#75 From Springbok Nude Girls Manager to CEO of Cala Capital Africa: Mark Taylor’s Epic Journey

TRANSCRIPT: THE bizval PODCAST
Guest: Mark Taylor, CEO and Founder — Cala Capital Africa (formerly Neu Capital Africa)
Host: Graham Stephen, CEO and Co-Founder, bizval
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-taylor-za/
Company: https://calacapital.africa

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[00:00:13] Graham Stephen: Welcome back to the bizval Podcast, where we speak to founders, entrepreneurs, operators, and capital allocators — people who understand how value is built and how it’s funded. And today, I’m really excited for this conversation. I’m joined by Mark Taylor, who’s the CEO of Cala Capital Africa. That’s only kind of the tip of the iceberg. So Cala currently specialises in sourcing private capital in the mid-market — so $10 million to $100 million companies — with a particular focus on African investment opportunities. So that’s the dry version of the intro. I’m going to welcome you first, Mark, and then we’re going to talk a little bit more about you. So, welcome to the show, Mark.

[00:00:58] Mark Taylor: Thanks very much, Graham, really appreciate it.

[00:01:04] Graham Stephen: Some of you might have heard the name, and Mark’s got a very unusual and varied CV — from venture capital to running parts of Remgro and Richemont, turnaround CEO, he developed one of Turkey’s first giant public aquariums. He’s a surfer, a business rescue practitioner, and a master swimmer. But the thing that stood out the most for me when I first met Mark is that he was the manager of the Springbok Nude Girls. So probably a manager of a rock band all the way to being a venture capitalist. Mark, we could be here for days, but let’s start right at the beginning, and tell us a little bit about your upbringing, your early journey, your early start to life.

[00:01:54] Mark Taylor: Thanks so much, Graham. I suppose I was born in Cyprus, on a British military air base, when my dad was a dentist with the Royal Air Force, so I grew up there as a little kid. We were English, so we moved to England and lived in Suffolk for some years, and then finally my dad decided he wanted to replicate the sun, rugby, and sea of Cyprus. And we ended up in Durban. He had a choice, interestingly, between going to Durban or going to Camps Bay. And it wasn’t even a thought process in his head at the time. He went to Durban. And in retrospect, it’s an intriguing thought, but in those days, Cape Town was sort of the country cousin, and Durban was the place to be. The Durban port was booming, the sugar industry was booming, so we came to Durban. And most of my life I’ve spent in Durban.

[00:03:04] Graham Stephen: I don’t know whether it was the warmer water or the friendlier people, but I think that obviously grounded you. Durban, for our international listeners, is a melting-pot city. It’s vibrant, it’s colourful, it’s energetic, and the people are down-to-earth and humble. You grew up in that environment. How do you think that shaped you?

[00:03:48] Mark Taylor: Perhaps it did. I mean, I’ve discovered I’m much more of an aquatic person than most other things. I played a lot of rugby quite seriously, and I did a lot of serious martial arts and competed nationally. But my main passion has typically been around the sea. And I think the Durban waters are warmer — if you think back in those days, the Natal Province dominated all the aquatic sports in the country. At a stage, I thought we were quite special, but the reason we were special was not because we were special. It was because we lived in a warm climate where you had an extra month on either side of the season to train. So we were always better prepared than the guys in Cape Town — not because they weren’t good swimmers, but they had to swim in much colder water. And, so, as I learned from my former boss, never confuse luck with genius.

[00:05:09] Mark Taylor: And I went to Stellenbosch to study after I finished my schooling in Durban. That was in 1979, in the days when people who spoke English didn’t go there in a hurry. And I went down there because I wanted to play rugby. I didn’t tell people that because I wasn’t very big. But I really, really wanted to go and play rugby in Stellenbosch. So I studied law there.

[00:05:22] Graham Stephen: So you could be somebody who’s sort of, like, not bound by convention and pushes yourself outside of your comfort zone. You know, you’ve worked in South Africa, you’re born in Cyprus, been in the Netherlands, Turkey, the UK — and for most people, that’s already a lot. But have you always been someone who’s been comfortable challenging the status quo and working outside of your comfort zone?

