In December 2008, Charlene Lewison, marketing director of the Johannesburg-based family business, Birdi Golf Apparel, surveyed the company’s well-stocked shelves with pride – but also with a growing sense of unease. In the past 12 years, Birdi had become an established brand on both the professional and amateur golf circuits in South Africa.

The first thing Thandie Dhlomo, sales partner at the Rawson Property Group, did when she arrived home on a chilly Friday evening in July 2016 was pour herself a glass of red wine, kick off her shoes and curl up on her couch. She felt exhausted. Her last clients for the day had been Lunga Dlamini and his wife, Sonia. They were looking to move out of their rented house in Soweto and purchase their first home in one of the suburbs of Johannesburg. Dhlomo had helped them to narrow it down to three properties in three different suburbs: Linden, Parkhurst and Fourways.

In 2001, about 2 million people had access to the Internet in South Africa, and Absa, one of the major banking groups in South Africa had an Internet banking client base of 153 000. In a move aimed at doubling this client base and changing the bank’s image from one of e-laggard to e-leader, the group decided, in conjunction with UK IT company, Affinity, to offer free Internet access to anyone in South Africa. Despite widely expressed scepticism about the viability of the project, the uptake was enormous. The projected month-one target of 10 000 registrations was reached on the first day.

In August 2002, Desmond Makondo walked out of the Johannesburg offices of digital products manufacturer, Hewlett Packard (HP), with a digital camera, two printers and an undertaking that he would pay the company R8 000 for the equipment within two months. He had no idea how he was going to do this, but he knew there was no going back; he had no choice. He had to find a way to make this equipment make money. But how?

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It was December 2004, and Desmond Makondo had turned his photographic business, Digitally on the Move CC, into a profitable concern in the three years since he had walked away from Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) offices with a camera, two printers and no idea what to do with them. He had acquired a number of regular corporate clients and was photographing various events including golf days, corporate functions, conferences, graduations and more.

“We cannot just sit by and do nothing!” said Sebastian Olofsson to his uncle, Dan Olofsson, a Swedish IT billionaire and owner of a private game reserve in Hluhluwe (northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa). It was February 2003, they were both at the reserve and Sebastian had just returned from a guided tour of the vicinity that had exposed him to the dire poverty in the area and the human suffering there caused by HIV/AIDS.

Dale Hefer, managing director of ChilliBush Marketing and Communications had started ChilliBush five years previously, operating from her Johannesburg garage. The business had proven remarkably successful, with billings exceeding R1 million after her first year of operation and reaching more than R18 million by 2003. However, Hefer knew that ChilliBush had to attract the big brands if they were to reach the billings target they had set of R36 million per annum by 2006.

In October 2016, the management team of Women in Wine – South Africa’s first wine brand to be owned and controlled by black women – gathered to prepare for the annual meeting of company shareholders. Operating conditions locally and abroad over the preceding year had once again proved extremely challenging, and chief executive officer (CEO) Beverly Farmer felt the firm needed decisive action to improve its fortunes.

James van der Walt, founder of SolarTurtle, looked out of his office window at the people sitting in the common area of Stellenbosch University’s LaunchLab. Van der Walt’s mind was, however, far from the LaunchLab’s collegial environment that afternoon in May 2018. SolarTurtle had not been growing fast enough to make the company self-sustaining, and the current finance model for franchisees had proven to be unsustainable. Van der Walt wondered whether the introduction of the BabyTurtle and the MiniTurtle, the company’s newest products, would improve the growth rate of the company. 

In September 2014, Calum McCracken, chief executive officer (CEO) of Next Generation Network Telecommunications (Pty) Ltd (NGN Telecoms), met with his partners to discuss the company’s Kenyan dilemma.