Tuesday 24 July 2012

More top SA businesswomen - including a bestselling author - share their strategies for success

Margie Orford

Role: Writer, author of the Clare Hart thriller series
Age: 46
Sector: Publishing
Definition of success: ‘
Making a (good) living from doing something that I love. That said, success is born from ambition, education, hard work, focus and luck.’
Greatest achievement: ‘Believing in myself enough to give my dream a chance of becoming a reality. That dream was to be a full-time writer, and behind the dream was a business plan. It’s only possible to live off writing if one’s books sell into international markets; my books have been translated into 10 languages and counting.’
Best strategy: ‘Investing in myself. I earned a substantial chunk of royalties for some text books I wrote years ago – enough to keep me and my family going for six months. Instead of doing the sensible thing and buying a new car or paying off the bond, I “bought” myself enough time to write the first of my Clare Hart thrillers, Like Clockwork. It paid off.’ Margie’s latest novel is Daddy’s Girl, published by Jonathan Ball.

Advice to SA women: ‘Dream big, plan in detail. Work harder than you ever imagined possible. And once you do achieve what you set out to achieve, enjoy it. Then dream bigger, work harder, do more.

Pam Golding
Role: Founder and chairperson of Pam Golding Property Group.
Sector: Property
Definition of success: ‘When I look back over the past 35 years, success has been enthusiastically doing what I’m passionate about – selling property, networking, and meeting interesting people.’ 
Greatest achievements: ‘Building up a large organisation from what began as a hobby.’ Today, Pam Golding Properties is the biggest independent property services company in Southern Africa, and has over 2,500 real estate professionals globally.
Best strategies: Pursuing her natural talent for matching buyer and seller; surrounding herself with people who share her ethos; following her instincts (‘for example, opening a London office in 1986, when South Africa’s international image was at its worst’); and being optimistic: ‘I began the company when South Africa was going through a recession, and people said I was crazy to go on my own, but I was determined to succeed.’
Advice to SA women: ‘Remain totally committed to your career path but retain balance in your personal and business life. Remain approachable and show empathy for others. Accept all challenges and never give up. Go for the gap, and keep scanning the horizon for new opportunities. If are focused, dedicated and ambitious, you will succeed!’

Lindiwe Sangweni-Siddo
Role: Founder, shareholder and general manager of The Soweto Hotel on
Freedom Square
Age: 44
Sector: Hospitality and tourism
Definition of success: ‘Creating a commercial opportunity that you are passionate about, that provides jobs and skills for our people, and that delivers world-class service consistently.’
Greatest achievement: To have built and opened the first four-star hotel in Soweto. It’s also the first black-owned, female-managed hotel on a national heritage site (The Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication) and acts as a training ground for local youth pursuing careers in hospitality.
Best strategies: Using local suppliers; providing an entrepreneur development platform; and focusing on local and domestic markets, ‘as these are the markets you turn to during global economic recessions, especially in the tourism industry.’
Advice to SA women: ‘Be inclusive and make sure your management team shares your vision. Have a support base outside of your business and keep in touch with like-minded women who are older and wiser than you or have experience you can learn from. Stay humble and deal with integrity. Also, you must be knowledgeable about the field you choose so that your business is taken seriously.’  

Nicci Scott
Role: Founder and managing director of Siyaduma Auto Ferriers.
Age: 37
Sector: Transport
Definition of success: ‘Very simply, reaching that which you have set out to achieve.’ 
Greatest achievement: Within three years of starting her business, Nicci supplied 80% of the car rental companies in four cities. Despite ‘some very daunting times’, she now employs 200-plus staff, ferries over 2000 commercial and passenger vehicles across South Africa monthly, and recently opened a training academy to empower women in the transport sector. Nicci won three business awards in 2010, including Top Young Woman Entrepreneur of the Year
Best strategy: Customer service. ‘Engage with a client, establish his needs, expectations and deliverables, and make sure that’s your business focus, not profit alone. You’ll set yourself apart from the competition.’ 
Advice to SA women: ‘Set your goals and take small, consistent steps to get there. Do what you enjoy, and you’ll never begrudge the time and effort required to build a business. I went through a stage of feeling very guilty for not being involved in my children’s lives like other moms are, but I don’t judge myself any more. Although children need their parents’ time and attention, they also need happy, stable, loving parents who feel fulfilled and successful within themselves.’ 

