Spotlight on Tobie van Zyl, Co-founder & CEO at Bettr
“There's a few stigmas that we’ve got to get rid of in terms of money. We have to inspire belief and motivate people to, you know, believe in themselves to start a business early, [for example]. Because the earlier you start, you start learning and teaching yourself about how to make money, earn money, how to grow it and ultimately invest it.”
Bettr CEO and co-founder, Tobie van Zyl, sat down with Simon Taylor of 11:FS – the world’s leading podcast and service provider for all things fintech.
In a chat that dives into Bettr’s origins, the trickiness of building banking technology in South Africa and the youth at the core of the company’s vision, we also learn Tobie’s 10 Tips for sticking it out as an entrepreneur – no matter what field you’re in.👇
- When you have the idea, start working.
- Figure out how you're going to maintain a lifestyle to put 100% into this.
- Have absolute conviction and self-belief that you can do it.
- Don't be closed to good advice.
- Your friendship circles are probably going to change. You need to stay positive.
- You've got to invest in yourself: stay healthy, stay in a positive environment, read books, know when to switch off – it's always hard.
- Self-discipline is very, very important. If you are not going to create the best version of yourself on a health level, right, how on earth are you going to inspire your team to do the same, right?
- You have to condition yourself to be in the mindset of a successful person.
- And yeah – just dematerialize, live lean, stick to it hard.
- Believe in yourself and never stop working.
Listen to the full conversation 👂
Read the full interview👇
[ Simon Taylor ]
Joining me today is Tobie Van Zyl, who is co-founder and CEO of Bettr. Tobie, how’s it going? How are you?
[ Tobie van Zyl ]
Hey, Simon 😀 I'm great and yourself?
[ Simon ]
Really well, thank you. Although I think you're in a better place today...Where in the world are you?
[ Tobie ]
I'm in a beautiful little town called Jeffrey's Bay. I came here for the lockdown and, obviously, surfing season. 🏄 So I'm basically here until the end of October, and I'll be back in Cape Town straight off to this beautiful, beautiful part of the world.
[ Simon ]
I'm very jealous...
Tell me – let's start off with a little bit about you and what you do. You've started a few companies before this, tell me the story of how you landed at Bettr.
[ Tobie ]
Bettr has actually been a 15-year vision of mine and my first fintech company, an official Fintech startup called Money Smart. And back then it was a personal finance management tool inspired by what was going on in the US (like Mint.com), the early stages of TechCrunch, really, and I thought that was needed in South Africa.
Money Smart was a tool that allows you to connect all your accounts and it brings it into a single view. And that's actually where a lot of information – in terms of how people bank, how they store their money, how they transact, and the challenges that they have – come to light.
So when you give people transparent access to their money, and they finally can make sense of what a budget looks like – income, expenses, where they spend – they quickly realise you know, bank fees are taking quite a lot of their income. Another thing was that a lot of young people were multi-banked. You might have a checking account with one institution and have perhaps a savings account, another credit card with another.
We realised that South Africans were extremely multi-banked, and they were incurring a lot of fees across all these accounts. And when it suddenly made them realise how much they were spending, there was no tool or alternative for them to go and find a no-fee or low-cost banking account. And they certainly didn't have the knowledge or the literacy to make those comparisons and draw the conclusions in order to switch from one bank to another themselves.
For us, we saw that that is really frustrating consumers, and it's limiting the choice to, you know, being financially included. They are extremely underserved by these incumbents, because there's only five of them –the Big Five banks – and you're kind of forced to just trust them.
So where do you go? What alternative is there? 🤷♀️
So they were starting out with just graduating and they were paying half the first year salaries into student debt. Even if they were paying off the student debt, they didn't build their own credit record in doing so. And when they needed formal access to credit – something even like signing a lease agreement – they’d get outright denied, because they've never been in a position to manage debt or to service debt, or build any form of credit worthiness.
So you know, it's hard when you are just starting out in life extremely underserved, and you can't fully participate in the financial services system until you're actually “worth” something to them. Making sufficient money to take out a loan – because that's the dominant business model – putting your money into products that are actually designed for savings, but waste the savings at the end of the day...
I mean, consumers are asking those questions. So all that data told us about how consumers really manage their money and how the industry is making the money from these consumers.
