1. What have you found most challenging as a leader of a small or medium enterprise?

Not having a management team to spare with

2. How did you become a leader of an SME? Can you please briefly tell the story?

Been involved with tech startups and scale ups most recently Travelstart which we scaled from 100 to close to 800 staff pre pandemic.
The environment became more corporate which I am not suited for and I needed a break.
I started consulting for my network around data and cloud solutions, which grew into a boutique consultancy called Indsigt. We help SMEs deriving value from their data
Later I co founded a insurtech company in Dubai.
Today we have a SaaS business focused on the travel space with more than 100 active agencies. Lastly we created a marketplace for small travel agencies to support the industri called localholidaydeals.co.za
Having been in businesses that heavily relied on fundraising and investment, I have focused on doing the opposite starting small and growing slow and just focus on the customer.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

Usually I will do something active in the morning or meditate. I have my staff standup at 8AM. We have never offices and we sit in different countries, as a virtual organisation I find morning check ins are important. I try to keep the rest of the morning for producing and creative work. Afternoons is usually where I will have meetings around projects and products. Depending on the days I sometimes have my last meetings around 7PM and after that I switch off.
I learnt the hard way that 80-100 hour weeks make my work worse and less productive so I will only do that in bursts.

4. What's the most recent significant leadership lesson you've learned?

Try to do less but more of what really matters, get things off my table. Outsource what you hate doing.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

Principals by Ray Dalio was very good although it is difficult to apply much of it in a small organisation, I think autonomy backed by data goes a long way.

6. How do you build leadership capacity in an SME?

This is not easy but for companies I am involved in I have partners that are shareholders. You have to keep your core people vested in the early days

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader of an SME so far?

For me personally it has meant more freedom and better quality of life.
What I enjoy most is hearing feedback from your customers on how our tools have helped them or insights have created needed opportunities for them.