Sbu Shabalala is the Founder and CEO of AdaptIT, South Africa's best performing tech company which started in Durban and provides specialised software solutions. Sbu has grown his startup to be listed on the JSE in just 13 years, employing over 1000 people and exporting software to more than 10 000 customers in 40 countries worldwide. Sbu was named 2016 IT Personality of the Year.

Adapt IT has grown 20 fold, after starting in 2007 and now reaching a R1-billion annual turnover. And by 2020 Sbu is targeting R3-billion. In the last five years the company had a compound annual growth of around 35% per annum. Growth at this rate isn’t usual!

"I think the advent of computers are meant to make life much easier, automate. But if you can’t make money out of it, it becomes useless. So I learnt both business and IT and that helped me."

Sbu was a software engineer and went on to understand the monetary side of it, how to actually make money out of it, how to price it, and the type of company you can create out of it.

Shabalala started his startup out in Durban, which is a small market where he did not get support from any corporates, so he started focusing on SME businesses. Not targeting corporates-type and slowly started developing the business. He managed a turnover around R50-million in three years.