MENTHER COVER FEATURE
Beauty, Retail & Blockchain Talk to us a little bit about your study background, what the early stages of the career that you designed for yourself looked like before you decided to venture off into entrepreneurship? My career started very early, I was born into a family business and that’s when I started working. My first job was as a mechanic assistant because my father had a car fixing business. My parents also ran a wood cutting business, where they would source wood and then sell it for commercial catering, butchers, funeral houses and domestic consumption as well. In a way, they ran as a social enterprise, because it was during the time where there was a mass migration of people from villages and other areas into mining towns like Johannesburg and other areas to go and work, leaving no manpower in the village. You’d have those houses where there’s an elderly
woman or a young bride who’s just had a child, and they can’t go out to source wood, so my parents would give them wood for free. There was an apprenticeship program as well, where boys on the street would come and work with my dad and gain employable skills. So both that social way of doing things and business form a very solid foundation into my entrepreneurship journey. I worked in male dominated
industries from a young age and I was always in overalls so everyone in my village thought I was a boy and that influenced me later to go and study fashion. I then studied PR and then from there I went and worked for social corporate investments, something that has nothing to do with what I actually studied. But it is connected to the heart and soul of the businesses I was exposed to from a very young age. Did you go into your studies with the intention of using them to create your own business or were you looking to create a safety net outside of entrepreneurship? I figured out what I want to do very early, I knew that I want to be in business, I didn’t really know what business that was going to be. I knew I wanted to work in a family business, because I wanted to be married to somebody I can be in business with because I knew I’m a workaholic. I
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