Repeatability is essential if you want to build a scalable business. But this is hard when the rules and contexts keep changing.

Unfortunately, many organizations looking to scale across Africa face many complex tasks and administrative responsibilities, which vary from country to country. It can seem too much to handle, but there is a solution.

In this blog we offer a practical guide to growing your pan-African business faster, and more profitably. With a sharp focus on your strategic priorities, you can expand successfully and seize new opportunities across the continent. 

Solving the complexity of pan-African expansion

Many organizations experience the same exact challenge when they start to expand their workforce and presence across multiple African countries. Before you can hire your first employee, you need to set up a company. And, for each country, this can take several months and incur significant costs. 

When combined with the complexity of managing payroll and taxes across multiple jurisdictions, this can feel overwhelming.

If you’re facing these challenges, you’re not alone. Indeed, this complexity is something that Workpay also faced (and overcame) as it transitioned from a small business into a pan-African organization. So how did we do it?

Laying the foundation for growth

Just as Jeff Bezos started Amazon from his garage, and Pierre Omidyar launched eBay from his home office, Workpay all started from just a kitchen table in Nairobi and five talented people.

To begin with the team offered a wide range of services to clients, and the demand for these was strong. Before long, their profitable business was serving a growing list of clients. However, each team member also had to juggle a wide range of tasks and responsibilities to keep up.

Despite the attractive margins, Workpay founders Paul Kimani and Jackson Kibigo realized that such a broad focus was not scalable across the entire continent. So how could they achieve this goal?

Making the shift to greater scalability

Running a broad-based business certainly helps to gain insights into customer needs. But it is also much harder to scale. This kind of business model is not easily repeatable, and it lacks clear focus. To take their fledgling company to the next level, Paul and Jackson needed to identify where to concentrate their energies.

At first, they had the idea of building a wide-ranging platform that wrapped together key functionalities needed for modern business: accounting, CRM, and payroll.

However, it quickly became clear that there was already stiff competition for many of the functionalities they wanted to offer. Accounting and CRM processes remain much the same no matter where you do business, so these were too generic. Also, established players like SAP and QuickBooks already had a strong market presence in these domains.

Pan-African HR and payroll, on the other hand, remained a significant problem for many companies. At the time, there was no good solution on the market that could cover all jurisdictions.

As this had become an area of expertise, they realized they had discovered a unique value proposition and laid the foundations for Workpay.

5 Key lessons in building a pan-African business

#1 See the opportunity

 Ask yourself where there remains a gap in the market. This can often be found by looking at the greatest problems your customers face and where no good solution currently exists. In the pan-African market, for example, there is a strong demand for solutions that can cover all countries, instead of needing to find a vendor for each one.

#2 Choose your battles

Competing in an area where you cannot win is a strategic error. Instead, an organization must focus its energy into areas where there is less competition, or where you offer unique value that others cannot. For Workpay, this was the realization that our experience in pan-African HR and Payroll was something truly special and very valuable for growing businesses grappling with these struggles.

#3 Listen to your customers

You cannot assume that you know what your customer’s problems are, because they won’t necessarily advertise them. By paying close attention to which services, assistance, or advice are regularly asked for, you can start to understand which problems they are encountering and why. For this reason, a broader-based offering or consultancy service can be a strategic advantage when you are still testing the market.

#4 Build trust

Customers are the reason your business exists, so you must treat them with respect and care. Even when you decide to discontinue a service, it is still important to ensure that customers receive help to transition to a new solution. It may not make a quick profit, but it does build the kind of reputation that grows your business sustainably in the long term.

#5 Reduce complexity

If each step forward only gets harder, you cannot grow. So, it is essential to reduce your complexity and increase productivity by adopting better methods. This may include replacing manual processes with more efficient automations and digital tools or forming strategic partnerships. These kinds of partnerships allow each party to focus on their area of excellence. Ultimately, this greatly benefits the end-customer too.

Ready to grow your business across Africa?

Building a business across multiple African countries isn’t easy. There are numerous logistical challenges involved, as well as the operational and administrative complexities we’ve outlined above.

However, you can achieve it if you stay focused on the areas where you excel and simplify everything you can. This is what Workpay did when it realized that solving pan-African HR and Payroll challenges was our superpower, and something no one else on the market was offering.

If your business is handling a wide range of competencies such as HR and Payroll, then it is wise to look into other ways to achieve the same result. Our clients find that by outsourcing certain roles or forming strategic partnerships, they can grow faster. Very often, expert guidance can remove barriers to scalability and clear the path to greater success. 

Watch the podcast to see the whole conversation. 

Want to learn more? Visit Workpay.com or reach out for a strategic conversation.

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