Fred Roed
About Heavy Chef

Heavy Chef is a platform for entrepreneurs and it's essentially about learning in bite-sized chunks. The way the platform has been organized is that we have recipes and those recipes are shared by Heavy Chefs.

The idea for Heavy Chef actually originated from my previous business, which was a digital marketing agency. Back in 2003, it was started by my business partner Mike Perk and myself.

We start with a core belief, and our belief is that entrepreneurs can change the world for the better. And they can affect that change faster and more efficiently than any other category of human on the planet. That's our belief.

Bite-size learning gives us the opportunity to be able to thread it organically into the patterns of our lives and to respond to the ongoing challenges that we face in starting, scaling and establishing our businesses.

A Heavy Chef is somebody who eats his or her own feed. It's basically somebody who gets stuck in. They roll up their sleeves and eat their own food. Somebody who learns by doing, who does the 10,000 hours, who speaks with authority around the topics that they specialise in purely because of experience.

In essence, it's just a whole lot of fun. It's really tough at times but the obsession and the passion that our small team actually has for the task at hand ensures that, through all the challenges that we face, that level of fun just keeps us going through. And the level of meaning really does keep us inspired and empowered ourselves. Which, again, speaks to that meta concept that is inherent in Heavy Chef.

The way we've structured it is, I suppose, a very logical way that you could almost see as a matrix. You could see it as three levels - the first level would be as, we call it, a lightweight, the second would be a middleweight and the third level would be a heavyweight. Bisecting those three levels, we would have three categories or three pillars, and these three pillars are essentially the currency of the future of entrepreneurship. That's technology, leadership and creativity.

An entrepreneur is somebody who has the ability to take an idea and grow that idea into something that is tangible, that impacts the world and that makes money. Something that starts to live a life of its own and that exists separately to the entrepreneur. The beauty of the entrepreneurial process, and this speaks to why I think entrepreneurs are the most creative people on the planet, is that there's an infinite amount of ideas that you have the ability to come up with. 

The primary role of the Heavy Chef Foundation is to research entrepreneurs and the way that they learn. So an example of that is, in 2018 the Heavy Chef Foundation initiated what has become the largest ever survey of entrepreneurial learning within the South African context ever conducted.

Step one was to build a brand and a community. Step two was to offer as much value to that community as possible. And step three is to then convert that value into a membership program. So, in other words, to create a form of sustainability for Heavy Chef.