Tracy Foulkes 
Role: Founder of NoMU
Age: 40
Sector: Food
Definition of success: ‘Whenever Paul (my gorgeous husband and business partner) and I try to agree on when we think we’ll have achieved enough business-wise, we always seem to come back for more.’
Greatest achievements: Having two healthy, happy sons,
winning the SIAL
Grand Prix for Excellence and Innovation in Packaging and Design for NoMU Vanilla Paste in 2006, and being awarded the Businesswoman of the Year prize (Western Cape) 2010. ‘Most importantly, Paul and I agree that finding each other and successfully running a business together are definitely achievements!’  
Best strategies: ‘Sticking to our guns in terms of quality and standards in a very price-competitive market. Our consumers are prepared to pay a slight premium as they know they’re getting the best available product.’ NoMU’s innovative range, available in over 30 countries, includes beautifully packaged rubs, grinders, sugar-free hot chocolate, fonds (liquid stock concentrate) and more, for both retail and catering. ‘Growing deliberately and quickly into exports was a crucial component. Also, my monthly recipe mailers to nearly 20,000 subscribers get me back into the kitchen.’ 
Advice to SA women: ‘Produce something you can be passionate about. Believe in yourself and your abilities – a powerful, bold woman with a clear idea of what she believes is almost impossible to say no to!’

These profiles originally appeared in Foschini Club.

Wednesday 11 July 2012

Top businesswomen share their strategies for success

These South African businesswomen are following their vision and making it big. (If they could do it, so could you.)

 

Jenna Clifford

Role: Founder and designer of Jenna Clifford Designs
Age: 51
Sector: Jewellery
Definition of success: ‘
To achieve your hopes and dreams while remaining true to yourself, maintaining your integrity and prioritising your family.’
Greatest achievements: Jenna set up her business in 1992, after the end of her second marriage left her in financial difficulties. By initially working 16-hour days, she’s created a glittering brand and four luxurious jewellery boutiques. Jenna initiated the Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa, and four years ago launched Dream Big with Ryk Neethling, which supports children’s charities. Through inspiring encounters with such icons as Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu, she’s been able to ‘share their influence and bring about change in South Africa, especially on a gender equality platform.’ That aside, ‘I consider raising my three daughters one of my greatest achievements.’
Best strategies: ‘Hard work works! Business success also requires vision and belief.’
Advice to SA women: ‘Have passion and determination. Don’t get married too young. Be your own person. Read, read, read. Find a mentor, even if you never get to meet them. Make your own money: that way you can be loved and respected for you. Invariably, what you put in to this world is what you get out.’

Nkhensani Nkosi
Role: Nkhensani Nkosi, founder and designer of Stoned Cherrie
Age: 38
Sector: Clothing
Definition of success: ‘Having the freedom to do what you love and knowing that you are fulfilling your life purpose in the process.’
Greatest achievements: Nkhensani has co-owned a TV production company, travelled the world as an actress, and hosted M-Net’s Face of Africa. But in 2000 she launched Stoned Cherrie, the Afro-chic fashion brand that has graced New York Fashion Week and won her a L’Oreal/Fairlady Catherine Award for Lifetime Achievement. To Nkhensani, achievement means ‘building a beautiful family and home with my husband, and giving birth to my kids and my business.’
Best strategy: Adaptability: ‘having the ability to adapt oneself and business to changing circumstances. With all the economic changes over the last decade, I’ve learnt that the best strategies are those that allow for change.’ For example, Stoned Cherrie can be found on selected Woolworths rails, and her specially designed clutch bags have featured in a Clinique makeup promotion.
Advice to SA women: ‘Be open to every experience as it’s there to teach you a lesson. See each challenge as an opportunity to do things differently, learn something, or gain a new appreciation or perspective.’

Ipeleng Mkhari
Role: Co-founder and chief operations officer of Motseng Investment Holdings group.
Age: 36
Sectors: Investment, property, industrial.
Definition of success: ‘For me, it’s about the ability to live a life that I’m content with.’
Greatest achievement: ‘Having built a very strong, proudly South African company, literally from nothing. The business is growing beautifully and employs over 200 people. It’s very humbling to be able to have an impact on people’s lives. I get up with a sense of purpose every day.’
Best strategies: Diversification: this ensures survival when one market – property, for example – crashes. Ipeleng started a CCTV company in 1998, then teamed up with two business partners to create Motseng Investment Holdings. Originally a small start-up providing ‘soft services’ such as security and cleaning, Motseng has become a major name in property development, property management, facilities management and industrial investments, launching a new business every two to three years.
Advice to SA women: ‘As a woman, don’t play the victim; play the victor. Like any man struggling to start a business, you’ll have to work extremely hard, make sacrifices, plan, and be patient. To be a great mom, wife and businessperson, you might have to work 10% harder, but such is life!’

