I started working at 12, in my father's cinema and supermarkets in Cape Town. By the time I was 19, I was effectively running parts of it: cashing up, procurement, cash flow, working out the quantities we needed on different days across the bakery, cinema, takeout, and supermarket. I paid the invoices, drove to buy goods, and made the calls that actually moved customer service and what we sold forward. It's an unusual place to start a career, but it's where mine actually started.
When my father passed away, I began selling carpets at the market to make money, and worked at the V&A Waterfront while paying my own way through a degree in Information Systems. Not the most direct path through university, but it was mine.
After graduating I worked in the UK for a while and spent time in Spain, including a stint at Harrods as a communications officer. When I came back to South Africa I returned to IT, starting again as a junior developer, the same place I'd started in the UK, and spent years building up a career as a software developer in Cape Town.
Eventually I opened my own business and launched a run of products: ParkingSA and ParkPal (Cape Town's first prepaid parking card), Housebid and Premis Real Estate, and later Coolbrew, one of the first online coffee sellers in Cape Town, sourcing the finest beans for resale and building a directory of the best coffee shops I'd found travelling through Germany, the Netherlands, and Cape Town, letting other people add their own finds too. Selling ParkingSA and ParkPal even took me abroad, trying to get the product in front of the right people internationally.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I became a novelist almost by accident. I told my dad once that I never liked how a particular movie ended. He said, "so write your own." I did, starting at 28, and I've since finished 19 books, novels and short stories both.
When I'm not working, I'm usually in the ocean; surfing and swimming to unwind, and more recently surf skiing. Not much of a business story, but it's where a lot of the actual thinking happens.
After that I spent years in the payments industry, while continuing to consult through my own business on the side. Which brings things more or less up to date, and to what I'm building now.