And you know, the vision stuck out one day: we've got to build something that, (1), empowers the end consumer with financial inclusion and control, and, (2), gives them one bank account that costs nothing with the best products and services. 💡
So Money Smart was really the catalyst and a default API infrastructure company, very much like Plaid in the US. And again, you know, we took that personal finance tool and we wrapped an API around it. And we started integrating it into personal lending, loan companies and insurance companies. And banks even wanted to use the technology because it was so quick to get all the information – three minutes or less – originate it to a lender's back office.
But interestingly enough, they wanted scale. And that's really where the money started flowing in for the company for Limitless Technology Group, the company that founded that house, all these apps. But again, none of those savings, you know, were passed on to the consumer. And we just saw how big the problem really is, you know, when the banks and the insurance companies and lenders started using this tech to serve their customer base.
[ Simon ]
It's interesting,y ou get a front-row seat to the business model that works: it's a bit asymmetrical in who benefits and has the big moat of being the only game in town. For quite some time banks have been able to look at customers on their spreadsheet and only go after the business they like and stay away from business that they might like in five years’ time. And actually, maybe that leaves an opportunity. Because if there's a customer that could be credit-worthy in 3 to 5 years’ time, why aren't you working with them now and getting ahead of that?
And I guess, is that front-row seat that you got the inspiration behind Bettr? What was the origin? How did that come about? 🤔
[ Tobie ]
Yeah, so that was one thing, and I just said, “Jeez, there's a lot of people giving their information to these institutions, but, at the end of the day, the institution has control over how they price, and how they originate and sell a product based on this information.”
So why can't we just turn around the power – like shift the power – give it back to the consumer and say, “Hey, all these guys ultimately – all these big institutions – want your business. Let them connect and you control on what basis the best rate [is], the best transparency, the best open policy [etc] profiled to your needs.
I just thought that there's got to be a catalyst for this. And there's got to be change. 💡
I think on a personal level for me, I've just always been driven to change things that are wrong, and I can't help that that's the career that I've chosen. You know, some days you think it's a passion and other days you think it's a curse, but that gets me up and that gets me going. Bettr is really an amalgamation of enabling people with tech and tools, putting them first in the driver's seat, and letting those institutions really consider that these are people who have money. They should be in control in the first place, and businesses should be done on data and not [their] ocean.
I think it's very evident in the 21st Century where business models are changing and the linear business model doesn't work anymore. But unfortunately, for these large institutions, it's going to be quite hard to turn around right now.
Fintechs obviously have the unfair advantage of no legacy, a lower cost phase, exponential technology, and social networks to scale for acquiring customers and building up their businesses. 🚀
[ Simon ]
Yeah – the lack of that legacy and cost is actually an advantage. You don't have the scale immediately. But maybe there's something else that you can do with it. So I guess the on-the-nose question is, what is Bettr? Is it a challenger bank? Is it a neo-bank? Is it a tech-company? Is it an account aggregator? Like, what is it? How do you describe it?
[ Tobie ]
So Bettr is a technology company, from a company perspective. It's a technology company that aims to do banking differently. Our view is, if we were just building another bank, we wouldn't be changing anything. 🤑
So that's definitely not what we intend to do, right. So, by building a technology company, our vision is to create Africa's first truly open banking platform. That's really about empowering the consumer. And through open-banking principles, philosophies and technology: to enable the best fintechs to come and enrich and provide low-cost, transparent and high-value products to our consumer base. 🔓
In other terms, we don't have our own banking licence. We're not in a position yet in South Africa, like other countries where a Fintech licence exists so that you can tap into the payments network of your country. South Africa has three options:
- You can either partner with a sponsor bank – which we've done.
- You can get your own mutual banking licence,
- or a Tier 1 or Tier 2 banking licence.
All of that is extremely costly. It comes with a lot of compliance and overheads. It’s a steep curve – a capital-intensive outlay. 🏦
And we just wanted to provide a better banking experience, so we partnered with a bank that has a mutual interest in our business model to lower the cost so we can pass that [cost-saving] onto our customers. So we are neobank in the fintech vocabulary if you had to identify what type of bank.
[ Simon ]
So there is a partner bank behind the scenes. I guess your business model is a bit more marketplace in the sense that you're also inviting other people in, using the data to kind of drive that?
We're already getting questions coming in from our audience.
J. Thompson asks, “How has the business changed over the last year or two? What have you learned in this process of building?”
[ Tobie ]
What's changed in the last year or two is we've had to restructure our entire business. I mean, the barrier to entry in this market is so high. It's extremely capital-intensive. There isn't a lot of VC [Venture Capital] that wants to back a business that's going up against the banks. So your only way in is to rely on a payment processor out there to build an MVP, prove your model, and show that you can technically execute and can compliantly execute and sort of tick all the boxes.