Ashantha Armogam

Role: Shareholder and managing director of Grid Worldwide Branding and Design
Age: 39
Sector: Media
Definition of success: ‘For me, it’s about staying true to your values, setting goals, thinking deeply about the implications of your actions, and looking at the legacy you leave.’
Greatest achievements: ‘Being authentic and open to new ideas. A lot of our work is based on disrupting categories and raising the bar by creating powerful brands, cultural hotspots, and improving the visual aesthetic through carefully considered design.’ Grid has twice been named Financial Mail AdFocus Branding & Design Agency of the Year, and has bagged three Loerie Grand Prix medals in five years (most recently for Comair’s SLOW airport lounges), while Ashantha was named top businesswoman in the 2011 Metropolitan Oliver Empowerment Awards.
Best strategy: Persistence! ‘You have to “give it horns”, even when the odds are stacked against you.’ When Ashantha joined design specialist Nathan Reddy as partner and MD in 2005, she aimed to establish a footprint for Grid, then a subsidiary of TBWA, locally and overseas. Ashantha and Nathan bought out TBWA’s 51% shareholding and launched the new Grid, which handles South African Tourism, Exclusive Books, Converse, Virgin Mobile and other major brands.
Advice to SA women: ‘Women have the opportunity to bring humanity, emotional intelligence, diplomacy, strength and unconventional thinking to the boardroom table.’ If you fail, ‘accept that you are human and don’t beat yourself up.’


These profiles originally appeared in Foschini Club.

Tuesday 3 July 2012

Author Marina Lewycka on sudden fame, the seriousness of comedy, and her new novel, Various Pets Alive and Dead

This interview with the best-selling author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian originally appeared in the Sunday Times Lifestyle section, 24 June 2012.