[00:05:53] Mark Taylor: I was diagnosed much later in my life with ADHD. I’m not sure if we all have some kind of ADHD, I suspect, but I’m easily distracted, and if I want to do stuff that I’m going to be good at, I need to be really absorbed by it. I don’t do boring — and I don’t mean it in some grand sense. But I’ve just been working on my tax here. My accountant will tell you that I cannot stand working with that kind of stuff. I’d much rather see a massive problem and go and try and fix it. That interests me and excites me. So I suspect that takes me into pushing boundaries. I do like to test myself.

[00:07:14] Graham Stephen: I’ve recently come across the concept of a polymath — somebody who is able to join the dots and not just become a jack-of-all-trades, but actually a master of a lot of different things. And what you’re describing resonates quite strongly with that. You know, whether it’s your swimming, your surfing, your martial arts, or business — everything you focus on, you put your heart and soul into it, and then you get bored and you move on to something else. That would probably be a fairly good description, right?

[00:07:39] Mark Taylor: It is, actually, and I think by the time you’ve done something, there’s a little bit of Dunning-Kruger involved, right? So I go and work on an aquarium, we pulled it off, we made money, it was a success — we had a million human beings come through that aquarium in Istanbul, a country that’s got 3,000 years of history, more complexity than you can ever imagine. And that was a success. So I finished that role, and then the other aquarium roles popped up, and I said, whoa, hold on a second — I now know the problems. I don’t want to do that again. So then I roll into the next thing and go and discover new problems in new businesses, because nothing is really as easy as you ever think it is.

[00:08:53] Mark Taylor: But you made a comment I just want to come back to, because I think there’s a message in it that’s really interesting. You talked about the idea of what is actually transdisciplinary thinking. And I think of the things I’ve done and studied extensively — as soon as you’ve got more letters after your name than in your name, I think you’re an academic. So I’m probably a bit of an academic.

[00:08:56] Graham Stephen: You’ve got a pretty short name, Mark, so that’s not going to take long.

[00:08:59] Mark Taylor: Even if you include my middle names, there’s a lot of letters after it. Not because I think I’m particularly smart, but because I’m inherently interested in things and curious. I’m also aware that I’m not as smart as I’d like to think I am, and so studying helps that process. And if I think back on all the things I ever studied — in 2017, I went to the Stellenbosch Business School and I studied futures. Not financial futures — I focused on futures thinking and futurism. And it was an absolutely revelatory experience. It was a pivotal intellectual period of my life. And this was in my late 50s.

[00:10:02] Mark Taylor: And to go back to your thought on transdisciplinary thinking — it’s not interdisciplinary, that’s between disciplines. It’s being able to overview and look at many things. And that intrigued me, because when I grew up as a young lawyer working in practice, there were ways you did things. When I started working with finance and seeing things in balance sheets, it’s two-dimensional: you make a change here and an answer comes out there. But a lot of the experience I’d had through my career was that that isn’t how the world works. You know, people say, oh, if you do this, then that. Well, if you press a light switch, the light will go on. But you can often think, oh well, if I sue them, they’ll back down. But that’s a different game. That’s a complex game. As soon as you start to deal with humans in a bounded setting, humans who are going to make their own decisions, and you can communicate fast — you have complexity.

[00:11:14] Mark Taylor: And in this course, I started to see the world as I’d always understood it, and finally I went, gee, so this is what I’ve always thought. And in my late 50s, I discovered a way of thinking about the world that I had not known existed. Futurism has become a lot more commonplace. People talk about complexity theory and systems thinking, but it was absolutely a revolutionary experience for me. And I do think that curiosity about many things is a valuable thing. You can get distracted, but it’s a valuable thing.

