Heavy Chef Stories
By Heavy Chef speakers and community members.
With all the cloud-based tools available, majority of small businesses in South Africa are still using spreadsheet to run their business accounts. Click to read the benefits of adapting a cloud-based tool - and, if you’re curious to learn even more, check out our finance masterclasses led by Philip van Zyl and Ian Meaker.
On June 9th Heavy Chef organized its very first event outside the city centre and had the privilege of welcoming this remarkable man to hear the story of his rise to fame and his thoughts on entrepreneurship, resilience and courage in face of adversity . The event took place in Cape Town’s largest township at the Bandwidth Barn, Lookout Hill venue in Khayelitsha.
Digital Transformation is the buzzword of our days and while everyone agrees that businesses need to invest in digital innovation it can be a daunting and complex practice. It's also a cultural change that pushes businesses to challenge the status quo and learn from trial and failure. But where do you even start, you ask. Operations and transformation superhero, Robin Hook, writes for Heavy Chef on defining digital transformation, or DX, and how we can embrace it.
Sbusiso Leope is an extraordinary South African entrepreneur. DJ Sbu, as he's more commonly known in South Africa, was the first speaker to speak on a Heavy Chef stage outside the main centres of SA. Sbu gave a fired-up performance in Khayelitsha, regaling a packed crowd of passionate entrepreneurs with stories of how he started hustling selling sweets while his friends were playing and how he made seemingly ludicrous gambles in his celebrity career.
Andre de Wet has started a host of legendary startups on the African continent. Scrappy, tenacious and incendiary smart, Andre has enviable experience in some of the most challenging regions on the planet and now, with his new business 2ndbase.co, is setting his sites on bridging the gaps between startups in developed nations and emerging regions such as Nigeria, Kenya, Philippines and India. In this succinct presentation on the Heavy Chef stage, May 2018, Andre provides a brief, hilarious and whip-smart guide for startup entrepreneurs.
You’ve been sending amazing content to your newsletter subscribers for weeks and it’s time to hit them with the sales pitch of your product or service. You craft the perfectly written newsletter with only one call to action and hit send and a few sales trickle in. You’ve hit the jackpot! Or so you thought. How about I tell you the one thing that is going to help you double those sales? It’s sitting right in your newsletter stats that you’ve without a doubt seen, but never knew what it meant.
Sam Beckbessinger is a anomaly. One of the smartest financial minds in South Africa, yet her education was anything but financially-minded. Our immersive anchor Caley van der Kolk decided to face her financial fears and go head-to-head with Sam in tackling some of the basic financial questions that plagues her and just about any other millennial on this green planet of ours.
Marlon Parker is a true African entrepreneur phenomenon. Together with his wife, he started a very special project in the underserved area of Langa, outside of Cape Town, in the Western Cape of South Africa. "RLabs is in the business of hope," according to Parker. Since its inception, the project has reached over 9m people and operates in 23 countries. In this episode of Heavy Chef Raw, anchor Caley van der Kolk finds out the secret recipe that Marlon has been wielding in creating such a remarkable and impactive South African success story.
Operations whizz and Heavy Chef contributing author, Robin Hook shares his views on how a growing business can turn challenges into opportunities. Robin has over a decade of experience working with both top flight companies and scrappy startups getting their operations in order. Click to read some of the most common high-level challenges, the opportunities they present and ways that they can be addressed.
Sam Beckbessinger used to bury her head in the sand hoping her finances would just work out by themselves. She had also hoped for someone to demystify the subject and explain plainly how to manage money. Now she wrote that book she wish she had had in her 20s: a how-to book on managing your finances entitled How to Manage Your Money Like a Fucking Grownup (Jonathan Ball, February 2018). Fred Roed caught up with Sam recently to learn more about the Sam and the book.
It is with great excitement and anticipation that the Heavy Chef team announces the launch of its first book on May 24 in Cape Town. The Heavy Chef Guide To Starting A Business In South Africa is the first in a series of guidebooks written by Heavy Chefs in the entrepreneur community. To celebrate the book launch, each audience member who attends the event at Workshop17 in V&A Waterfront will be given a signed copy of the book.
Dominique Collett, Head of AlphaCode, shares her views on the changing insurance market, in particular on insurtech, one of the hottest trends right now in South African fintech. The insurance industry is adopting a more proactive approach toward innovation and technological advancements, read on to find out how South Africa is tracking this trend.
Monde Sitole is an astonishing young South African. He is an educator, philosopher, fundraiser, entrepreneur, social activist and mountain climber. Monde has already climbed 4 out 7 of the world's highest peaks and now, in his mid-twenties, he intends to scale the other three - including Mt Everest without bottled oxygen. In this episode of Heavy Chef Raw, our intrepid anchor, Caley van der Kolk hikes the Cape Town's most sedentary peak, Constantia Nek (Everest, it ain't) - and gleans an extraordinary lesson from an extraordinary individual.
Arlene Mulder is the co-founder of We Think Code_, one of Africa’s most explosive education startups. Upending the traditional route to becoming a developer, We Think Code_ has already trained hundreds of coders in its short existence - and Arlene's team plans to train hundreds of thousands more. Find out how Arlene did it in this fascinating video of Arlene's talk on the Heavy Chef stage in May 2018, in Cape Town.
Yesterday, on Wednesday the 2nd May, we paid a visit to Tastelab HQ, headed up by Wessel Adriaan Pieterse. With a BSC degree in Food Science behind his name, followed by an MBA from UCT GSB, coupled with product design courses in Barcelona (I mean, what’s next Wes?), Secco Infusion is Wessel’s first creation that lives, very neatly beneath the Tastlab Mother Brand. Secco is already in 50 stores in 8 months. We find out how Wessel did it.
In anticipation of the May 3rd event, Heavy Chef founder Fred Roed caught up with We Think Code_ co-founder and MD Arlene Mulder to ask her about the coding education in South Africa. This is just a glimpse of what we will learn from this brilliant businesswoman about building a tech business in South Africa.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” Many of us can identify with this well-known lament from John Wanamaker, a pioneer of marketing. He said it almost 100 years ago, but it’s still painfully applicable today. Advertising has become unimaginably complex over the years. There are now so many intermediaries in the supply chain – including programmatic advertisers and ad tech companies – that fraud is increasingly difficult to keep at bay. Read how Blockchain might be able to save the day.
