Culture carried Yoco through the pandemic
Yoco is an African technology company that builds tools and services to help small businesses get paid, run their business better, and grow. Yoco was established in 2015 by four founders who knew then that culture would be a critical part of their success.
In 2018 we worked with the Yoco founders to define their cultural foundations — vision, purpose and values. We did this by listening to the original story of why Yoco was created and looked back at how they did things that consistently showed results and delivered value to customers — honing in on the magic that had been the source of their success so that the business could stay true to its original vision as it scaled.
Cultural foundations as the foundation of growth
“As an organisation scales, it’s essential to codify how you thrive — finding the unique behaviours that link to unique outcomes and that are difficult to replicate. Our values aren’t aspirational, and they aren’t borrowed from other great companies,” says Katlego Maphai, Yoco’s CEO. “They are a reflection of how we’ve done things when we were at our best.”
The cultural foundations are what Yoco lives and breathes every day. And Covid has shown the value here. As the crisis hit, the impact on the 100,000 plus entrepreneurs Yoco supports was especially significant, with regular trading shut down.
Values guiding change
Rather than going into high reactivity, Yoco leant into their culture to find their way through. Using their values as a guide to ‘stay connected’ with entrepreneurs and ‘make space to explore’ to reinvent the support they offered entrepreneurs in a new trading environment. It included helping small businesses to trade online and reinvent themselves.
What’s been the impact of articulating the magic authentically for Yoco? The four founders speak a lot to alignment, consistency and enablement, and how these drive growth, whether in network growth, decision making, recruitment, product development, customer service, or simply grappling with everyday challenges.
Yoco tripled its customer base from when it started work on its core values in 2018 until the end of 2020, notwithstanding Covid impact.
“We’re very intentional about what we’re trying to build. How do we make sure other people understand those intentions even when we can’t be in the room, so that they can innovate and make their own decisions within those intentions without speaking to a single founder?” says Yoco co-founder, Lungisa Matshoba. “And even if that decision blows up, if it was consistent with our purpose and vision and values, it’s probably a decision that any of us would have made.”
Alignment through culture
“The values give us a common language to talk about things,” adds Yoco co-founder, Bradley Wattrus. “If there are problems, go back to the values. If you’re working with someone who’s battling, it’s easy to get direction from the values or give feedback without feeling like they’re being called out. Instead of it being ‘I think this’ but ‘you think that’, it becomes a more objective conversation.”
“Purpose allows us to move forward with strength and passion. Where every step we take links back to the fundamental of why we exist — to enable people to thrive,” concludes Maphai. “The Yoco core is taking us into the future. We rely on it for inspiration and the way to drive growth.”
