What happens to professional rugby players when they retire? Bob Skinstad hung up his boots in November 2007 after a prominent rugby career in which he played 42 times for the Springboks and was a member of the victorious 2007 World Cup team. Since retiring he’s kept himself busy, most prominently as a rugby commentator on Supersport. He has been a tourism brand ambassador, and runs a charity. But few people might know that he’s a successful businessman. He’s a director at a company called Seartec, the local distributor of products from the Japanese multinational Sharp, where he’s in charge of new business development as well as focusing on new technologies. He tells us more about his business acumen. – David O’Sullivan
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Bob Skinstad: The journey, for me, really started to accelerate when I retired completely from rugby, and then I had to be in the game. I had to be pushing the pencils myself. Since then, it’s been a combination of the entrepreneurial side… Then I bought a business, which folded into a bigger technology business and then I took… It’s been five years of a desk job, literally learning how to dot the I’s and cross the t’s because I realised that every entrepreneur has got the same creativity and drive as the next guy, but you need to understand the corporate structures, environment, and their needs if you’re going to be trying to service them. That’s the journey in a nutshell.
Technology’s never been that daunting for me. I’ve always been a relatively early adopter so I was able to try and understand and obviously, bring in the experts where needed. What I like is a hybrid of what my skills were. As they say in South Africa, an ex-sportsman can get at least a couple of hundred people to the opening of anything. An outside loo or an envelope. It doesn’t matter but it’s got to work and it’s got to be interesting. I tried to cross-pollinate. I tried to get people to the opening but then also keep them there, and that’s where the transition happened.
In the technology space, we distribute two things. 1. The Sharp brand (calculators, screens, points of sale, and copiers). In the calculator space, I think we’re the biggest distributor of Sharp calculators in the world. That was completely foreign to what I’ve done before but not foreign in terms of understanding systems and understanding the businesses that needed to use them. 2. Then it was my job to go and find other businesses, which we could take on so we bought a small Wi-Fi business. We bought a security business. We bought products and people who could sell those products into our growing community of customers.
The interesting side of what I’ve done is I’ve started various businesses. I’ve also started a charity and we had to pivot the charity quicker because that was focused on people. The businesses have been able to reinvest. We understand engineer, change, and tweak much quicker than a charity, which had one endpoint where the consumer was out there. They had to benefit from giving. We just created an environment where they could give more effectively. We used an overseas model and it didn’t work in South Africa. It has subsequently become more successful because like I said, we’ve been able to change it a bit and do more corporate giving, which effected the same benefit to the charitable cause but we had to sell to less people and make it more effective.
However, I do think that in the South African space, B2B is definitely a sweeter spot to aim at. If you look at the recent acquisitions in that space, I would say 99 percent of them have been B2B-focused businesses.
The best thing I’ve learned is that you know very little and I’ve definitely failed more times than I’ve succeeded but it’s the scale of the success, which then pays for the losses. Not every entrepreneurial business can survive like that (or every entrepreneur). That’s the whole essence of trying to understand the market and trying to succeed in it.
What I’ve always been able to do is collaborate well, work with people, and completely defer to knowledge from other people.
