My professional career has been a very colorful and exciting one, especially given my low starting base as a shy village boy from a poor household. Sheer determination and a can-do spirit enabled me to rise to the upper echelons of business management and to report directly to CEOs. At some point in my career, I left the world of big corporates to become the CEO of my own business. I have also had the privilege of serving in the boards of directors and in the business world, it doesn’t get better than that. My journey has not been straightforward though.
Whilst the desire to document and share my life story has always lingered in the background, the inspiration to start writing came from the challenges that I came across, when I finally made the bold transition from being a full-time employee to running my own consulting business, Mabedlana Group Consulting, proudly named after my village.
That move was not the first though. Prior to that, I had left my job as the head of audit, risk and compliance at a financial services company to join a friend’s start-up consulting business, in the capacity of Associate Director, with the hope that I would ultimately become a director and a shareholder. However, not very long after that, my role proved difficult, with the biggest challenge being that we needed to find clients, and very fast, in order for the business to generate the much-needed income and become sustainable.
For the first time in my working life, I was also directly responsible for finding clients and it was such a stressful exercise. When the going got even tougher, I volunteered to take a pay cut, and the only option I saw as feasible going forward was to bounce back to the corporate world. Therefore, I joined a big African telecommunications company, as the Senior Manager responsible for the risk management.
However, the desire to be my own boss was too strong, as it was something I always intended to do from my university days. Thus, instead of settling down at the telecommunications company, I once again found myself itching to launch my own business, which I finally did after working for the telecommunications company for under twenty-four months.
When I left full-time employment, I basically went from a senior management position with what many would consider to be exciting company benefits (guaranteed salary, pension, performance bonuses, free telephone calls etc.) to being the CEO of a new and unknown business entity, Mabedlana Group Consulting. In my new job I had no guaranteed salary or benefits. Instead, I had faith, hope, and a can-do spirit!
I was confident that my business would become a success and ultimately provide me and my family with a comfortable lifestyle. When I ultimately started my own business, my wife had somehow experienced what it entailed, based on my days at the friend’s start-up consulting business, but I assured her that things would be different because, unlike at the friend’s company, I would be completely in charge of my business.
I told her ‘just wait and see, things will work out and we will live a very good life. Unfortunately, the opposite happened! Months passed and the chances of securing consulting work, even from my former employer, slowly faded away. With no money coming into the bank account, the savings started running dry.
Things became even worse when I had a freak car accident, resulting in my Mercedes Benz C240 being written off. Because I no longer had a salary at that time, the replacement car that I could afford to buy was a navy blue 1993 Nissan Maxima, which I bought for about R35 000, after an extensive search. Just before my car accident, I had started to wonder if time had not come, after all, to eat my humble pie and ask for my normal job back.
As a result of the car accident, the anxiety of not having a stable source of income got the better of me. Long story short, I arranged a meeting with the head of HR and my former line manager, to ask for my old job back but it was too late. They later gave the job to an internal candidate, my former subordinate. I just didn’t know how to tell my wife the news but when she found out, all I could say was “Eish, I didn’t know how to tell you, but don’t you worry, God will make a way. Something is going to come up”. I had to say something positive. My sanity depended on it!
Even though my business plan had floundered badly, and the most natural reaction would have been panic, anxiety and despair, I was, however, able to soldier on because of a strong conviction that I would indeed bounce back. I was not certain how long it would take me to rise again from the ashes like a phoenix, but I did not anticipate that it would take me close to ten years. Well, the journey to financial recovery was not very easy. It had more ups and downs.
I had gone back to the corporate world to start all over again, but just as I was beginning to adjust to corporate life - slowly recovering from the financial ruin, buyingbetter-lookingg cars again, and even buying a bigger house. Interestingly, throughout the trials and tribulations that we went through, I did not regret the decision of starting my own business, because I had taken it by faith and my intention was to make our lives better.
Naturally, there would be days where I would feel down but I would always make sure not to drag my family into to those dark moments. I had the confidence that no matter what, we would surely rise again. There was no other option. When I bounced back to corporate, I joined a property division of a large logistics parastatal as a consultant, but that was after the revival of my love for writing and publishing, and that was the birth of Mabedlana Group Publishing and 2023 Books and publishing of my first book titled “Don’t Be Afraid To Fail.”
But where does Bheki Zungu come from?
