About
I wasn’t always successful. But I’ve always been an entrepreneur.
Since I graduated from WITS in 1987, I’ve been in one business or another, and inbetween, in one job or another. I’ve owned a software development business (more than once), a coffee shop, a stationery business, a dot com bomb, been swallowed up by
a listed company and unswallowed.
Around 1995, I found a gap in a tiny segment of a market that gradually grew and grew into the business it is today. This business was once sitting on a knife edge, and was either about to fold, or grow. The only reason it didn’t go the way of all my other business ventures is because, at that time, I was enrolled as an MBA student at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), and I started putting what I learned into practice. I watched my turnover almost double from one year to the next, and by restructuring my business, I increased the cashflow exponentially.
Although I had been running my business, like so many others out there, with passion, drive, and every other good characteristic of a good entrepreneur, I was missing some basic building blocks. It was like owning a Ferrari and not knowing how to drive it faster than 20kmh.
You can’t learn passion and drive, but you can learn basic business skills like how to analyze your costs, how to identify the weaknesses in your organization, and how to set and execute strategy. I discovered that by learning these skills and others, my business became stronger and stronger, and my bottom line improved exponentially virtually overnight. I found I had more time on my hands while my business was doing better than it ever had before.
In 2005, I graduated with an MBA from GIBS, and since then, I have been exploring the world of entrepreneurship, and learning how all this knowledge and experience can help other entrepreneurs on their journey.
Imagin8™ opened in January 2007 out of my passion to help entrepreneurs not to make the same mistakes I have made, but rather to guide them through the process, whatever stage the entrepreneur might be, with the benefit of knowledge and hindsight.
To date, I have already helped several entrepreneurs discover the hidden value in their ideas, and to develop their ideas thoroughly before taking them to market. Without the help of Imagin8™, these ideas would not have had the chance of success that I believe Imagin8™ helped them create.