Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Up Close & Personal!  It’s fair to say that we have a bit of glamour with us today, but behind the beauty is a steely lady with a passion for business.  It’s not all male and stale here at Renegades you’ll be pleased to know.  So, from my point of view this lady is an inspiration. Hailing originally from South Africa. . . It must be something about the climate there that breeds these entrepreneur types, because this is the second straight talking South African person that I’ve interviewed for this magazine. This lady was introduced to me about 6 months ago and I’m proud to say that she’s a member of my Mastermind Group, and a valid member of the Oak Group to say the least. She has an awesome back story that I hope she’ll touch on today, which saw her starting a business after being very successful in real estate; and quite honestly has been pretty successful at everything she’s ever put her mind to. She built her business herself with a lot of help from her fantastic husband, Alex. And not only catered for and supplied most of the BMW dealerships in South Africa, but then tendered for and won the catering contract for the South African defence force, which saw her feeding over 27,000 troops a day. At its hay day she built her business to 360 staff and over a 100 million rand per year. After the collapse of the rand and with the government in disarray, this saw her come to the shores of England, which is our gain obviously. She now runs CICS, a specialist industrial and commercial cleaning solutions business, which proudly claims to save 1 million people a month from infections like MRSA. She has specialist cleaned more than 10 thousand police cells and says she has even cleaned things from Gordon Ramsey’s kitchen to the crane that built the Olympic Stadium.  And so, I’m very honoured to introduce the Duchess of Dust, the Queen of Clean. . . Shayne Warden! Shayne, how are you today?

Shayne Warden:  I’m very well thank you.  How are you Steve?

Steve Matthews:  You’ve got to live up to the intro now.

SW:  I certainly do, don’t I.

SM:  Everybody says, “oh no, I’ve got to live up to that now”. Obviously, there’s so much in there that we could talk about, but I said something about this back story of yours.  We need to fill in gaps, I think.  Where are you from originally? How did you get this fantastic work ethic, that I know you’ve got, and is it true that you worked in a clothes shop when you were 7 years old?

SW:  I did indeed. I was only 7.  I worked for my parents. The building actually belonged to my Grandfather and parents rented a shop off him selling men’s, ladies and children’s wear. My mother would drop me off at school in the morning, I’d go to school, she’d pick me up, have my food cooking on a gas stove in the back, I’d do my homework and then be out the front selling.

SM:  Never. You told me a great story before about you taking your own takings.

SW:  Yes, I did. Unbeknown to my Mum, I took a draw which I turned into a till and I landed up taking more than my Mother did for the day.  She was angry and flabbergasted at the same time.  Telling me, “Don’t you ever do that again”.

SM:  So, obviously you had that entrepreneurial spirit from a very young age. Is it fair to say that?

SW:  I’d say so, yes. . . Growing up with entrepreneurs around me.

SM:  I don’t know what the education system is like in South Africa, but did you go to college or did you get into work as soon as you left school?

SW:  Steve, do you really want to know the truth?

SM:  Yes, go on.

SW:  I left school in Standard 6, nobody knows that, not even my children. My husband does but not my children.

SM:  So, Standard 6, how old was that?

SW:  Before you go to senior school here in the UK.

SM:  Never!

SW:  Yes, so I never finished my schooling, I obviously went into the business, I ran shops of my own.  I then left and I landed up doing my Matric, which is your final year via correspondence through Damelin College.

SM:  So, you’d have left school at about 12 years old?

SW:  I was 12 or 13, yes.  So, I got my Matric and then went on to get my MBA.

SM:  I think there’s such an emphasis, especially in this country now, these kids are put under so much pressure.  My son has just finished his GCSE’s and it was very difficult for me as a parent. I know exams are important and education is important, of course it is, but it all depends what you want to do. If you want to be a lawyer or a doctor, then it’s massively important.  But if you want to be a plumber or an electrician, it’s important that you get hands on and earn your stripes as early as you can. I always love to see when people buck the trend of saying that you’ve got to have all this education and qualifications, but you did it after school, which is amazing. So, you did working in the shops. Where did you go from there then? Obviously, I guess you then wanted to branch out on your own, did you?