Those would be initial hurdles for an investor to invest before you raise capital, and also ensure that you understand what you're building from a technical knowledge and technology perspective, as well as [a regulatory perspective]. We’ve gone through that process. ✅
In parallel to that, we've always been a first-principles Design-Thinking company as well. So consumers are really involved in designing the service. And the feedback that we got was: “we need x, we need y, we need a better savings rate, etc. etc.”
The providers that we were using at the time – because we were initially so small – just couldn't fulfill all our needs. The only way for us was to go and convince a local sponsor bank that we are fit for the game (really), that we can achieve distribution, that we can achieve scale, that we can run this business compliantly.
And they've put us to the test. It took an 8- month process for our business case to be approved. Post that business case, we had to undergo rigorous due diligence on our technology on security. Deloitte did an audit with us earlier this year. We had to prepare for months for that audit.
In addition to that, we had to build the infrastructure to get ready to market and we had to migrate from previous infrastructure to new infrastructure as well. It was very, very – super – challenging in order to prove this beautiful business model.
And then COVID came – you know – and that just completely disrupted us. By that time, we were all pretty much broke. We had invested all our money, and then investors really wanted to fund us. I think when the business case was approved earlier this year and the Deloitte audit came out clean, that's when investors started feeling comfortable.
Also – there were other digital banks that were launching, and it was kind of good for us to stand back and just observe. What's different about them? How's the market perceiving them? Who's the customer base that they're going after?
We had to go back and evaluate. Are we still on the right track? Is our target market still served or underserved by these new ones, and these incumbents? Now that all of that is out there now and it provides us a lot of comfort that we are on the right track, and we could prove – through consumer demand, product and execution– that we are fit for investment and obviously fit for our sponsor bank.
So it's a long journey. If you're a fintech company in this country, it's extremely challenging – high capital starting amounts, high regulatory barrier, and a long road to technically execute and get to a good product. 🚧
[ Simon ]
But you sound like you've been able to get some traction, so well done! 👏 I see a few more questions coming in, but before we get to those – the speed you mentioned briefly, you know, where do you play in the market?
We shared the promo video for Bettr on the 11:FS Slack channel, and it was a sellout. The emojis were off the charts. It's clear you're targeting a younger demographic with that video. Why have you focused on Gen Z, and that younger demographic?
[ Tobie ]
We felt that there’s this new up-and-coming youth that, you know, that needs – we need to step in – and make sure that the Millennial Middle Class story doesn't repeat itself.
There’s this recipe...where you go to school, you get good grades, then you're going to go to university, get your degree and ultimately go work for the boss-man. And before you know it, you know, you get married, you have kids, you're 35, and you're just stuck at this job because you've got all these bills to pay: a mortgage, credit cards, a second baby’s on the way. And, you know, your whole youth has gone into that, like, initial dream – that lifecycle, right that cultural past now. ⌛
But people have realised this. They're hitting 35, they're halfway through their working careers, and they haven't really saved any money. So you know, the traditional process – the way of life financially and professionally – is really failing a lot of people.
Gen Z is very woke – and younger millennials. They started asking questions. We are in student campuses and out there and they come to us and they're like, “Hey, you know why somebody who's managing your investments called a ‘broker’?...And while banks are making so much money from people that don't have any, why do we have over 100 pension fund companies, yet less than 8% of our country can retire?
You see. So what we have now is this millennial middle class stuck in the rat race, right, and they've got very little chance of retirement. At the same time we are discouraged from starting businesses, being creative and thinking out-of-the-box to look after ourselves. What you have now is people addicted to a salary. It's the same addiction rate as sex and cocaine.
Gen Z is saying, “Look – we've got the power of the Internet. We were born with a phone in our hand. We are a third of the population. And we are all for change: we inspire change, we follow things that we have a vested interest in and that we can co-create and collaborate on.” ✊
That was very interesting for us.
If you're 16, and all the way up to 35, you are predominantly still underserved.
The same problem remained from when I started Money Smart 10 years ago. Nothing has changed. And there's been no real disruption in banking and financial services for the last 20 to 50 years. For us, the young market is such an opportunity to start early and start right – to build something that's culturally relevant and relatable, something that provides equality, that something that involves everyone and there's nothing that separates, you know, the wealthier young person from the poor.
