The English teacher had announced earlier at assembly that I was the speaker of the day. I think that was the turning point for me, in how communication works or how I could use language to communicate, to maybe start a business later on in life. But at that point, it was as a result of my ability to communicate that I was recognized for something positive, for something that placed me as a leader.

The first thing that inspired me to become an entrepreneur was, once again, my mother. And where it starts is, at that time when you were 15 or 16 in high school, kids started working in retail stores, be it the music shop, or the clothing store.

Word-of-mouth marketing is described in many ways, but it is basically the ability for a brand, product or offering to enable people to talk about it almost organically. Organically, it is built into the product or the offering so that there's a certain talkability around this product that makes it something worth telling somebody else about.

When GoPro came onto the market, if you saw somebody running down a mountain, riding a mountain bike, doing any kind of activity with a camera or video, you associated that with GoPro. So GoPro managed to generate and create word-of-mouth marketing around the brand so that they actually owned a category.

In the South African context, there's Nando's. I'm going into advertising now, which are the ads that you see on TV or wherever else. But if you removed the brand name, removed the fonts and removed the logo and you saw an ad that was that particular style, you would associate it with Nando's.

There's a place in Cape Town that I had never been to but found out about when I was doing a story where I was asking people about the best burgers in South Africa and the best burger joints that they've been to. And this one fast food joint in Cape Town came up, and I'm looking forward to visiting it, and it's called the Dog's Bollocks.

There are many basics and fundamentals of a good word-of-mouth marketing strategy or, at least, the thinking around word-of-mouth. Without complicating it too much, the one is talkability.

Let me just go back a couple of steps or go back to something that is probably basic and well-known to all of us. I mentioned Nando's earlier. Nando's came out, or at least Nando's comes out, with a different kind of message. One, it's about the courage to do it. The other, it's also about understanding their uniqueness and their brand.

Don't be the brand that's in the middle, because if you're in the middle, then there's nothing worth talking about you.

One of the challenges that I've also had, especially doing something on social media and amplifying the work and creating the opportunities to amplify the work, communicate and engage with people, is not being ready. You must always be ready.