[00:11:51] Graham Stephen: Yeah, and I think just before we move on, there’s an important point here. Often people — and we do a lot of work in the US, and the US is a hyper-specialised economy — you can do capital raising in this market for these types of people, and when you go outside those bounds, people battle to classify you. And the thing we often see in business is, you know, to be successful, you need to focus. So sometimes when you talk the way you talk, people immediately think you’re a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. And I think the superpower you talk about there is that you think in a certain way — let’s call it systems thinking — but when you apply yourself to something, you apply yourself wholly and focus on that thing for a discrete portion of time to allow you to get mastery in that. And I think that’s certainly been one of your superpowers, Mark — systems thinking together with focus is something which is incredibly powerful.

[00:12:58] Mark Taylor: Yeah, you know, we’ve all heard the aphorisms about business. You need to be tough and resilient if you’re an entrepreneur. But you also need to fail fast. So which one do you do? That’s where wisdom comes in, that’s where the ability to see the bigger picture comes in. Everyone’s got an aphorism, and they’ll throw it out — if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. With respect, that’s nonsense. You can’t measure culture, but my goodness, if you don’t manage it, your business is in trouble. You can’t measure values, but if you don’t have values — so, I’m quite sceptical about a lot of accepted wisdom about things like that. And I think the idea of being able to appreciate that if you have a complex problem, there’s no such thing as a simple solution. If it’s a wicked problem and someone says, give me a simple answer — well, maybe you should just go back to being a spreadsheet jockey, where you put a formula in and you get an answer. Because the world doesn’t work like that. The soft stuff in life is the hard stuff.

[00:14:31] Mark Taylor: The hard stuff, like learning how to trade energy — I just came from spending three days with Eskom, learning how to trade energy in the new South African wholesale energy markets, which will be launched during April. The most fascinating thing. I thought, you know, sitting there going, oh god, all that load shedding. But you have no idea how complex a grid is. It’s been described before as the most complex machine on Earth — managing a grid where everything changes at the speed of light. And I think it’s an important part of the process, going back to your point, to hyper-focus as well. If I get involved in something, I want to understand it right down to the dirty end of it.

[00:15:29] Graham Stephen: Absolutely. Okay, so I’m going to shift gears a little bit. We’re going to go back to your story. For those of you who grew up in South Africa, I guess in the 80s, 90s, maybe even the early noughties, you hear the letters SNG — or Springbok Nude Girls — and they were absolutely legendary in their time. So it’s not often that you get to speak to a former manager of a legendary rock band. Let’s dive a little bit into that period. How did that even come about, Mark? And what did that teach you about business, about people?

[00:16:19] Mark Taylor: I’ve always been passionate about music. I’m not a musician — I cannot play an instrument, I can’t even dance, I’ve got no rhythm. If I focused on it, I might be able to play chopsticks, but nothing beyond that. But gee, I love listening to music. I had, at one stage, actually run the radio station in Stellenbosch, Radio Marty, and I was the Wolf Omroep. There are a whole bunch of stories around that, but the real thing was, I went with a buddy of mine, Gerrit, and he said to me, Mark, you’ve got to come and watch this band. I’d just got back from the Netherlands, moved back to Stellenbosch to work — I was working as Johann Rupert’s assistant at the time. And I thought, well, let me go along. And we saw, in an attic with about 30 people on a Sunday evening, this band playing. I watched them and I was mesmerised. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’d seen some live music before, you know, I’d been to the Melkweg a few times in Amsterdam, and it was mind-boggling to see what these guys were doing. So I thought to myself, why don’t we offer to manage them? These guys look like they need some help.

[00:17:40] Mark Taylor: So I said, look, I don’t know anything about music management. But he said, Mark, you know music. And you know management. Music management. So, there we were — as stupid as that. It was a Dunning-Kruger event again. I actually cleared it with Johann, because it was a hobby, you know? We did it as a hobby, not to make money. We did it because we just loved the guys. They were the most fascinating group of five. Their music was gorgeous, and I loved the wall of sound that they would play — just an absolute wall of sound, and quirky, crazy, wild stuff going on on stage.

