Township-based digital agency Lemok flying South African flag abroad

An agency originating from Soshanguve, north of Pretoria, has earned itself international recognition. Known as Lemok, the township-based digital agency has won clients from Angola and Florida in its first five months.

Lemok is the brainchild of Lebogang Mokubela (pictured in red), who had quite a baptism of fire prior to launching the agency. He quit his job in 2014 and had his car repossessed shortly after. To add insult to injury, Mokubela also started his own events business Simgy South Africa, which ultimately lost the entrepreneur over R200 000.

But that didn’t seem to deter him.

Instead, Lemok was born initially as a design studio. Its creation was ultimately sparked by a client beckoning Mokubela to use his “marketing and branding skills”.

“I posted this infographic on our Instagram page and a few hours later, I receive an email from Abdul Hodge and that’s how I landed our first USA-based client. 11 months later, we enjoy a 23% month-to-month growth in revenue,” explains Mokubela, who now employs five people from Soshanguve and neighbouring Mabopane.

Mokubela’s business model is also fairly interesting: clients pay according to targets met, which gives employees further incentive to perform at their best, but also inspires client confidence in Lemok.

“If a client pays us R10 500 a month to handle their social media marketing, we make it an aim to produce a return on investment, every month, through sales leads,” he explains, suggesting that many agencies aim to be paid without producing equal returns.

Currently Lemok’s clients include the likes of Professional Interactives and the American Imaging of Southwest Florida Medical Centre, both based in (you guessed it) the United States.

As for future plans, Mokubela hopes to scale Lemok to Nigeria and other areas within South Africa.

“Our current action plan is called #Project100 where we aim to sign 100 clients by 2025. We will achieve this by opening satellite offices in Nigeria (we are in talks with a partner in Nigeria) as well as expanding into other townships, in other provinces,” he explains in correspondence with Memeburn.