It was a move to South Africa and the boredom of being an employee that spurred Asher Bohbot to head what is today a $1.4-billion information and communications technology company, Enterprise Outsourcing Holdings, popularly known as EOH.
Born in Morocco, the 61-year-old chief executive moved to South Africa at the age of 27.
He had been living in Israel at the time when a friend suggested they travel to South Africa for two weeks.
“I asked what is South Africa. I didn’t know about South Africa at the time. I came, but he didn’t come. He dropped me at the last minute. I knew nothing about the place [Johannesburg]; that two weeks turned into longer than that,” he says.
“I behaved for the first week or so as a tourist in Johannesburg. I took a bus down to a museum and there I saw this girl who shared a flat with me in Israel. I didn’t know she was here.”
They took the bus to her home where Bohbot met her husband. A few minutes later a friend of theirs came to visit. He said he came from Israel to recruit industrial engineers for his business. Bohbot went for the interview and decided he’d work there for a short while. He worked at Laminate Industries (later to be part of the PG Group) as an industrial engineering manager in 1981 and started moving up the ranks, becoming General Manager and later Executive Director of Distribution of the main board of PG Bison.
Throughout his career, he was exposed to general business leadership, business systems and supply chain logistics, but the work became unfulfilling and boring for a man in his late twenties. He had had an affinity to system processes and this spurred Bohbot to start something from scratch.
The business idea came at 3AM one morning. He drew a picture charting how he thought this company would work. That drawing lies in his offices in Bedfordview, just outside Johannesburg. At the time, he wanted his business to bridge the gap in the information technology sector. EOH has stuck to its foundation.
But Bohbot doesn’t see himself as the classical entrepreneur, especially since he worked for the same company for 17 years before starting EOH.
“I don’t believe entrepreneurs reside only as little start-up guys working from a garage. Entrepreneurs exist within a company where they can influence capacity, to do things greater than an individual or entrepreneur can make on life or society,” he says.
“The notion that a corporate is anti-entrepreneurship is wrong. It’s the culture and nature of the business that dictates it. But we somehow take it that the corporate is the opposite of entrepreneurship.”
This chief executive says that EOH tries to embrace both. He says it’s worked so far and he believes it will similarly work like that in the future.
“Entrepreneurship, in our definition, is the ability to have one head and one brain that manages demand and supply.”
EOH is a firm with offices in cities in South Africa as well as 30 other locations across the continent. The business provides consulting technology and outsources solutions from the continent and Britain, operating in infrastructure, software and services segments.
His first client was his employer at the time, PG Bison, and 17 years later they remain so.
The business is one of the largest IT firms in the country and is set on growing. It listed on Africa’s biggest bourse, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1998. At the time, the listing was done to create more awareness rather than making money. Today, EOH is a $1.4-billion company with revenues around $610 million, and employing over 8,000 people. The company is making good progress in expanding elsewhere in Africa and now has a presence in 29 countries. Its success can be attributed to its winning formula for acquisitions which has been carefully structured.
“We want to grow, be bigger and we want to develop. The bigger we are, the more influence we will have and also have a positive impact on our environment. Growth is paramount for us,” he says.
In 2014, Bohbot was named Business Leader of the Year at CNBC Africa’s All Africa Business Leadership Awards (ABLAA’s) for his success and bold contribution to solutions-based business and IT strategies. Over the years he has also won numerous awards which he says are merely recognition for the work EOH does.
Had Bohbot not gone to the museum, he could have boarded a different bus and led a different life.