Crossing The Line | From selling mice to conquering the continent

Business development expert Barbara van Heerden became an entrepreneur when she was only six or seven years old. However, she only began studying in her forties after raising seven children. She completed her MBA in her mid-forties and began her PhD when she was sixty.

Van Heerden is the featured guest this week on the Crossing the Line podcast started by media veteran and former Cape Times editor, Ryland Fisher, last year. As part of our partnership, IOL features one of the guests every week.

In her PhD, Van Heerden wrote about a sustainable business model for Africa, based on an eight-point programme, to implementing sustainable business, public private partnerships and sustainable business performance.

“When you talk about sustainability, to most people it becomes people, planet and prosperity. In a business, they would call these three pillars triple bottom line, and you can have performance outcomes that you can measure,” she said. 

“What makes Africa so different is that we have economic performance, which is generic. It will be about retained earnings and market share. But on the people side, in Africa we have quality management business performance, and that has a particular focus on compliance with safety and health in the workplace, your basic conditions of employment, your organised labour, your working conditions, and how your quality management of your products or your services are key to being sustainable.”

Van Heerden said her family had always been entrepreneurial. One of her forefathers had started salt mines in what used to be known as Natal, becoming known as the “old mine of the salt mines”.

She started her first entrepreneurial venture when she was about six or seven. “A friend of mine had baby mice and I sold these. I learned my first lesson about business risk at the time. I had put the mice in a box, but it was still within reach of my dachshund, who killed all the mice.”

After getting married to a farmer at 18, she started a business selling live chickens. She learned very quickly that live chickens only remained profitable up to a certain point, and so she began a processing plant to sell frozen chickens.

Van Heerden was also involved in starting industrial hubs in what was known as the homelands during apartheid. “I worked with women in Natal, whose husbands had left to work in Gauteng and left them behind. The ground in the homelands was not very good for crops or livestock. The industrial hubs helped to develop business in those areas.”

Van Heerden said she had built a few businesses, including some factories, before beginning to consult with businesses throughout the continent.

She only began to study formally once all her children had left the house. “I completed my MBA in my mid-forties and only started my PhD when I was sixty. One of the benefits of doing my PhD through an international organisation was that my fellow students came from all over the continent. We used to meet in Joburg to do our modules. Most of  my fellow students became ministers or occupied other important posts in their countries in later years. We had worked and studied together, so our links were very good. This turned out to be a great network that I had built up and that would benefit me later as I did a lot of work on the continent.”

Van Heerden worked briefly at the Cape Times during the 1980s, mainly writing marketing and promotional material.