[00:18:30] Mark Taylor: So we pitched to them, had a chat. I remember sitting talking to Theo, the lead guitarist, feet on the table, tuning his guitar, looking at me, just like, dissing us — what could you bring to us? Funny enough, they were actually also looking for a manager at the time, but he was playing the game well. And then we disappeared because it seemed like they were all sorted out, and then they weren’t, and then they called us, and we went to start working with them. And basically, Gerrit and I — Gerrit lives in Stellenbosch — were old varsity mates, and we basically ran the business side for them. And eventually it became too demanding, so we had some guys who ran the road shows and the tours. Eventually we brought a guy, Franny, in who ran things very effectively. I suppose I moved into more of a chairmanship role. It was, I suppose, almost a vice chairman role, but I had the relationship with the record company, which gave me a little edge in the picking order. And Franny was effectively the CEO — he executed, and we helped work on strategy. And it was an amazing experience.

[00:19:56] Mark Taylor: It was a funny time in our history. All through the 80s, things had been very repressed. The Nude Girls first got together in about 1994, we linked up with them in 1995, and they’d just finished their first album. They’d sold about 372 copies of it, and we got involved with them at the time. And it was almost like — as the elections took place in April 1994 — it was like a release. The amount of amazing Afrikaans music, and musicians who are Afrikaans who were also singing in English — who were starting to perform music. It was almost like someone had taken the lid off the pressure cooker and said, you guys, come out and express yourself. We’re free, you can do stuff.

[00:21:15] Mark Taylor: Now, I’m sure a lot of people of colour will have their own experiences about that lid coming off, but my piece of experience of it was to watch this musical development amongst white Afrikaners — you know, why would they be doing that? But they did. So that was great, and then we actually ran what I believe was the only time at that stage that we ran an auction with all five record companies. We went out to all of them and said, here’s the pitch, bring us your quotes. And by this stage, the band had an amazing following. We had a website that had nearly as many visitors as Amazon at the time, because I was also a venture capitalist eventually during this process, and we were watching all the numbers.

[00:21:55] Mark Taylor: And I thought, again — never confuse luck with genius. I thought, you are so clever, look, there are 50,000 hits a month. In those days, in the mid-90s, this was astonishing. And then I sat down and had a look, and I went, hang on a second. Our website name is nudegirls.co.za. And all the visitors were coming into the gallery.

[00:22:19] Graham Stephen: You can see where this is going.

[00:22:22] Mark Taylor: They went! They went! They thought this was a porn site. But we were a little bit circumspect about mentioning this to the record companies when we went up, but we did say, look, we’re getting 50,000 or so hits — it was an astonishing number. So that was quite interesting. And I also tried to register the name Springbok — I wanted to trademark the name Springbok Nude Girls. And you know, we got beaten by two months to register the name Springbok by SARU. Can you believe it? The South African Rugby Union — we nearly gazumped them. I nearly owned the name Springbok. Well, the band did. Some funny stuff happened.

[00:23:26] Mark Taylor: And if you want to get into complex law, music law — the number of rights that relate to every single song, the artist, the performers, the writers, the publisher, the needle time — you cannot believe how complicated it is. Anyway, I worked extensively with a guy called Mark Rosen on that, and he became a friend. He sat on the other side, and he was the leading media lawyer in the country.

[00:24:04] Graham Stephen: I think we have to have a fireside chat just about those years. You could fill out a whole evening, I guess. There are probably a few stories which are best shared around a fire and not on a podcast.

[00:24:17] Mark Taylor: Well, I’ll tell you that they were such a nice bunch of guys, so nice and well-behaved, that the senior guy at the record company said to me, Mark, we’re going to have to go into the hotel rooms and chuck the TVs in the swimming pool, because these guys are just too nice. They were always yes sir, yes sir, and incredibly well-behaved — but if the record company said, could you please produce something a bit more commercial, my goodness, then all the niceness stopped. And we protected the creativity of the band vigorously. Some of the stuff, I look back on it, it was not as good as it could have been. But I think what we wanted to do was — we just felt these guys were like geniuses, and that’s what I learned about early-stage business. When you’re dealing with geniuses who’ve started up a business, you’ve got to fan those flames, you’ve got to work with the guys who are wanting to develop themselves, and you have to trust their instinct.

