There’s something wonderfully humbling about preparing for your 22nd cycle race and almost not making it to the starting line because you forgot to register. Yep. That was me this week. Twenty-two Cape Town Cycle Tours. You’d think by now I’d have a checklist tattooed on my forearm. Training rides? Done. Early mornings? Done. Legs burning on Suikerbossie? Done. But somewhere between client workshops on EOS and ChatGPT, transcript deep-dives, and hiring frameworks, I forgot

“Oh oh oh oh, oh my Lord, Never made no one like you before… You had to make your own sunshine. But now the sky is opalite, Oh oh oh oh oh…”    There’s a seductive phrase that does the rounds in entrepreneurial circles: do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. It sounds wonderful on a coffee mug, but I don’t really buy it. Of course, you’ll work. You’ll wrestle with strategy. You’ll second-guess pricing. You’ll wake up at odd hours replaying a conversation

I’m road tripping in Durban and Joburg, and in between dinners with old friends, golf with family, cold plunge therapy and walks on the Umhlanga prom, I am training 60+ business leaders in three locations on Scaling Up, EOS, AI, Recruitment and Psychometric velocity in business. It’s a heady mix, and I love it. I'm also building on the shoulders of giants, which made me think… There’s a story we love to tell about innovation. It usually begins in a garage. A lone genius. A li

This week’s newsletter is about the people you surround yourself with... and the conversations you choose to stay in .   I’ve been cycling for a long time. Long enough to know when I’m properly prepared, and when I’m bluffing a little. Going into this weekend’s 99er cycle race (my annual warm-up for the Cape Town Cycle Tour in March), I felt undercooked. Heavier than usual. January training goal technically ticked, but nutrition less so. A fair bit of travel. Business. Pleas

This week, I found myself standing on a stage in Sandton, delivering a keynote for one of South Africa’s best-known companies. Sandton On paper, that shouldn’t feel strange anymore. I’ve spent most of this year working with large, listed businesses. I’ve built and led multiple mid-sized companies myself. I’ve been in enough boardrooms to know how this game works. And yet… walking onto that stage, there was a quiet, familiar voice asking: Do you really belong here? I work most

Last week, I wrote about family. About being intentional about where and with whom you spend your time, about the tribes you belong to, about the importance of connection and community. About making 2026 matter in all the right ways.  And, even before my newsletter went out into the world, I got punched in the gut.  I take a lot of meetings at Workshop 17. The co-working space, with locations in Johannesburg, Kloof Street and Newlands, is a place where I have gotten used to

This week, I was reminded that leadership doesn’t start with strategy. It starts with family. I flew to  Guadalajara  for a short, purposeful trip, doing service work with the  Entrepreneurs' Organization . What stayed with me wasn’t the sessions or the agenda. It was the people. Complete strangers, fellow EO members and locals, who invited me into their homes, took me golfing at night, walked me through markets, bought me breakfast, shared stories, and laughed easily. No tra

As a small business owner, I spent years stuck in an uncomfortable tension. I wanted salespeople who were hungry, and I also needed them to be helpful. Core Value: “It’s about how well I do not my job.” (Thanks Rich Mulholland). Competitive, not territorial. Driven, not destructive. And it’s tricky. So I did what most founders do: I tried to  engineer  the perfect incentive scheme, running the numbers and forcing it down people’s throats. Didn’t work, hey. Every model looked

Last weekend, I sat down with the boys to watch the Springboks finish their unbeaten tour against Wales. It should’ve carried that electric, knife-edge energy you expect from a test match. Instead, it played out like a dominant training run. The boys quickly decided to skip it and go build an unsanctioned house for what they believed to be a homeless man outside the pub (he was really just a patron with a nicotine habit), and I watched it – kind of. It was, to be honest, not

Taking my boys to a little golf mashie tournament up the road sounded harmless enough. Over the last few years, we’ve spent many afternoons meandering around a twilight back nine when the other adult players were out of sight. The kids run amok, I write it off to childlike enthusiasm. And for sure, nobody is keeping score, nobody is in a hurry, nobody melts down. Then, without warning, the moment we turned “fun walkabout” into “actual competition with rules and required finis

There’s a specific emotional whiplash that comes with watching your child step into a new chapter. AJ is off to Jan van Riebeeck Primary School next year. “Big” school, broader horizons, and all that wide-eyed excitement only a six-year-old can summon before he even knows what awaits him. It’s pure joy, framed by parental anxiety if we can keep up with the pace (which is hectic, I’m told). But joy tends to drag its shadow behind it. His new beginning means our ending at Huppe

When I think about the best decisions I’ve made in life, almost all of them were borrowed. My earliest mentors were my father and his business competitor and friend, Jannie Gildenhuys. They didn’t teach through lectures, they modelled through motion. I watched them shake hands on trust, lose money without losing integrity, and keep showing up. That was my first MBA - free, practical, and brutally honest. I could never fully be my extroverted father, who built his success on r

This past Saturday, I was mountain biking with the boys in Bloemendal. After the ride, we were sitting down for a drinks break when a stranger walked up and offered AJ an ice cream their family had bought by mistake. Kindness out of nowhere. Then Matie arrived from the track, saw the ice cream, and launched into a mini-meltdown. The same family, bless them, went and  bought him one . I protested… they insisted. It struck me how often this happens. A stranger buys my kids ice

When I started  PG Tops Travel & Tours , I was just another hopeful entrepreneur with a laptop, a minivan, and a mountain of enthusiasm. What I didn’t have was trust. In travel, as in life, trust is the ultimate currency, and it’s not granted easily. It took years of small wins, awkward partnerships, and slow-building credibility before the industry started to see us not as the new kid with a glossy brochure, but as a reliable partner. Once that happened, once the alliances w

I’ve been playing golf since I was 14 years old. That’s 37 years of walking fairways, losing balls, and chasing that one pure strike that makes the whole maddening sport worth it. Over the years, I’ve had flashes of brilliance: a single-digit handicap in school, a few under-par rounds, and one glorious hole-in-one at the Seekers Pro-Am. But mostly? It’s a messy business. Inconsistent, infuriating, and as honest a mirror as life will ever hand you. Fluffed chips, hooked irons,

Last weekend, I went to Oktoberfest with Caroline. Only, it was a local beerfest version. And although there was beer and pork product, it felt off. Caroline and I concurred - it was the bands. They were just not… cheesy enough? On the way to the beach afterwards with the kids, we decided to save our musical day, and I tracked down an Après Ski playlist on Spotify. I was taken aback when half the songs on it were from a kids’ movie I had just watched with the boys the night b

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