The music video is really a celebration of creating a new culture of money, inspiring change, inspiring creativity and, and going along and saying, “We want to co create this service so that we never fail you, and it's in your best interests to collaborate with us openly and transparently all the way.
For us, the music video was to celebrate a financial institution now existing in the 21st Century with an exponential business model. If you look at banking, and just finance in South Africa today, it's very much designed in, and it looks and feels like an Industrial Age kind of thing, right? It's not exciting. It's not enticing. It doesn't get you up and better. Something that you’d share on your Instagram with your friend, like, “Look at this cool bank!” And we felt that, that really put us on the map. That's just a 1% example of the creativity that we are going to unleash when we ultimately launch the market. 🔮
[ Simon ]
Speaking of that creativity, a question from Amanda Moore has come in: “Do you see yourself staying there – to keep pushing into that younger and younger generation and stay with the 20-somethings – staying with the next teenage generation? And or do you see yourself growing with this cohort, too, as they age?”
[ Tobie ]
That's a good question. I mean, that's the advantage that we have, you know, starting at the age of 16. Teaching you basic financial literacy basic skills, putting all of that financial management in your hand and coaching you so that you're in control. We help you with spending and your financial management decisions – and making saving and investing easier. 🤳
That is the idea. We want to be the first account – not the second account – because even as African people, we stay 24 to 28 years with the first bank account that we have. We never really leave – we just open up new accounts. That also explains why people are so multi-banked. I didn't ever want to go away from where ‘Mom and Dad’ referred you. ⛓️
So I think we are young enough – we've made all these mistakes and we've seen how the industry works. And, you know, you've only got one life, so make it the best, make it Bettr.
[ Simon ]
There was a question from Maria, who's our Head of Marketing at 11:FS. She asked about the main challenges to grow Bettr.
I think you'd mentioned earlier some of the challenges in terms of the infrastructure and...the audits and all of that kind of stuff. Are there other things around...cultural habits and no-show consumer adoption? What are the things that you're worried about on a day-to-day basis? What are the things that you think are your biggest challenges over the next 6 months?
[ Tobie ]
That's a very good question! There's so much going on building a business like this. The first focus that we always want to give is not always possible. It’s about what the consumers are saying – giving our ear to them, and also giving them a voice. 👂 So always being true to being consumer-centric first, and acknowledging what their needs and their demands are, and then incorporating that into our value proposition.
However, from where we are now, we are laser-focused on execution. ⚒️ So everything is about deadlines, and due dates, and making sure everything is solid and sound from a financial perspective, regulatory compliance and technical perspective. We are in the trenches – working day and night. We're a small team, but we do an incredible amount of work. And being venture funded, you know, there are particular milestones you have to reach. 🏅
Having not been properly funded from Day One – funding this ourselves – we now have an opportunity with the [funding] round that we closed to hit those milestones and finally see it go to market. It becomes very overwhelming to manage all these things, and these relationships – and that is our only focus right now.
When we launch, we have an active community that we're growing. So we will have an active consumer base. We are [also] getting an enormous amount of enquiries from industry – from telecom providers to loyalty companies – all who have existing consumers who believe they deserve better. And all that is leading up to very good potential distribution partners for us. 🔥
You know, you're always concerned about how you're going to acquire a customer – what's your cost going to be? You don't know until you’re live, right? You have a theory, but you’ve got to put it out there. The [#WeDeserveBettr] campaign is doing very well and the industry is receiving us very well. We were very excited for how excited everyone else is – also very nervous because we’ve got to keep our heads down and not get too distracted. Just focus on the goal. 🔭
[ Simon ]
Yeah, always challenging. Like the old saying is: “If startups don't starve, they drown.” There's too much to do and focus is absolutely everything.
So talk to me about the team. Talk to me about the talent – who is the team and how do you find sourcing talent in the South African market?
[ Tobie ]
Talent for us is like the whole team – let me tell you – these people know what it is to dance in fire and walk over coals through many hills. It's the sheer belief in yourself and wanting to belong and making change in the world.
Bettr was really a vision that started drawing people in – that was the way that we ‘found’ the team….
I met my co-founder, Andrej Stempowski, the CTO of the company, in 2016. Again, I think the vision just drew him in. And we've just been like back-to-back working together.
Then, my neighbour at the time, Robert Leusink, who's now Head of Finance and Operations. He was just finishing his chartered accounting degree and he wanted to get onto the audit trail, but he jumped off and joined us along with his friend, Sergio Marais, who was also frequently there [at Robert’s apartment].
