Servest’s success story

Business entrepreneurs Kenton Fine and Dennis Zietsman founded facilities management company, Servest in 1997. Twenty-three years later, with the help of RMB Corvest, the company has grown into a multi-billion, multi-national. RMB Corvest CEO, Mike Donaldson, and Kenton Fine share the fascinating Servest story and its UK expansion and their long-term business relation built on loyalty, trust and mutual respect with BizNews’s Alec Hogg.

This special podcast is brought to you by RMB Corvest. This episode features the Servest story, from start-up to a R10-bn multinational. Private equity is a long-term game that’s 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-m. That’s roughly, R10-bn. 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 Corvest also followed the story, so I think they met Kenton when he still had a little waste business that was based in Durban. I think at the time he came to 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.