Growing Greatness

A Journey Towards Personal and Business Mastery

Pepe Marais

• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780994722645
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Biografías de negocios

Pepe Marais began his entrepreneurial journey as a newspaper delivery boy at the age of twelve. After finishing high school in 1986, he spent two years in the army completing what was then compulsory national service. On his way home at the end of his service, while waiting for a Vlossie at an airforce base in Rundu, he had a chance encounter with a graphic artist, an event which would change the course of his life.

Pepe's latent talent for art was developed and honed at an art school in Cape Town, where he finished top of his class each year, which in turn would lead him to discover his passion for advertising. After six years in the industry he and his business partner Gareth Leck launched their enterprising Take-Away Advertising Agency and success seemed a foregone conclusion.

However, in 2006, Pepe's business career and personal life began to disintegrate. At the lowest point of his life, he would discover a fundamental insight that became the foundation on which he would rebuild everything. It would also inspire the development of his Purpose for Business methodology and his deep interest in unlocking both human and business potential.

While Growing Greatness contains many lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs, perhaps what is more important is the deep wisdom it offers. Through his growing awareness of what purpose means in both business and personal terms, Pepe points the way to growing your own greatness.

Exchanging my R4 rifle for a 4B pencil

It was the start of 1989, and I was walking hand in hand with Heidi down the main road of Woodstock in Cape Town. I had a new-found confidence growing within me and it showed in my step. Could it be my newly discovered musical talent, a gift that somehow played a role in winning back the heart of the love of my life?

I had left my chapter in the military behind me, although the evidence of it was still clearly to be seen in the brush-cut hairstyle reflected in the shop window in front of me. Call it a sixth sense. Call it a gut feel for marketing a brand. But somehow I knew without a doubt that ‘Brand Pepe Marais’ was in need of a serious upgrade and that the solution to this little problem was staring me right in the face in the form of the pair of handcrafted shoes on display in that very same shop window, the style that’s worn by pixies in fairy tales with bell-tipped turned-up toes.

I purchased those pixie boots on the spot, and countless others thereafter as they would become my personal trademark in the South African advertising industry in the years to come.

On arriving home after my two years of military duty I had a brand-new obsession. I was going to become a graphic designer. I had less than a month to find an institute that would accept my application, and with the help and can-do attitude of my mother, we embarked on a frantic investigation of all options available to me. Because of my poor high school grades, most of these options led us to dead ends.

However, a few fringe options remained available to me, one of which was a small art school in Woodstock, on the outskirts of Cape Town, headed up by the famous South African artist Erik Laubscher. We enquired about the possibility of enrolling and it turned out that all I needed to do was to submit a portfolio of drawings to assess whether or not I had any talent for art.

At that stage of my life I had never actively drawn, apart from my ‘Egg Head’, which was not something I could actually submit. Thus for the following few weeks both Heidi and I spent all our time compiling our portfolios, spending hours scribbling away on pieces of paper. At the same time I was also frantically going from bank to bank trying to secure a study loan. I can’t remember who finally came to the party, but I somehow managed to find a bank that backed my dream and for five years after completing my diploma, most of my salary went towards paying off that loan. If only I hadn’t spent every cent of my army savings on my first car, paddle ski and guitar! However, as it turned out, that one little study loan would end up paying me back for the rest of my life.

Although both our portfolios were extremely basic, we were accepted into the Ruth Prowse School of Art and at the beginning of 1989 we started this new chapter in our lives together.

Walking out of the narrow-minded, far right structure of the old apartheid regime’s national conscription programme into the liberal context of an art school, led by an artist who had had black friends since the 1970s, was nothing short of headbutting a landmine. I had a brush-cut hairstyle and a world view that was defined by the limited and narrow thinking of the context in which I was raised, compounded by two years of brainwashing by a right-wing military organisation. It’s almost impossible to comprehend that the first time I ever heard of Nelson Mandela was when I joined the Ruth Prowse School of Art. Every conversation during break times on the lawns was about the release of Nelson Mandela and the coming of a new South Africa. Although I had just stepped out of a system that had induced in me a belief that black people were the enemy, the prospect of being part of something new and different appealed to me at the deepest level. I have to smile when I think back to one of my first actions. I promptly started drinking Carling Black Label as my choice of beer, as I naively assumed that it had to be the black man’s beer because of its name.

I also desperately wanted to look the part of a liberal, and so I started to grow my hair and to wear bell-tipped pixie shoes. It is quite incredible how something so small – albeit unusual – could change the perception that people had of me in such a radical way. Such is the power of branding that wearing those shoes soon became second nature to me. They became my very own manner of disruption, because wherever I went they stopped conversations and turned heads. Together with my long hair, my shoes pitched me as a liberal, broad-minded creative activist from the outside, whilst on the inside I was still massively insecure and desperately striving to find my place in the world.

My campaign worked, and a very short while into my first year I was accepted into the circle of the third-year ringleaders of our art school. Although I never perceived myself as the best – in fact for many years I used to belittle myself as not being the best – I somehow always managed to find myself accepted into the circles of influence of whichever community I joined. It’s only today that I realise it’s been a trend throughout my life. As the years passed it became more and more profound and I see it as a gift today, an energy within me that brings me naturally into the folds of the right people at the right time – people I need to guide me on my path through life as I grow towards the greatest iteration of myself.