SW:  I did.  I left home at a pretty young age.  I lived a very sheltered life, I must admit. I landed up meeting a man who I married and had 2 children with. The marriage was a disaster to be quite honest. I actually went to secretarial college and I learnt to become a secretary. This was prior to my MBA, and so I got my ground in this.  I got a lot of temp jobs for Kelly Personnel and Drake, and I worked with lots of inspirational people. I then got myself a full-time job with a company called Lazarus and Associates and I was Kenny Verhague’s PA.  Kenny obviously saw that I had something unique, and I used to handle a lot of the divorce matters and senior matters for him. I used to actually take the clients off to counsel on my own. He was going to be putting me through an actual law degree, and the husband that I had at the time thought I was having an affair. This was because he had a 450 Merc, he used to drive me home and bring me back.  But there was nothing of that there at all, absolutely nothing.  Anyway, that job came to an end, then I carried on working, I worked for Long Thomas & Anglo and quite a few other jobs. I always chased the money where I could earn extra. I then moved to a completely different area and I managed to get the man I was married to a better job. I went with my Mum into the centre of Johannesburg one day, she didn’t say a word to me, but took me up to the top floor of a building and paid a fee over. She then said, “just sign this piece of paper”, so, I just signed it as I was told. When we came out of the building, she said to me, “right, you’re an estate agent now, how do you feel?” I thought, “God Mum, no different to what I was 2 minutes ago”. She said, “Right “now go and get yourself a job in real estate”.  My Mother was doing exceptionally well in real estate, she really was. So, I got myself a job and I did very well in real estate.  Obviously, I’d met Alex. He was my ex-husbands boss. He was after me for about a whole year and eventually we got together. Alex had a caravan and I’d take this caravan and park it in a prominent position. . . Remember there was no internet in those days or anything like that. I am probably BC… Before computers.

SM: BC, I like that.

SW:  I negotiated a deal with the owner of the garage and parked the caravan there every single weekend. What I did was, I took pictures of every single house that there was in the area and I put them onto large display boards.  Inside the caravan I’d have tea, coffee, champagne, beer and wine. And while Alex was entertaining them, I was driving them around showing them houses and taking the offers in. What can I say, I was actually the queen of real estate. I really was.

SM:  Funnily enough, we’ve done a Strengths Scope exercise earlier this week which identifies your strengths, and one of yours was creativity, wasn’t it (I’ll tell everybody later on who ‘we’ are).  But I bet nobody else was doing that were they?

SW:  No, nobody else was doing it.

SM:  Sometimes we do things without thinking about it don’t we, but when you think about that, it was a kind of disruptive advertising wasn’t it. So, you were putting those houses in front of people when they weren’t even looking. You were proactive, as opposed to most estate agents who just sit behind a desk, but you were actually putting it right out there.

SW:  Yes, I was.  I never thought of it as disruptive marketing, but you’re probably quite correct.

SM:  You’ve got so many names for it now, you’ve got disruptive, direct response, but literally you were just creative in a way that you were trying to do that.

SW:  I did very well at it I must admit, but I then lost my edge because my Mother could see what was happening.  So, she said for me to go along and work for her in her business, but when you’re getting 50% of nothing as opposed to 50% of a decent commission it makes a big difference. So, of course the income wasn’t quite there. Also, I changed from the area I was in, to a more affluent area and obviously I wasn’t known in that area. I landed up having to get myself a job thereafter and I got myself a job working with DHL.

SM:  The courier yea?

SW:  Yep, and so I got a job as a senior sales consultant who only looked after the blue chip clients.  Then I was poached by TNT Sky Pack, I worked for them for quite a long while.  I did my Sales Marketing Diploma with them and I won a trip to the UK.  What I’d actually done was, I’d sold pre-paid flyers, which is basically just an envelope. So, I sold a client pre-paid flyers at a reduced rate for 2 years and obviously I exceeded quite a few of my targets there. I had a very, very lucrative area and did exceptionally well with them. They had quite a lot of management change, people coming in from Bahrain etc, so I then decided that I should go home and look after the children. So, I went home and looked after the kids and that lasted all of 2 weeks of my life. And then Alex said that they were looking for someone to do catering at the Working Man’s Club at ESKOM, Rosherville, so I took that on. From there I started doing cricket functions, soccer functions, masonic functions. . . .

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