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 employee experience design and leadership development. We worked with high-growth businesses across Automotive, FinTech, Banking, SaaS, and FMCG. 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 more 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. When companies move from 15 to 20 to 50 to 150+ people, something shifts.
What built the business stops being enough to run it. Leadership strain increases. Communication fractures. Culture starts to blur. A slowness 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. Rather, it is the necessary instability that emerges when a business grows faster than its leadership 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.Today, I work primarily with scaling organisations (20 - 200 employees), helping leaders evolve as fast as their businesses need to. 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 that it is a consequence of lack of intention and insight.
Work shapes our lives - we spend most of our week there. Scale shapes leadership - nothing feels more like living in a pressure cooker.
And growth does not have to cost us our humanity.