My first job sucked...
True Story!
I was 18, and I remember thinking: this can’t be it. This cannot be what working life is supposed to feel like. Around the dinner table at home, work was something people tolerated or survived, and that never sat right with me. That early conviction shaped everything that followed.
It’s why my first book is called We Are Still Human (and work shouldn’t suck!).
And it’s why, for more than a decade, my work has focused on the human side of business: leadership, culture, systems, processes, and what it really takes to build organisations that grow without eroding the people inside them.
I built and ran my first company for nearly ten years — a boutique advisory focused on organizational effectiveness, and leadership development. We worked with high-growth businesses across Automotive, FinTech, Banking, SaaS, and FMCG. I exited in 2021. I’ve been a founder, a business owner, an employee, an executive, and a consultant. I’ve raised teams, built offerings, carried payroll anxiety, sat in boardrooms, and worked inside VC-backed and founder-led organisations, navigating the pressure of rapid growth.
The longer I worked with scaling businesses, I began to notice that irrespective of the different industries, different leadership styles and different geographies, the same patterns persist. As organizational surface area and complexity increase, effectiveness, employee experience, and structure begin to strain and crack.
The organizational operating system, structure, and ways of working - basically the things that built the start-up are no longer capable of sustaining or supporting the business you are now, or the business you're becoming. Leadership strain increases. Processes and systems create drag instead of efficiancy. Communication fractures. Culture starts to blur. A slow, muddiness creeps into the system, interfering with speed and responsiveness. Founders and leaders feel the weight multiply.
This is what I call The Chaos of Scale. And although it might feel like it, this is not dysfunction or failure. It is the necessary instability that emerges when a business grows faster than its systems can evolve. Enormous possibility exists inside that chaos. As does enormous risk.
I started The Chaos of Scale to help founders and scaling organisations navigate this phase consciously, building leadership maturity, human infrastructure, and cultural clarity before the chaos begins breaking the business. My work combines founder-level insight, behavioural science training, coaching, and over a decade in high-stakes growth environments.
I am a TEDx speaker, international keynote speaker, radio and TV contributor, and was voted one of South Africa’s Top 50 Business Women to Watch. I do what I do because I fundamentally believe that work shouldn't suck and that 99.7% of leaders do not intentionally create bad culture or poor employee experience; rather, it is a consequence of lack of intention and insight.
Work shapes our lives - we spend most of our week there. And the Chaos of Scale bends our systems out of place, while under increasing pressure to perform - nothing feels more like living in a pressure cooker.
Let's navigate this together.