Capitec, Stalking Giants. It’s a worthwhile read. One of the biggest takeaways that I got from it was that they really focused on getting a few things absolutely right. And it’s a great example of that strategy. I know, speaking for myself and looking at your business, this is where I want to ask my last question with the time that I have with you guys – it’s around building out different parts of a business.

All of us have that feeling where you need a little bit of diversification, right? It’s one thing to build a very big business that is focused. And obviously, if what you’re focusing on works beautifully, then that’s the dream.

Entrepreneurs have that optimism, but we also all have that fear where something goes wrong. And if you’ve only built one line of business, that can be lethal.

Something that’s interesting with your business is that you do have some revenue diversification angles, which is common. It’s something adjacent to what you’re doing. I’ve seen placements, I’ve seen outsourcing. 

I wanted to end off with firstly the logic there, why you do this; and then secondly, advice you have for other entrepreneurs on the need to balance focus versus diversification. Because I struggle with this myself, basically every day.

Manie Van Greunen: It’s a thing that we also sometimes struggle with. But in our life, in being in business, we’ve made some good decisions, we’ve made some bad decisions, we bumped our heads. The one thing that always comes back to us is the saying, “Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket”.

In saying that, we don’t mean you have to open multiple businesses. That’s also a good thing. If you do open multiple businesses, please just open them with Capitec Bank because they’re going to take you places in any case.

But in saying that, if we just did software development, it’s a long process. Things have changed over time. Apps are being developed a bit quicker as well. But we realised many, many years ago that there are different areas that support the whole process. From offering total outsourced solutions (development from beginning-to-end, to deliverables where they take the app live, like a one-stop shop – we can actually help them with that), to just giving them a resource. They might be in demand for somebody can help them with the internal projects they want to do. 

In our previous business we also had placements of a lot of people in different areas. Most of them were in the development space, but they were also in the business requirement space; even the testing space within different areas within the IT infrastructure and the business side.

When we do technology – we need to speak to developers, we need to speak to business, we need to make sure we get all these parties together to make sure everything is successful. 

Apart from the app development (Olympia Engage), we also have the outsourcing of projects, placements of resources, where we assist customers to achieve what they want. We personally search for these people, usually for a network of people who we know can give an immediate benefit to their client. But also people that we know personally who could assist. We don’t know all the people in the market, but we try to help people with people that we’ve dealt with in the last 20, 30 years, that can make a difference.

For entrepreneurs like us in the business, diversification works when it deepens your ecosystem. So stay close to your core capability by staying disciplined about execution, and ensure new services reinforce your strategy and your strengths.

In our case, we are very strong in the app space, and in the software development space where we developed our apps. We also support that with complementary areas. We make sure that the whole offering is a successful and enjoyable experience to clients. 

At the same time, the client gets the benefit of having access to very good people. It also gives you a little bit of space in the business so that if your development side is going a bit slowly, you have a different income stream that you can tap into from resourcing as well.

Helping customers to get the right people offers a little bit of a different view. I always say to companies out there, if you’re good at something, you stick to that. But always look at areas that are complementary to what you do, and you can actually offer a service that’s an income generator for your business as well.

It makes a huge impact, especially during quiet times in the business. And we all know we all go through that unfortunately. But it also keeps you on your toes to make sure that you actually grow your business.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, the plan is always to focus on what you’re really good at. But it’s that Mike Tyson quote, right? “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. And when life punches you in the mouth, having a bit of diversification, having another mouth is quite nice. The one that hasn’t been punched today!

That’s life as an entrepreneur. Something that Capitec understands, I understand, and you clearly understand as well. 

I think that’s probably all we have time for. I’m keen to direct people to the right place if they’d like to learn more about Olympia and chat to you guys about the services that you offer. What is the best way for someone to contact you and find out more?

Manie Van Greunen: They can go to our website, www.olympiahld.com, or they can contact me or George very easily at manie@ompiahld.com or george@olympiahld.com, and we’ll gladly assist where we can. We can’t assist with everything, (but) we can send people in the right direction. 

From our side, thank you very much for the opportunity. We were very excited to be part of this journey, with the whole business, with you now, with Capitec. It’s exciting for us. Being based in South Africa, being here in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, we’re super excited about what we are still going to achieve – and what we are going to be able to enable people to achieve, in the future.

The Finance Ghost: Absolutely. Manie, George, thank you so much for your time on this podcast and all the best to you both with the business. Very cool, what you’ve built, and I wish you both a lot of success, and to the teams on that side.

I’ll include in the show notes, the links to the websites, etc., so people can easily find you. And thank you! Manie, George – all the best.

Manie Van Greunen: Thanks to Capitec. Thanks for this awesome journey, for this awesome podcast. I believe what you’re doing is going to be very successful and value-adding to people out there. So thank you very much for your time, and effort, as well. 

George Van Greunen: Thanks to you and Capitec for making this podcast worthwhile.

The Finance Ghost: Lovely. Ciao, bye.