They heard about, “these guys who are building a bank from the kitchen table,” and said “you know, we've got to give it a listen.” So that’s how the core core guys came together.
Then some of my best friends that I've worked with in the industry as well. They've done phenomenal work. Like Marco and Terri da Sousa [heysous.com] – they have some of the most extremely talented design [talent].
The creative team, Team Geek, Ryan and Andrei – shout out guys – like they've been very instrumental on the technology side. And then we've got on the design Make Reign.
So everybody in our company is very world-class. They've kind of had some form of success that they can invest straight, add cash or discount their hourly rate.
Our goal is to build the leanest, most beautiful product, so it's really about people feeling and believing that change was necessary, that kind of had them refer one another to come and speak to Anj, myself, Robbie, and Sergio. We chose people by commitment, you know, these people that started working with us not earning any money for 3 to 6 months, and they would do whatever it takes by whatever shape, means or form, just to be involved. And when we got some cash, we'd fund them, but they never went away. And sometimes they would have to do 2 jobs just to do their passion work at Bettr. I mean, I'm incredibly proud of all of them.
Recently, we have Dinika Govender, who's now heading up marketing along with Rasheed Ferguson, who's the director of the video hit a friend. They came in with 3 months unpaid, and did all of this work, like all of this production and launched this brand in the hopes that we would close this round and surely pay it off. So it's all about belief. And it's all about dedication. And that's why we can get so much done with so little, with a small team, and so little funding to have come where we are today.
[ Simon ]
The mission and the story, it seems, Tobie, like that mission seems to be...at the core of everything you guys are doing. How do you think what you guys do could change how young South Africans interact with money? Do you think you’ve got a real shot at that? 🤔
[ Tobie ]
I think we absolutely have a greenfield opportunity there. But [it’s] because we see the world the way they do, we understand their point of view, we understand their cultural heritage, we actually have listened to them – instead of building a product [and] shoving it down their throat...we've invited them to participate in our vision and in our journey. We did this from an organic point of view, and we got traction on that.
How we're going to change it: number one is we have to teach disciplines, right? There's a few stigmas that we’ve got to get rid of in terms of money. We have to inspire belief and motivate people to, you know, believe in themselves to start a business early, [for example]. Because the earlier you start, you start learning and teaching yourself about how to make money, earn money, how to grow it and ultimately invest it.
And that is what the traditional South African right now isn't providing around the dinner table. They can't coach their kids about personal financial management, and schools don't have financial literacy as a subject built into it. Entrepreneurship, SEO, selling marshmallows at breaktime – it's teaching people how to be the owners of their financial destinies. 💸
Because they are scared, there is an old culture – an old stigma and we have to first break those barriers down. So how we do that is through the #WeDeserveBettr campaign where we are educating young South Africans about how you can go from nothing in the poorest circumstances to becoming a big hip-hop star like Dee Koala or Costa Titch who speak about money honestly, truthfully, and openly – giving life advice first and inspiring belief – and then also talking about how they make their money and manage it. 🎤
[ Simon ]
I love that idea of creating a role model where it's good life advice rather than “get money by any means necessary.” There is a financial literacy piece here, and there's a learning curve and, like, whatever your creative passion is, can be your business. That's inspiring for a lot of people, yes. And it isn't a “salaryman job” – people don't get inspired by that. Like if the good advice means: “Oh well, you're gonna have to be bored for the next 30 years,” that's quite difficult to swallow. But if the good advice is, “You can do what you want, and you can make yourself a life,” I think that's a much more hopeful story to be able to go to people with.
[ Tobie ]
That's so true, Simon. I mean, a lot of people didn't believe in us. And that's [also] a big motivator for me.
[ Simon ]
Yeah, I can really imagine. So, as you look forward then, let's just look at the business a little bit. How are you guys going to really monetize this thing? Is it going to be more of the banking business model in terms of deposits and lending? Is it going to be more on the marketplace side? Like, where's your head at, knowing that startups are startups and things could change?
[ Tobie ]
Yeah...So the primary revenues are just two [main] streams:
1. It’s net interest income that we share with our sponsor bank. That is, we take a cut after customers save money. Our business model is explained right up front to the customer, that we only make money when you’re saving. So if a customer saves money, and they are in a positive balance, then Bettr gets a cut of that, that we share with our sponsor bank.
