Small business owners generally lack strong IT skills. As a result, they find it pricey and virtually impossible to maintain sophisticated on-premise solutions or integrate them into many external best-of-breed solutions.
Luckily, there are comprehensive tools like TallOrder that entrepreneurs can invest in. Daniel (Dana) Buys is a serial entrepreneur and a techie behind this robust solution. He has been actively involved in the software business since the early 80s while studying for his BSC in Computer Science at UCT.
Today, Buys and his team leverages their extensive industry knowledge and local expertise to deliver easy-to-use, affordable solutions that meet local needs, supported by excellent maintenance and support. His role, along with his co-founder Anna Groenewald, is to lead the team to provide world-class service to companies.
His business, TallOrder Solutions, is a Cloud-based Point of Sale (POS) software provider that caters to SMEs in the hospitality and retail industries across Sub-Saharan Africa.
TallOrder is a comprehensive solution suite that covers operational functions. From orders, sales, inventory management, and digital signage, with many best-of-breed integrations spanning the popular accounting systems, payment solutions, marketing solutions, and hotel and lodge property management solutions. Incub8 Magazine touched base with Buys to learn more about his business.
What makes your line of business unique from others?
Given that we focus on Sub-Saharan SME merchants, we have to design our cloud solutions to run on the African Internet, which is more expensive, less reliable, and much slower than the developed world Internet. Cloud solutions for our markets require robust offline capacity and effective use of our more limited Internet connectivity.
SMEs generally lack strong IT skills and have found it expensive and hard to keep more sophisticated on-premise solutions up to date, secure, and integrated into the myriad of external best-of-breed solutions available. Our Cloud solutions remove the hassle and cost of running local servers and secure networks. We take care of disaster recovery back-ups and software updates and manage the integrations.
Many US and European Cloud POS providers are payment processors at the core. However, TallOrder has taken a merchant-centric approach, offering integration with popular payment platforms including SnapScan, Zapper, Yoco, ThumbzUp, MTN MoMo, Innervation, African Resonance, NetCash, DPO, and PayFast.
TallOrder offers a robust solution for the 10-100 room hotel/lodge/resort market, with integration to popular cloud-based Property Management Systems such as ResRequest, Nightsbridge, Guesty, RoomRaccoon, Mews, and Hotelier.
TallOrder POS offers Smart Reporting: The secure Cloud-based data warehouse enables flexible, fast, and accurate reporting, easily accessible and displayed. Owners can use TallOrder’s Now mobile app to track performance anytime.
TallOrder’s new myStock solution offers a comprehensive, fully integrated Inventory management system with support for more advanced multi-location inventory processes. Businesses can manage products and pricing, control purchase requisitions, orders, suppliers, stock levels, and drive sales trends through reporting.
What challenges did you face when starting, and how is your business faring now?
South Africa suffers from a shortage of highly skilled developers due to emigration. Foreign companies recruit local talent (for remote positions) at salaries difficult for local startups to match. Encouraging high school students to enter the tech world should be a priority to fill the demand and ease the local unemployment burden.
Many IT job-hoppers switch jobs before being caught out for poor performance, and this is a risk and lost financial investment suffered by many companies. These issues need to be addressed but hiring more remote workers from other countries, where the right talent is more plentiful, may provide a solution.
Venture Capital funding in SA has been minute versus the likes of VC funding in Israel, India, and other developing markets like Brazil. Without sufficient funds, it is hard to hire the best employees, making it tough to compete against startups in other countries where funding levels are much higher.
The Venture Capital landscape is changing, and Africa is becoming much more interesting to investors looking at the next frontier. Hopefully, this will become less of a challenge in the near future.
What is your strategy for keeping profitable customers?
We’ve been lucky to have some great customers who have supported a locally developed product and embraced change. They stuck with us through the early days and bugs that come with young products in such a varied customer base. The lessons we learned while trying to please many customers and meet their requests were hard.
Our clients operate seven days a week, 24 hours per day. You won’t last long if your business cannot support customers in this environment. Staying focused on the product vision, which includes ease of training and use, is the key to our success.
What is it about the industry that keeps you motivated?
I am motivated by continuously innovating solutions to merchant problems and finding ways to improve our products as new technologies become available. For example, with our offline capabilities, we cater to Africa, where the internet is generally slower, more expensive, and less reliable than developed countries.
Our job is to help our merchants build more profitable and sustainable businesses. The Covid-19 pandemic has taught all companies about the value of Cloud-based solutions. Most of our largest competitors have 30-year-old legacy solutions, and the jump to scalable, reliable cloud solutions is more brutal than most realise.
We can now leverage our leadership position and introduce innovations faster than before. I believe it’s time for more self-service in the hospitality segments and, at minimum, tableside service, which will significantly improve customer service and reduce order errors.
I am most excited about helping SMEs collectively build Big Data by aggregating our merchant base’s relatively ‘small data’ sets into data sets large enough for the coming benefits of machine learning. If we cannot help the smaller companies leverage advanced technologies, they will get wiped out by the large companies with large data sets and IT budgets.
What would you like to change in the industry?
A major challenge for South African startups is the lack of funding for early-stage companies compared to the type of funding available in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. We have seen a few significant funding rounds, but they all took place later.
It is also common in other markets for pension funds, endowments, etc., to allocate a small portion of their capital to Venture Capital firms, which typically require long-term commitment and vision tied to limited liquidity. There has not been that kind of development here, leading to poor funding for startups.
Without early funding, startups in South Africa are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to attracting talent and starting with the best.
What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs
While in a larger company, you have various HR staff specialising in recruiting the best people, it may be you or perhaps just one or two people handling HR duties in a startup. When you hire the best people in their fields, your business can make informed decisions based on their expertise.
Invest a lot more time in hiring the right people from the start. We have learned that getting the right people on board is more important than getting the ‘best’ people. An organisation’s cash flow is heavily influenced by its people, and hiring the wrong people is extremely costly.
COOs and CEOs don’t always have time to make all the informed decisions immediately, so investing in your team will pay off in the long run.
Focus on getting a broader customer base from the beginning rather than relying on a few large customers or partners. It is possible to allocate many resources to a dead-end partner when large companies constantly change their priorities.
Identify who will benefit from the MVP (minimum viable product) and begin focusing on the customers who need it versus those who want all the features you don’t have.
