RMB Corvest and Servest UK

This special podcast is brought to you by RMB Corvest.        This episode features the Servest story, from start-up                to a R10-billion multinational.

Private equity is a long-term game which is why it appeals so much to ambitious entrepreneurs who’d rather have an equity partner than be forced to deal with the sometimes fickle nature of bank debt or the volatility of ‘Mr Market’ and his friends, the other share market investors.

When he took the fledgling Servest public in 1998, Kenton Fine was all of          29 years old — the youngest CEO of any company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) at the time. Four years and a hostile take-over bid later, with the help of African Merchant Bank he then took the company private again. What then followed was a hugely successful partnership between Servest and its private equity partner, RMB Corvest which had acquired the shares from African Merchant Bank a few years later. One, which was concluded to mutual satisfaction this year when the European group, Atalian, bought the company for a hefty £540-million. That’s roughly, R10-billion. RMB Corvest CEO, Mike Donaldson, has got pretty close to Kenton Fine over the years. Let him kick-off by opening the first page of Fine’s fascinating Servest story.

I followed Kenton’s story for many years in the past, and then I think colleagues of mine at RMB Corvest also followed the story, so I think they met Kenton when he still had a little waste business that was based in Durban. At the time he came to RMB Corvest for funding and certainly the guys turned him down, and rightly so. It certainly wasn’t the business that we came to know. But it just tells you, I think tenacity from an individual like Kenton, over the years and building something into a Servest business – it didn’t happen overnight, so I think it’s all credit to the individual.