But something else also played into my hands. I had finally discovered my craft, a latent talent, that one little thing that I would turn out to be really, really, really good at. It was something I loved with such passion that I would be able to pour my heart into it for hours on end without ever running out of energy. I remember my first life drawing class, turning red with embarrassment after 20 years of conservative conditioning as a young woman bared her body to us, posing in the most unbecoming way for a lady, all in the name of art. Soon our Monday life drawing sessions became second nature, as we studied the nude forms of both males and females for hours on end.

My drawing aptitude exceeded even my own expectations and with the growth of my artistic skills another aspect of myself started to grow. My self-esteem. At the end of the first year I won the top student award by a mile. And because of my new-found ability to outperform those around me, my self-belief improved to such a level that I started to show an interest in sport and excel at that too. It’s this little insight into human nature that I hold true to this day: that self-esteem and self-belief are at the heart of success, and that any system that is designed to destroy self-esteem and self-belief should be uprooted and eradicated at its core.

At the end of our foundation year Heidi decided to further her studies as a goldsmith, a four-year course that Ruth Prowse offered, and I decided to complete my three-year diploma in Graphic Design under the tuition of an ancient designer named Austin Ellis. Over the following two years I mastered the airbrush, the rendering of storyboards, conceptualisation of posters and print campaigns and packaging design. Both Heidi and I were still living with our parents and we had to drive in to Cape Town from Somerset West each morning. Every Saturday and Sunday I worked as a barman at the Radloff Park Squash Club, and since the Club would sometimes be dead quiet during the day, I used the bar counter as my desk and conceived my own projects and executed countless pieces of alternative creative ideas in my own time.

I think my proactive, forward-thinking nature was nurtured during those years. To this day, nothing gives me more joy than to fabricate ideas out of thin air rather than off a brief. In fact, I deeply believe proactive ideas of the right calibre are far more powerful than most of the solutions we create off briefs. I cannot speak highly enough of the notion of proactivity in my craft or in business, as opposed to that of reactivity. This natural way of being, maximising my time while earning extra income to subsidise my studies, also led to my having an exhibition of work at the end of each year that would be more than double in both quality and volume than what was required of us. If the brief was for a poster, I would create a poster, a bus design and an activation. If the brief was for packaging design, I would create the packaging, the billboard and the television commercial.

I ended up top of my class in both my second and my third years and to this day, no matter how filled with puns those campaigns were – including ‘Discover the tale of the whale’, a poster of a whale under water with its tail sticking out above, die cut, for the Natural History Museum – they are some of my proudest pieces. It was much more about the experience gained from the intent and the input than it was about the rawness and naivety of the output.

Yet, although I became aware of the massive strides I was taking in my craft and how that impacted positively on my self-belief and self-esteem, a huge insecurity still remained deep within me. This aspect of the inner me came to a head in my third year when Erik Laubscher asked me to teach the second-year students how to mount their work properly. Because of my obsession with craft and perfection and my technical skills, my work was always impeccably mounted. But although I was slowly becoming highly capable for my level of experience, I remained incapable of one thing: speaking in front of people.

The session was embarrassing to say the least. I simply could not speak in front of people. My throat blocked up and I would have a group of people staring at me with big eyes, taken aback that the top dog of the school was in truth a little puppy. A puppy called Pepe. Or so the little voice in my head screamed as I pretended that I had forgotten something and rushed out of the class in order to compose myself.

However, I know for a fact today that my lifelong battle with anxiety – later identified as social phobia – would also be the ...

Table of contents

• PREFACE
• Mom
• Dad
• Primary school
• The beginning of the end
• Building a new life
• Looking over the railroad
• Fighting for the safety of my girlfriend and her boyfriend
• An about-turn
• Exchanging my R4 rifle for a 4B pencil
• Nothing creates change more than an idea
• Take-Away Advertising
• Our first diner
• Burning our fingers on Sloppy Joe Burgers
• Selling our souls
• Joe Public Jo’burg
• Losing half our business overnight
• Turning point
• Buying Joe back
• Two births and a death
• Surviving the worst recession of our lives
• Finding Joe’s greater purpose
• Growth to the power of n
• Long live Take-Away Advertising
• Shift, Ignite, Connect, Engage!
• The pain of growth is a privilege
• The worst thing that can happen, is the best thing that can happen
• a business plan for life
• We are much more than mere mortals
• Each of us is unconsciously conditioned to fail
• A business is a being too
• How to close the gap between A and B
• eight forms Of wealth
• eight forms of wealth, applied to business
• People: our only appreciating asset
• Agri-Culture
• The world is upside down
• Turn grudge purchases into love purchases
• How to start a business in one simple step
• Raising a business is like raising a child
• In order to grow, you have to let go
• How to grow a business exponentially
• Your deepest fear can be your greatest gift
• Be better than your best, and then better
• Everything I’d do differently if I had to do it again
• 20 learnings gathered from 20 years in business
• A life well measured is a life well lived
• I am because of you