David Tayler would probably be a farmer today had his father not insisted that he get a degree before joining the family enterprise of cultivating tobacco in Mangura, Zimbabwe. He travelled to Cape Town in the year 2000 where his elder sister was studying, to pursue a one year diploma in business management. “In 2001, I took up a second diploma in information technology (I.T.) in order to gain a good understanding of technology as this was becoming a key component of modern farming,” David recalled in an interview at his aesthetic Fusion Software offices in Randburg. It was while he was pursuing this diploma that he got a frantic phone call from his mother in Zimbabwe where there had been developments related to President Mugabe’s policy of resettling war veterans on white farms. “People who were not nearly old enough to be war veterans had stormed our farm in my father’s absence and given my mother thirty minutes to pack up and leave. She only had time to pack a change of clothes, a computer and our family albums.The house was then ransacked and burnt to the ground,” lamented David who recently turned 32.
Over 100 farm employees lost their jobs and the insurance company rejected the claim on the grounds that this was an ‘Act of war’ that was not covered by the policy. David’s father eventually managed to commence farming on a second property but this was short-lived as a government official expropriated the land with no compensation. “The loss my parent’s experienced was the saddest part of the situation given that they were now in their 50’s and everything they had was taken away. I decided that I would pay my own way through college and took up an evening job as a waiter at a high end restaurant.”
develop and provide software to his client base and we both invested our capital into the idea.” In 2007, David decided to hive off the software company and purchase Colin’s stake. The two went their separate ways although they remain best friends today and are partners in a completely different business venture. “I called the company Fusion to reflect our core business of fusing a number of elements together to produce efficient software. When I took it over, I had 30 days to make it work as this was the lead time before the rent, PABX payments and salaries for eight employees were due!”
David would attend classes during the day and wait on tables from early evening up to two in the morning every night. It was at this restaurant that he met his future wife Wendy who was one of the pastry chefs. When she got a job offer in Gauteng in 2003, the couple moved to Johannesburg and initially lived with Wendy’s aunt as they found their feet in the new town.
It was a leap of faith but David managed to pull it off using a personal overdraft facility and cash flow from some of his early clients. Today the company’s staff complement is approximately four times its initial number and Fusion services well over a hundred customers each year with solutions in four main areas – fusion software applications for all aspects of the business, contract development, software integration and websites.
“It was through Wendy’s cousin that I met Colin Thornton, the owner of Dial-a-Nerd, a company that supplies hardware and I.T. support to a variety of clients. He had only employed me for a week before I presented him with a business plan to
“I took the decision early in life that I would neither pay rent nor work for someone else. In 2013, it will be the tenth anniversary of this software business and I am immensely proud of what we have managed to
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