How we do that is we obviously have to teach you how to keep a positive balance. So with that, the app provides you a daily spend capability, and gives you tips and tools on how to stick to a budget – and it rewards you for doing so.
2. And the second one is interchange. So that's also revenue that's being slowly but surely diminished, you know, becoming diminished that interchange of card. That's another avenue of revenue, and then there’s the marketplace. So mobile airtime and necessities like electricity and data.
3. But ultimately, it's going to be the marketplace.
So, our business is great – from a unit economics perspective. It can wash its own face with a mere 100 Pounds a month positive balance, right. That's our first target – is making sure that once you've acquired a customer, you've onboarded them, and they maintain at least 100 Quid with a positive balance, and then build on from there, you know.
[ Simon ]
Which is very different to what The Big 5 banks will be looking for in terms of a deposit base in order to make it wash its own face – because their cost structure is fundamentally different, right?
[ Tobie ]
Of course...and that is unfortunate. But I mean, that's how they started, right? And now we’re in this 21st Century and it's exponential, and technology makes it so much easier, so there is a big advantage from a cost perspective. 🚀
[ Simon ]
As we're coming out of 2020, as we're looking to 2021, what are the next 18 months looking like for you? And what are your hopes?
[ Tobie ]
Well we really want to acquire market share in the youth and student market – that's a big thing for us – if we can get 10% of that market. We have really good developments on the way. That's the success for us.
So we also want to be a profitable business. 🤑 So not, you know, chase multibillion dollar valuations – we are very realistic about building this company. We certainly want to keep as much of this business for ourselves, right? It's very expensive and taxing, raising funding all the time and diluting. For us, we always want to remain in control of the vision, and we want to be building a profitable business to give our customers the peace of mind that we don't always need funding to trust us with the money. And we can do things in our own time. Because the moment you take on venture funding, it's pedal to the metal – you’ve got to perform, you suddenly get pressure for exits or mergers, or private equity firms want to buy a big chunk out. And that's certainly not the kind of business we spent years putting this thing together and have had enormous sacrifices for. We're just not going to let that go. So building a profitable business acquiring 10% of the student market – that is the primary focus for the next 18 months.
[ Simon ]
Fantastic. Well, I really wish you guys well with it! The last thing I'm gonna ask before we close this one out is: what have your big lessons been? Especially for budding entrepreneurs that are outside of London or Silicon Valley – people that are building in some of the harder places – what have you found that has been the keys to getting to where you've got?
[ Tobie ]
You can't do things half-on, half-off. You’ve got to find a way. You have to scale down your lifestyle. You've got to get rid of the ship you don't need and you’ve got to go and work. Have you thought that you've never worked harder in your life? You're going to work harder. If you think you've sacrificed, you're going to sacrifice more. And the time to get to realise your dream is always going to take longer. So buckle up for 5 years – maybe not always – but it takes a long time to see things materialise.
My previous businesses we're businesses. It's always working hard and lots of sacrifice. It pays off, though, you know. I'm not gonna lie – it's great when you get a big chunk of cash, and you can schedule the taxman, and you can travel the world and just enjoy it...I was lying on the beach, actually, in Greece, and I told my wife, “It's time, you know. I need to start Bettr.” And we came back and we started it.
- So when you have the idea, start working.
- Figure out how you're going to maintain a lifestyle to put 100% into this and have absolute conviction and self-belief that you can do it.
- Don't be closed to good advice. You can always buy advice, but you've got to have really good advisors around you: people [who] motivate you.
- Your friendship circles are probably going to change. You need to stay positive, right?
- Because this is a very lonely journey. It's very hard: very taxing mentally, it's taxing physically on your health as well.
- You've got to invest in yourself: stay healthy, stay in a positive environment, read books, know when to switch off – it's always hard.
- Self-discipline is very, very important. If you are not going to create the best version of yourself on a health level, right, how on earth are you going to inspire your team to do the same, right? How are you going to look good for your company, be the representative of it so that other people follow your example? So you have to start with yourself.
- You have to condition yourself to be in the mindset of a successful person.
- And yeah, just dematerialize, live lean, stick to it hard.
- Believe in yourself and never stop working.
[ Simon ]
I love that. What a great way to finish well, we're coming towards the end of the show. I really want to thank you, Tobie. 💜
Doing it Bettr
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- Dinika Govender – CMO – dinika@bettr.app
- Gugu Sithole-Tyali – Head of PR and Communications – gugu@bettr.app
#OwnYourWorth
