Lessons for SA's 650,000 entrepreneurial businesses from BrightRock

Suzane Stevens, executive director of marketing at BrightRock.

According to Forbes Magazine this is the ‘Golden Age’ for female entrepreneurs, described by the Kauffman index 2016 as more adept than their male counterparts at seeing gaps in the market and seizing the opportunity. Enter Stevens, who has had a rich, fulfilling career based on her entrepreneur-mindedness.

Take the obvious thrill of being part of the early high-performance, hard-working, driven, innovative team that started Discovery, when she joined the company as a copywriter in early-1996 and staying put for 15 years – by the time she left in 2011, she was the general manager of marketing, responsible for a division of 70 people with annual marketing spend of about R250m.

Suzanne Stevens, image supplied.

She’s now relishing the current challenge of creating and building an absolutely unique brand in the competitive life insurance industry, but still fondly remembers being appointed as Father Christmas for three weeks over the December holidays for a Sea Point shopping centre during her post-graduate student years. She can laugh now about being retrenched or ‘pretrenched’ from her first full-time job, a week before she started – the high school where she had been appointed as a teacher had, had her post withdrawn by the education authorities, so, retracted their job offer.

But it’s her first real full-time job on exiting varsity, as part of the team that opened and launched the first Imax cinema in South Africa at the V&A Waterfront that truly laid the foundation for her success. She managed the front-of-house staff of about 20 people, which included ushers, receptionists and ticket salespeople, and supported all the marketing and PR efforts.

Lifelong leadership lessons

As Stevens had never lead a team before she learned some very hard leadership lessons, and admits to making some awful mistakes, but also how to galvanise a committed, top-notch team, as well as what she calls ‘incredibly valuable marketing skills’ from a Canadian couple that had come to SA to help with the opening of the facility. In addition to international thinking and experience, Stevens says they brought an absolute passion for the power of making a positive impact and driving a stakeholder-centric approach, to a startup space.

She lists the following as a top lesson from the experience:

If you want to be really good at what you do, you need to work harder than anyone else, and be prepared to do any job that is needed when it is needed. Nothing should be ‘below”’ you – and nothing should be ‘above’ you. Dive in and give it your best shot, no matter what it is.

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