When she appears on my Skype screen, Marina Lewycka is lying in bed. ‘Excuse my hair; I’ve just been for a swim,’ she says with a sheepish look.
Lewycka (pronounced ‘Lewiska’) not only conducts interviews from her bed at home in Sheffield whenever possible, but writes her novels there too, on a laptop. ‘It’s comfy and cosy in bed, and you can shut yourself off. It’s much nicer to sit back and have cups of tea at your side and a hot water bottle under your knees than to sit at a desk. I could spend six hours a day in bed, but it does get a bit hard on the body,’ confesses the writer, now in her mid-sixties.
Dismantling the webcam, she takes my eyes on a quick tour of her bedroom, past an antique mirrored cupboard and a shelf stuffed with books to the window, where I peer down a few storeys of red-brick house to her spring garden, momentarily lit by a pale English sun.
The tale of Marina Lewycka’s late-in-life literary fame has become legend. ‘Until my mid-fifties, I was really a housewife who stayed at home,’ she says with self-deprecation. ‘But I’d always wanted to be a writer. I’d tried writing Mills and Boons, and had a go at thrillers. In fact, I’d written two complete novels, in longhand, and got very dispirited.’ A part-time lecturer at her local polytechnic, she was approaching retirement and was invited to take any course offered by the institution gratis. She chose a creative writing course, ‘and that,’ she says, ‘led to my breakthrough.’
Among the external examiners was literary agent Bill Hamilton of A.M. Heath in London, who, after reading her manuscript, signed her up. A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian was published in 2005 and sold over a million copies in the UK alone. The hit comedy about two sisters whose widowed father, a former engineer writing a history of tractors in Ukranian, marries a much younger Ukrainian immigrant, was followed by Two Caravans in 2007, We Are All Made of Glue in 2009, and Various Pets Alive and Dead last month.
Success flipped Lewycka’s life around. She describes not only the fulfilment in attaining her dream – of ‘having always really known I was supposed to be a writer, having worked for it terribly hard for so long, and then it all happened at once’ – but the downside: ‘When something is no longer a dream, it becomes a day job. I’m 65 and I’ve never worked so hard in my life! My friends are retired, and I wish I could relax, like them.’ But for the next few months, following the launch of her new novel, she’ll be giving talks and interviews, doing readings and book signings at the Scarborough Literary Festival, the London Book Fair and other events. ‘Then it will all calm down, and the story that’s at the back of my head will come out – I hope.’
Lewycka’s first literary effort was a poem written at the age of four. Born in a German refugee camp, dark-haired Marina was a year old when she and her Ukranian parents moved to England. Her father, who worked for International Harvester tractors in Doncaster, ‘considered himself a poet, and was actually quite good,’ she recalls. ‘My mother was one of the great story-tellers. She’d tell me about life back home in Ukraine – what people did in the winter, the names of their pet animals.’
The author remembers a stimulating, multi-cultural household filled with her parents’ friends from France, Germany and elsewhere, partly thanks to a warm, embracing mother who liked to invite interesting people home and feed them cake. Lewycka, however, was uncomfortably conscious of her own foreignness throughout childhood. ‘I grew up in the habit of seeing myself on the outside of things. It’s not nice for a little kid, but for a writer it’s nice to be on the sidelines, watching.’
Early feelings of exclusion may explain her empathy for those marginalized by society – the immigrants, refugees and elderly figures who appear in all her novels. Always full-blooded, quirky and indomitable, these characters offer more than mere entertainment value by humanising the people one might unconsciously regard as ‘other’.
Their presence reflects too the years Lewycka spent writing handbooks for Age Concern, Britain’s support organisation for the aged, and Mencap, the charity for people with learning disabilities. ‘I’d interview families for the handbooks and write about them in the first person. I still had dreams of telling their stories in novels one day,’ she says.
‘When I started writing Various Pets Alive and Dead, a Down’s Syndrome boy I knew popped up in my mind. He was so enthusiastic, so full of life, and could do anything he wanted, such as go off to the Special Olympics.’ This case study inspired the character of Oolie-Anna, a lusty, loud young woman with Down’s Syndrome who is desperate to leave home and live in her own flat, while her adoptive mother, ageing hippy Doro, struggles to let go.
The novel illustrates actual situations Lewycka encountered during her work with Mencap. Children with Down’s Syndrome live longer nowadays than they used to, and, as Lewycka points out, ‘What happens to them when their parents grow old or die? One needs to plan for the possibility of their outliving their parents.’ In Various Pets, a perky social worker finds Oolie-Anna a job and irritates Doro with such platitudes as, ‘But in the long term it’ll be better for everybody if Oolie-Anna can spread her wings and learn to fly’.
Various Pets Alive and Dead is a characteristic blend of farce, wit, pathos and social awareness. ‘I’m actually a very serious person, but I’m not good at writing serious things. They come out with a light touch,’ explains the author, a fan of British comedy classics including Fawlty Towers and Monty Python. ‘You think comedy isn’t serious but with comedy you can say such a lot that serious can’t. Comedy can expose the depths of the human soul; funny is what we are when we least intend to be.’
            A wry exploration of modern values, the new novel moves between three narrators: Doro; her son Serge, who’s pretending to finish his maths PhD at Cambridge while secretly raking in money as a City trader in London (a position that would horrify his anti-capitalist parents); and her daughter Clara, a primary school teacher. ‘I’m a bossy sort, like Clara,’ Lewycka laughs. ‘Actually, there’s a bit of me in all my characters.’
The storyline involves two present-day locations, flashbacks to Doro and Marcus’s lentil-infused commune in the 1960s, loads of backstory to inform the present-day plot, plus various pets. ‘It was very complicated to write,’ Lewycka admits, ‘as the backstory and real world had to dovetail together. If I changed one tiny thing, I had to go through the whole novel and change a whole lot of others.’ Yet she clearly thrives on complexity: Two Caravans featured nine interlinked narrative voices, including a dog.
Having taught media studies at Sheffield Hallam University for twelve years, Lewycka acknowledges the rewards of teaching but adds, ‘There are some really, really awful students and you wish you could flog them. There are departmental meetings, and days when you just don’t feel like doing the marking…’
Since retiring from teaching in December, Lewycka has more time for writing in bed. Her daughter and granddaughter live in New Zealand, and her partner, a historian, is based in London. ‘He and I go between the two cities,’ she says. ‘It’s nice to have gaps.’ Her next novel, the second of a two-book deal, will probably be set in Derbyshire, feature a child as its protagonist, and involve animals.
Though something of a celebrity in Sheffield, she remains resolutely down to earth. ‘The good thing about being an author is that, on the whole, you’re pretty invisible. That picture of me on the dust jacket of my new book was taken some time ago, so when I go out looking like a bag lady, as I so often do, I’m not recognised,’ she says with satisfaction. In her spare time Lewycka indulges in low-key, very English pursuits: gardening, swimming, baking cakes, taking a friend’s dog for walks in the surrounding Peak District.
It’s unlikely that Marina Lewycka will ever be accused of taking herself too seriously. As she wrote two years ago, ‘I’ve been a “successful” writer for almost five years now, but I never forget that I was an unsuccessful writer for more than fifty. It helps to keep things in perspective.’

(It's never too late to write a novel. Join The Peacock Project's online creative writing programme at http://www.peacockproject.net/, and get started today!)