[00:25:34] Mark Taylor: Just one final piece of it. The song Blue Eyes is probably one of the five greatest rock songs written out of this country. It would include things like Weeping by Bright Blue, but it would include Blue Eyes. And Blue Eyes was interesting because it’s this beautiful love song from a father to a daughter. My daughter was two at the time, and she had blue eyes. Driving up to the studio after I’d been working with Hanré on some stuff, I was listening to the raw tapes from the day before. And I said to Hanré, that song Blue Eyes — it’s like a love song to a daughter, but it’s quite strange, there’s something very captivating about it. And he said to me simply, Mark — family murder.

[00:26:47] Mark Taylor: And it was about the phenomenon in the Afrikaans community where there is a very high percentage of family murder. A lot of it’s around shame. And they will take the whole family out before they kill themselves. And this song, Blue Eyes, is: once I’ve killed you, I can kill myself. And when you hear it like that, that song is a devastating song. And so the question always became with Hanré: did she make it? And when I was standing there with my two-year-old in my arms, he said — no. She doesn’t make it. And then we did a documentary some while later, and he’d had a little kid. And they asked him the same question in the documentary — this is like 20 years later — and he said, no, she made it. And I said, Hanré, you traitor, that’s not what you told me. He said, Mark, I’ve had a child. How can… And that was the beauty of what I was working with. It was an incredible privilege to work with guys like that. Fantastic human beings.

[00:28:14] Graham Stephen: I mean, it’s fascinating. Not a lot of people get to have those kind of experiences. But I want to move to a different part. You’re also very fortunate to have worked with some leading industrialists and entrepreneurs. You spent some time as Johann Rupert’s right-hand man at Richemont. That must have been a fascinating time with some really unique exposure. Tell us a little bit about that period, Mark.

[00:28:59] Mark Taylor: Yeah, look, I’ll be circumspect about it, out of respect for Johann and for the family. It was an incredibly special time, but it was incredibly tough. You know, Johann is demanding. He is scintillatingly clever, really smart, and strategically savvy. He can be tough as hell when he needs to be, and he can be very human when he needs to be. But it was an environment where I felt I was holding onto the tail of a bull as everything moved forward. It was an interesting time. And to work with a person like that at the level he works at — people say to me, oh, Mark, as if Johann is my bosom pal. But the business I do in my life doesn’t even come close to the kind of stuff that Johann does. We might raise $50 million for a business — that’s a big deal for us. In Johann’s life, that’s a rounding error. So I don’t mean it dismissively, but the guy operates at an amazing level.

[00:30:33] Mark Taylor: When the job was offered to me — I was in the Netherlands at the time, and we were going to move to London — Jan said, no, we’re coming back to South Africa. I called up Cliffy Elphick. And Cliffy, at the time, had just finished his stint for the Oppenheimers, for Harry O, as his assistant, in the same sort of role. Every family office or setting where you’ve got a very powerful family has different roles, so there’s no standard role for being an assistant to somebody. Sometimes I was making important decisions for Johann, but quite often I was simply carrying a bag into the room and writing down notes and being the skivvy. I said to Cliffy, I’ve been offered this role. What do you think? Is it a dead end? Where does it go career-wise? And he said, Mark, it is the most amazing opportunity, but there’s one thing you must be aware of.

[00:31:41] Mark Taylor: You live in the reflected glory of your principal. And if you can’t cope — when you finally step away from that role, if you cannot cope with the fact that people have lost interest in you — don’t take the job. And he was right. When I finished working with Johann, even though I was still within the group and working with Dillian Yannit at Venfin running new investment evaluations there, the fact that I’d worked for Johann was helpful, but people saw me as an access point and I was a gatekeeper. So it did happen. And I have to say this to anyone who is sitting in a big company thinking they’re going to change the world when they go on their own — when the final chapter was when I finished the turnaround I did for Johann in Durban, I wanted to take a year off. I was so sick of human beings by that stage, because it was so difficult.

[00:33:09] Mark Taylor: And I decided not to go back to Stellenbosch. Then I started slipping out a bit on my own as an entrepreneur. And without the big balance sheet, without the big brand name behind you, people don’t take you seriously unless you’ve proven yourself. And I hadn’t proven myself as an entrepreneur, and that’s probably why I ended up in Turkey — because no one knew me there anyway. So I could do something unusual.

