AutoHive Business Consulting is the governance and structuring division of the AutoHive Group, advising South African SMEs with annual turnover between R20 million and R250 million. Services cover complex business structuring including trusts, holding companies and Section 42 asset for share transactions, family constitutions and succession planning, shareholders agreements and dispute resolution, operational value chain audits, and non-executive director appointments to SME and family boards. The practice is led by Barteld Bakker, a Certified Director of the Institute of Directors in Southern Africa whose MBA dissertation evaluated the long term effectiveness of family constitutions and succession plans in South Africa.

Business consulting

Most businesses this size are not held back by the market. They are held back by their own structure.

A company turning over R40 million with no shareholders' agreement is one disagreement away from a problem no amount of revenue can fix. Governance is not paperwork you file to keep someone happy. It is the infrastructure that decides whether a business survives its founder, and whether the next generation inherits an asset or an argument.

Start with a governance check Who is behind this

The model

One foundation, three buckets standing on it.

Porter (1985) split a business into activities that create value directly and activities that make the first kind possible. Governance is the second kind, the infrastructure everything else depends on. Automate on top of a sound structure and the gains compound. Automate on top of a broken one and you have automated the breakage, faster and at scale. The whole model is drawn out here.

One foundation, three buckets standing on it Three hexagons sit in a row across the top of the diagram, labelled two, Marketing and sales; three, Operations and data; and four, People, the lifecycle. Each rests on a wide bar running the full width beneath them, labelled one, Governance, the ground everything stands on. A short arrow runs down from each hexagon into the bar, showing that all three report back into governance. A note beneath the bar reads that the foundation is built first, and that the order is the model doing its job. THE WORK THAT FACES THE CUSTOMER 2 Marketing and sales 3 Operations and data 4 People, the lifecycle 1 Governance, the ground everything stands on Structures, trusts, constitutions, succession, the board, and the agents that watch the numbers Built first. The order is not a preference, it is the model doing its job.
Three buckets of work face the customer. All three rest on the same foundation, and all three report back into it. Build the foundation last and you have automated whatever was already broken.

1. Governance, the foundation

Trusts, estate duty and asset protection. Holding, trading, property and asset companies. Family and business constitutions, shareholders' agreements, succession. The board and the non-executive seat. AI financial management agents watching the numbers continuously rather than at month end, with a network of accounting practitioners behind them.

Read bucket one

2. Marketing and sales

The sales machine: AI sales agents that qualify and follow up, AI PABX call handling, digital cloning for repeatable conversations, sales dashboards, and a CRM for smaller clients. We build the machine. The marketing division fills it.

Read bucket two

3. Operations and data

Employee and client apps, checklists that produce a record rather than a tick, digital certificates and job cards. Then the part that matters most: one operational event raising the invoice, updating the pipeline and feeding the financial agents, without anyone rekeying it.

Read bucket three

4. The people lifecycle

Recruitment through Scout with OCEAN, DISC and compatibility scoring, onboarding with signed contracts and a POPIA manual, a secure FICA vault, training built as avatar video or recorded properly in a studio with a real person, and labour attorneys for hearings and CCMA matters.

Read bucket four

Who this is for, and who it is not

Between R20 million and R250 million.

That band is deliberate. Below roughly R20 million a business usually needs a good accountant and a clear head more than it needs a trust structure, and paying for governance it cannot yet use is money we will tell you to keep. Above R250 million the large advisory firms are properly equipped, and priced, for you.

In between sits the group nobody serves well: sophisticated enough to need real structure, too small to be worth a big firm's attention, and quoted accordingly when they do ask. That gap is the whole reason this division exists.

We will also say no inside the band. If the real problem is that nobody knows you exist, that is a marketing problem. If your website loses the enquiries you already earn, that is a web problem. Restructuring will fix neither, and we would rather send you to the right division than sell you the wrong one.

The rest of the argument

The rest of it.

Who is behind this

Eighteen years of building and governing companies, an exit executed properly, and a dissertation on the exact thing this division sells.

Read the record

The value chain model

Porter mapped onto four buckets, drawn out, with the sequencing that decides what you fix first.

See the model

How the hive connects

Six divisions, what each is for, and when you would need it after this one.

See the network

Who we say no to

The size filter, and the questionnaire that establishes what you actually intend to do with automation.

Read the screen

How to start

Three ways in, what each involves, how long it takes and what drives the price.

Read the chapter

One clear next step

Start with the governance check.

A short, structured look at what exists and what does not: your entity structure, shareholders' agreement, succession position and board arrangement. You get a written view of where the gaps are and which ones actually matter yet. If the honest answer is that you do not need us for another two years, that is what it will say.

Request the governance check

Or read what each engagement involves before you decide.