I grew up in Mabedlana village, in Zululand, which is located in Ulundi, a town close to the historic sites where the Zulu nation grew from a tiny tribe to a very powerful nation which ultimately humiliated the mighty British army at the battle of Isandlwana in 1879. That fascinated me as a young boy. I did not have any role models for the career I chose to pursue and despite my very poor background, I worked hard at school, always striving for the Top 10 positions in class from primary school to high school.
It was that attitude that helped me to believe that I could achieve anything that I set my eyes on. That is why I was able to force my way to university even when I had not secured any funding, and my father had passed away in the middle of my grade 12 studies. I dreamt big and convinced myself that I too, was also entitled to go to university, and achieve great success in the business world. That was despite the fact that my family did not have the means to fund me and during my grade 12 year, I had sent out as many bursary applications as possible and received just as many regret letters.
I have a very interesting family organogram which always fascinated me. My father was born in 1906, and my mother was born in 1937, and that is a 31 year age gap between them, making it a serious chicken-murder scenario! My father was, therefore, already 67 years old when I was born – another fascinating for a curious boy that I was, because I had cousins who were born before the 1940s, and my maternal grandfather was my father’s age.
Because I spent my formative years with my maternal grandmother, I was inspired by my maternal grandfather’s smallholding, called Mpoqabulungu. Loosely translated, it meant ‘the one who forces to be a white man,’ because he modeled his smallholding on the ideas he got from the white farmers where he had worked as a young man. The smallholding had all sorts of fruit trees i.e. orange, naartjie, lemon, pawpaw, guava, prickly-pear, mango, peach, pineapple etc. which were beautifully set up in a row formation. The two main things I learnt from my grandfather, were patience and the importance of hard work which are the traits I possess.
I am very passionate about career guidance, workplace readiness and small business development initiatives, and have made presentations in various locations and have also engaged with young people through regional and community radio stations. During my training at a firm of auditors, Deloitte, I was actively involved in Project Siyakhula Accounting, in which me and my colleagues provided high school learners from Atteridgeville township with extra Accounting lessons.
This love for empowering others started at a very tender age when I taught Sunday School at the church, where my father was a preacher – and interestingly, my wife was one of the learners there but that is not to say that is where I earmarked her…No! It is this passion for social entrepreneurship that led to me establishing Mabedlana Group Foundation and Mabedlana Group Awards, through which I advance my community development initiatives.
Bookpreneurship
I have authored the following books: Don’t Be Afraid To Fail (title later changed to You Too Can Rise Again); The Rejected Proposals – what entrepreneurs go through; Why Are You Getting Married; Corporate Humour; and From Small Beginnings to Big Brands. When the traditional book distributors rejected me, I decided to go directly to my customers by implementing a book distribution model which has proved very successful. It involves fulfilling the book orders using courier companies like DSV, The Courier Guy, Postnet, Paxi, Aramex, and other books have been distributed using other non-traditional channels like supermarkets and convenient shops.
My latest book, From Small Beginnings to Big Brands was published at the end of May 2022 and even though it is not yet available through. The book features the stories of how some of the well-known companies in South Africa were founded and grew from humble beginnings into big brands i.e. Pick ‘n Pay, Chicken Licken, Ocean Basket, Capitec Bank, Spur, Maponya Group, SPAR, Sizwe Ntsaluba Gobodo (now SNG GrantThornton) etc. Apart from these stories, the book contains touches on Bheki’s own entrepreneurial journey and also contains chapters on customer centricity, business planning as tool for success, effective business systems and the role played by risk management processes.
Over the years, I have been featured on various publications (Drum magazine, The Star new newspaper, New Age newspaper, Roodepoort Northsider newspaper) and has also been interviewed on a few radio stations (Ukhozi FM, Radio Khwezi, East Coast Radio, Vuma FM, Massiv Metro FM, Ikwekwezi FM) as well as 1KZN TV. Of all the media coverage that I have received to date, the article by the Daily Sun newspaper, in November 2014, titled ‘The Success of Failure,’ stands out, but I like the sub-title even more, which is: ‘Bheki is the man who tries and fails but he is not afraid to try.’ When I saw it for the first time though, it shocked me. That was because I had suggested to the journalist that the title of the book (Don’t Be Afraid To Try) would be good enough as the headline, and that is what I had expected to see. In retrospect, however, I realised that the headline she used was in fact spot on, as it captured the essence of my story.
Book orders can be submitted through the following means: Email (2030books@gmail.com), LinkedIn DM and WhatsApp (+27 83 626 5134). Some of the books are available on Amazon.com
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