What does your job involve?
Generally, I arrive at work and then start working through my dashboards, which are designed to tell me when there is stress in certain areas of the business. I can then help direct capacity to those teams to help them overcome their bottlenecks. I generally manage using the concepts from the book The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. Once that is done, I can also thank the people who are exceeding their targets. I need to keep abreast of new ideas and concepts to bring to the people in the trenches.
What makes you a good CEO?
I have no clue, but probably being humble and keeping the people you appreciate around you. It’s about having good people and letting them thrive.
What are the main challenges facing the car rental industry?
Car rental has an issue because we all sell a slightly different flavour of the same product. Rates are cut-throat and brokers with muscle control rates and take huge commissions. This anticompetitive behaviour makes it difficult to be profitable and deliver the best deals for customers.
My advice for choosing a career is to choose the stuff that comes easy to you
What did you want to be when you were a child?
I wanted to be a lawyer. I was a fan of the TV show LA Law. I studied BCom law at Wits University; the accounting stuff came easy to me, and law was hard, so I took the path of least resistance and became a chartered accountant. My advice for choosing a career is to choose the stuff that comes easy to you. I enjoy numbers and business and hardly ever consider it work.
What do you look for when recruiting?
We look for a track record of success, from school through each and every role the candidates have had, and for good problem-solving skills and verbal comprehension.
What advice do you have for young people wanting to be entrepreneurs?
One thing that is very important is that many entrepreneurs have this saying, “I wasn’t built for a job.” But if you can’t make it in a job, you won’t make it big as an entrepreneur. It’s much harder to work for a customer than a boss.
It is important to listen to customers, so much of our growth was achieved by customer suggestions. Another point is that if you see a threat, be the threat. When we saw Uber and thought about what it could do to our business, we decided to become an Uber partner. Very quickly we were their biggest partner.
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