[00:33:34] Graham Stephen: It’s a fascinating backstory. You’ve worked with geniuses in different fields — the Nude Girls, Johann — and I guess as somebody who’s got this ferocious appetite for learning and getting bored with things easily, you’ve got bored with two geniuses already, now you’re going out on your own.

[00:33:59] Mark Taylor: No, I will confess, I’m never bored by either of them. And rather strangely, Johann and I found each other again when I graduated from my futures studies course in 2017. He was doing the capping of all the students, and I happened to be graduating there. It was quite fun to see him in that setting.

[00:34:31] Graham Stephen: Let’s talk a little bit about the Turkey story — specifically the aquarium in Istanbul. Maybe you can share the story behind that, how it came about. And then I want to spend a few minutes talking about Cala Capital. So let’s quickly talk about the Turkey experience. You moved to Turkey. Take it from there.

[00:35:01] Mark Taylor: Yeah, and again, I did everything wrong. I’d never done a development, I’d never been to Turkey. I knew nothing about aquariums or fish. So what did I do? Dunning-Kruger struck me hard again. At one stage, we had a million euros’ worth of fish swimming around in that aquarium. You get a disease, you get bloom in the water, and it sucks the oxygen out and those fish die. But so I was taking my year off, and I got a call from my wife’s cousin Rob in London, and he said, Mark, we’ve got to do something in Turkey. I’ve seen an opportunity. Why don’t we have a look at it? I said, Rob, it sounds like a nuts idea. I’m not going anywhere near it. I’ll consult you, though.

[00:36:09] Mark Taylor: It moved from consulting very quickly into a full-blown role, because I actually realised it was really interesting and challenging as hell. In fairness, it was really a financial instrument. We worked out that we could get very high gearing from the New Zealand government for a New Zealand exporter of an aquarium to export that aquarium to Turkey. So the aquarium got sold in pieces, and for that, the Export Credit Agency in New Zealand — we became their first client. And we raised capital off the back of an 80% guarantee from the New Zealand government, without which we could not have done it. It meant that when we went to investors, they knew they were only putting in 20% of the risk capital, and there was no risk on the 80% of the gearing. So it was really an upside-only option. And we were playing the lira against the euro, because at that stage, it looked like Turkey was going to move into the EU.

[00:37:35] Mark Taylor: As it turned out, Turkey never did, but it was a highly leveraged option with an underlying that just happened to be an aquarium in Istanbul, which I had to build, develop, work on, and in fact run for a period of time. And I can only say this much — Istanbul was the most fantastic place to be. I loved working with Turkish people. I did not do what everyone told me to do, which was to get a local partner. I treated my landlord as my local partner, because we were 90% aligned. We had the same interests, other than when we were negotiating on the lease terms. And I was committed to Turkey. I tried to learn the language, I tried to understand the culture. It’s a very secular type of Islam that they practise, so it’s an easy and comfortable environment to operate in.

[00:38:37] Mark Taylor: And we built the aquarium, put a million people through it, and then sold it a few years later to the biggest aquarium owner in the world — who owns Madame Tussauds, the London Eye, Legoland, all of those assets — and we sold it to them. Along the way, I made great friends. There are a lot of funny stories about an aquarium, some really funny ones.

[00:39:04] Graham Stephen: In summary, actually, to start, it was all about financial arbitrage and derivatives. The aquarium just happened to be the vehicle. But beneath all of that, there was substance and real stuff. And as you’re chatting, a lot of this is about business being about risk and reward, but also about timing and having the mindset of seeing opportunities. If you’re curious and open to seeing these things, you would see that kind of opportunity.

[00:39:52] Mark Taylor: And you had a city of 18 million human beings. This was back in 2007, when we first went there. Eighteen million people with no aquarium. And if you think how many aquariums are in the various South African cities, there’s a number of them. So it was screaming out for an aquarium. Once we sat down and did the numbers, it was screaming for one. There was a government aquarium that had failed, and they’d mothballed it. And the minute we opened and they saw what was going through our doors, they demothballed it and started competing with us. Anyway, that’s how it works.

