‘Activquest on road to success’

BPC Support Officer, TechnoServe

The Managing Director, Sipho Kunene, said breaking into the market was the first challenge the company faced and for the first two months they did not have any job secured.

"Our relationship with Africa’s leading market research company, Steadman Group (which has since been acquired by Synovate), landed us our first job in April 2007. Steadman gave us a brand tracking assignment for South African Brewers (SAB) in Swaziland," disclosed Kunene.

However, Kunene said they still struggled to get a sizeable contract and there was a time where they went three months without doing business. In September 2007, ActivQuest got business from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to do an awareness study on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Poverty Reduction Strategy and Action Plan (PRSAP).

This year has been an eventful year for Kunene’s business. "One of the lessons we have learned is to maintain customer relations. You need to deliver as expected and meet set deadlines. We have learnt to work under pressure and manage multiple projects running at the same time," he said.

Early in the year ActivQuest retained the SAB project, which included taking over Lesotho this time around. Ongoing projects include an enterprise and employment survey, also in Lesotho commissioned by the World Bank. This project is managed by the world’s leading market research company, TNS Opinion, which contracted ActivQuest through Steadman to do the Lesotho chapter.

Locally, ActivQuest is currently doing a customer satisfaction measurement study for Nedbank and has also done work for MTN.

Given the amount of work, Kunene said that being a small company, there was a need to bring in more people to strengthen his team. He said, "At the moment there are three of us and with more projects we find ourselves strained. Fortunately we have a trained a pool of 25 research assistants from which we draw people to assist in our projects. We are hoping to hire a couple to boost our fulltime staff."

Kunene revealed that one of the challenges they were facing was cracking into the Swazi market. Kunene said they had not presented themselves fully to the Swazi market. He concedes that their marketing had not been broad enough, "we are known by the people we deal or want to deal with and there is a need to strengthen our marketing strategies," he said.

Kunene used the prize money of E75 000 mainly towards setting up the office, buying office furniture and equipment. In addition to the prize money he received business development services vouchers worth E30 000 which played a major part in developing marketing material for ActivQuest.

Although the company seems to be holding up well, Kunene acknowledged that they needed to get more business than they currently had. "At this stage we are able to cope, but we have not reached a stage where we can say we are making money," he said. "Therefore there is a need to go back to the drawing board and work on our marketing strategy. Our goal is that when people talk of research in Swaziland, ActivQuest should come up as one of the giants."

Apart from ActivQuest, Kunene has played an active role as the Executive Committee Secretary in the BBB Alumni club, an organisation comprising of graduates from the Believe Begin Become programme.

He views the Alumni club as a vehicle to business opportunities. "This is a network of business people who can give us business and open doors for other business opportunities. The Alumni should give validation and a good reference for my business," he said.