Too young to drive one of his parents’ minibus taxis, Mohamed Baba instead cut his entrepreneurial teeth as a conductor, or “guardtjie”. The experience of collecting money, dealing with all sorts of customers and the sometimes scary enforcement arms of Cape Town’s taxi associations, not to mention the gangs seeking a slice of the transport action, did nothing to dampen the business ambitions of this boy from Grassy Park on the Cape Flats.
After a year as a guardtjie, Mohamed graduated to driver and then, in 1995, started his own business with a partner, two vehicles and a single contract with a Cape Town hotel. This was after Mohamed had done a tourism course and transferred fans visiting the Mother City for that year’s Rugby World Cup. “The money was a lot better than the R1 I got per passenger between Cape Town and Sea Point,” remembers Mohamed.
In 2000 when he went on his own, his business, Legend Tourism Services, employed three or four people. In 2005, Legend became ILIOS Travel and now has 65 full-time staff, not just in Cape Town but also in Johannesburg, Durban and Port Elizabeth.
A full-service tour operating business, ILIOS (Greek for the sun) offers escorted services across South Africa, day trips in and around Cape Town and elsewhere, tailor-made tours, luxury vehicle and coach charters, pick-ups, documentation, hotel and car-hire bookings. In short, if it involves moving tourists efficiently, safely and in luxury and style on the ground, ILIOS does it.
They take you personally
What sets ILIOS apart, says Mohamed, is firstly its personal touch and secondly the fact that it is embedded in the community. “We have a strong belief in responsible, sustainable tourism. We really participate in previously disadvantage communities, in terms of the products they sell, developing their skills and linking tourists to non-profit organisations to which they can contribute.”
Most visitors from overseas, Mohamed says, want to interact with communities. “Tourism is not just about place; it’s about people.” Not only do they want to interact with these communities, many overseas visitors want to keep that interaction going, to offer support, long after their holidays are over.
Two great interventions
TEP, Mohamed says, has been an excellent support to ILIOS’s rapid expansion. “They’ve done two great interventions in our business.” The first was the help TEP gave the then Legends in moving from a system in which its reservations were manually inputted into Excel spreadsheets onto a program which Mohamed helped to design which captures reservations automatically and gives management tailored yield-management reports.
Two years ago TEP gave Mohamed access to financial and marketing consultants. The financial advice was “high-end training that helped me understand how to get our business to a sustainable space.” In addition to this, TEP has helped Mohamed to participate in trade events in London, Durban and Dubai.
While ILIOS has mostly grown “horizontally” – from Cape Town to other centres, Mohamed, still only 34, is now gearing up to expand by drawing in more top-quality business. The company, he says, is particularly well positioned for the Fifa World Cup in 2010. “We have good clients and a good business. We’re all over the country, we have a proven track record and we are as legitimate as they come. One advantage to what is happening economically at the moment is that now every second person is not going to think that they can start a tourism business. Those people who have invested over the last ten years or more will reap the benefits of that investment.”
South Africa as a whole, Mohamed believes, is going to reap the benefits of the investment it has made preparing for 2010. “We’re going to do an exceptional job. We always do,” he says. “And we really don’t have a choice this time but to do an exceptional job.”