[00:40:57] Graham Stephen: Mark, we’re going to have a little last section here, and then I’m going to ask you just a few rapid-fire questions. But I want to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about Cala Capital. That’s where you invest most of your time and energy now. If you could just share a little bit about what Cala Capital is, what you’re trying to do, and why it’s important to you right now.

[00:41:25] Mark Taylor: Thanks, Graham. So Cala Capital — and if you’re that way inclined, Kala Capital, because it has a meaning behind it that is relevant in our lives. And that is that we play a neutral role. We used to be known as Neu Capital. The neutral role is manifest in the term “ingotaṭikala”, which is a closer expression to mean “not to take a side”. So we try to sit in the middle of investors and paying clients. And the way we started out was — I wanted to know the mandates and know every single financial investor in the world who’s prepared to write a cheque of $5 million to $50 million in Africa. Now that’s a finite number. It’s a big number and it’s very hard to get your hands around it, and no one really knows what that number is, but I’m going to guess a couple of thousand.

[00:42:21] Mark Taylor: And that includes local investors as well, who can write cheques, and that can be debt or equity. We started speaking to people, and I will say that I have had conversations with probably now pushing closer to 2,000, but certainly after the first six years, with 1,500 unique investors. And we trimmed that down to about 500 investors who we felt were really serious about Africa — not just tacking the A onto MENA. There was commitment. We wanted to know they were clean. There’s a lot of money floating around out there, so you’ve got to be careful of it.

[00:43:09] Mark Taylor: And we built up an amazing network and database of investors. And so the idea was to create efficiency — to work with capital seekers and say, right, we probably know the five people who will invest in your business. You need to speak to seven. And anyone who tells you you need to speak to 50 is an idiot. Having said that, I sometimes come up with 50 names, but the point was really that we wanted to be super accurate and not waste people’s time with lousy deals. So we would vet the deals, we’d know pretty much who would invest in them, and we had the relationships — and that’s the secret sauce. People have seen the quality of transactions we take to them, and typically when someone comes to us and pays us to help prepare them for the market, build a documentation pack and data room, and take them to market to raise capital — when we go out to the investors, the investors will respond. I did a transaction for a subsidiary of a former company I worked for, and on the day we launched the deal, within 24 hours, over half of the 30 investors we’d spoken to were already looking at the data room and had signed NDAs. That is moving at the speed of light.

[00:45:22] Mark Taylor: And because it’s become relevant in an AI setting — can’t someone else just go and search and find all the names of investors that invest in Africa privately? Well, you can. But so what? You need a relationship. You need to know what’s going on, and that’s the missing thing. So that’s what we try to do. And as we’ve grown and morphed, at the end of 2022 we noticed that limited partners weren’t investing in general partners — we used to do fund advisory. So we went, trouble’s coming. Money is going to dry up in Africa. So we turned to restructuring, and that’s why I dusted off a business rescue practitioner licence, and within about three months we had our first business rescue. So we morph and move a little bit with the opportunities. We’ve done a lot of work with the UK government, done work in the old days with USAID, largely facilitating the movement of capital around Africa. And our mission was really — if people are going to put money into Africa, please just put them into good deals. Let us be a vessel for that. To try and ensure that the little bit of capital we get given to us on this continent goes into proper deals, not politically motivated or dreamer deals. Real stuff that’s going to make a difference to Africa.

[00:47:11] Graham Stephen: And Mark, it’s fascinating. As you’ve shared your story, there can be few people who are as well-placed as you in terms of your background, the building of relationships, the identifying of patterns, and also a passion to really do good and make sure that things have a real impact. Your past journey and where you are now — Cala Capital — is making a difference. It’s not just sourcing and channelling funds. It’s actually making sure that the right funds are deployed in the right way to make a genuine impact. And obviously make a bit of money along the way — we are in business after all. In conclusion, I’m going to ask you four or five quick rapid-fire questions, and then I’m going to give you an opportunity just to share any closing insights.

