As startups move beyond the early stages, growth often brings greater complexity and new challenges, including expanding teams, capacity limits and often the founders themselves unknowingly becoming growth blockers to the business. Supporting small businesses to move beyond the early startup phase and scale sustainably is crucial, given the significant impact these SMEs have on employment and the broader South African economy.
In fact, SMEs make up approximately 91% of all businesses in South Africa, with over 2.7 million SMEs providing over 60% of total employment in the country1.
At Edge Growth, we believe transformation happens when founders are equipped not only with funding but with the frameworks, tools, and peer networks to lead confidently through scale. That’s why we are proud to be deeply connected to Founders at Work (FAW) – a national masterclass series launched in October 2025 in partnership with FNB and Art of Scale. FAW is designed to help ambitious founders and CEOs navigate the scale-up journey in the AI era, aligning directly with Edge Growth’s mission to unlock SME growth and create quality livelihoods across Africa.
“Once a business moves beyond the early stage, growth stops being about working harder and starts being about building repeatable ways of leading, deciding and delivering,” says Jason Krause,
Aimed at businesses typically with between 10 and 200 employees and with turnover between R8 and R150m, the series is seeing strong early momentum, with the first masterclass of 2026 oversubscribed and over 80 founders attending in January. Many are returning for subsequent sessions to continue to build practical skills and capabilities that can be applied immediately in their businesses.
For founders, the value is already showing up in real decisions and operational changes. Atish Dahya, who runs a law firm and debt collection practice, describes how the programme helped his team evolve how they grow.
“What it’s done is allow us to grow. We’ve grown our business from around 200 staff to about 400,” he says, adding that for his business, data is key. “We need automated QA scoring, data analytics, and we’ve brought in a few tools into the business that literally sets us apart from our competitors,” he says.
Founders at Work’s next session, The Art of Strategy Masterclass, is taking place on 23 February 2026 in Cape Town, with a live-stream option for founders across South Africa.
In this masterclass, founders will learn how to identify their business’s strongest competitive advantage and decide which activities to cut or reprioritise to reach that goal.
They will also discover how to build a repeatable growth engine that drives predictable revenue, translates strategy into sustainable weekly execution for their teams, and apply practical tools to sharpen decision-making, focus effort and track progress.
Attendance of this session, which will run from 10h00 until 13h00, is free for qualifying founders and space is limited. To reserve your place, please go to
For more information, go to www.foundersatwork.co.za.