[00:48:22] Graham Stephen: First answer that comes to mind. What’s the biggest mistake founders make when raising capital?

[00:48:31] Mark Taylor: The biggest mistake is they’re not investor-ready when they think they are.

[00:48:36] Graham Stephen: Yeah, we see that too. You know, a good idea is not enough. You’ve got to be investor-ready. What do investors fear the most — let me frame that in terms of investing in Africa in particular. What’s the biggest fear for investors?

[00:48:59] Mark Taylor: So let me say what my business partner Gordon said. When he was at Barclays, he said you stood more chance of losing your job if you lost one pound in Nigeria than if you lost ten million pounds in South Africa. Because people would say, I told you so about Nigeria, it’s a difficult place to do business. So what do they fear? They fear looking like chumps and making a bad decision based on things that they should probably have known otherwise.

[00:49:35] Graham Stephen: That’s a really good insight. What do you think creates long-term value?

[00:49:47] Mark Taylor: Long-term value is created by institutionalising your business so that you are completely replaceable. There are other things too, but that’s top of mind.

[00:50:02] Graham Stephen: Systems, processes, and no owner dependence, ultimately, yeah. What is the hardest decision that you’ve had to make over the last 40-odd years?

[00:50:18] Mark Taylor: It was laying off the CEO of my aquarium. A big bear of a man, a Serbian guy, the most fantastic human being. I had to lay him off as part of our sales transaction, and he was in intensive care at the time, having had a heart attack. That was the hardest thing I’ve done. And look, we looked after him, and it wasn’t callously done, but it was brutal.

[00:51:03] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I mean, I can see, Mark — one of the things from getting to know each other, you’ve got a genuine heart for people, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have to do tough things. Last question — what’s one trait that all the great CEOs you’ve met and worked with share?

[00:51:15] Mark Taylor: I don’t know what they share, but I know what I’d like to think they share. And that is a level of — even if it’s internalised and they don’t always project it — epistemic humility. They know that what they think is right may not be right. I think that’s a trait of successful people. You need to be curious, and you need to be careful about it. It’s the things we are certain about that trip us up in life, not the things we are uncertain about.

[00:51:57] Graham Stephen: I love that. Mark, before we wrap — you know, I want to give you the opportunity. Anybody who’s been listening in today, what would one final piece of advice be to a listener? They could be an entrepreneur, or just somebody who’s curious about business.

[00:52:18] Mark Taylor: I often hear that you must follow your passion. I’m not convinced about that. Quite often, you do stuff you have to do so you can follow your passion. And you’re very fortunate if it turns out that you’re in a business where it is your passion. So I would say to people, in a world that’s become a world of instant gratification — you have to know how to play a long game, and you have to be prepared to ensure that you’re tough enough to get through that journey.

[00:53:04] Graham Stephen: Yeah, and I guess that talks to all these things like resilience and having a clear purpose — that’s what enables you to play the long game.

[00:53:17] Mark Taylor: But then again, sometimes you’ve got to know, I could be wrong. Maybe it’s time to fold the cards. And, you know, the guy who always holds, always holds — you soon see them around the card table.

[00:53:33] Graham Stephen: Mark, it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting to you today. If any of our listeners want to reach out to you, what’s the best way to contact you?

[00:53:44] Mark Taylor: They can find me on LinkedIn, or they can contact me on mark.taylor@calacapital.africa. Either of those would work.

[00:53:59] Graham Stephen: Thank you for joining us today. As I said, I think a follow-up episode might well be in hand. For those of you who know us, Mark’s down in Cape Town, and I’ll tell you one thing — we didn’t even touch on his swimming exploits. He’s got a good 12 to 15 years on me age-wise, and he’s still faster than me in the pool.

[00:54:31] Mark Taylor: You were kind to me last time we swam together. You literally beat me.

[00:54:35] Graham Stephen: Mark, fantastic. We’ll chat to you soon.

[00:54:39] Mark Taylor: Thank you very much. Thanks a lot, Graham. All the best.

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