Quitting the race
Former IT executives who`ve quit the rat race are making the most of their freedom. One has sailed off into the Caribbean sunset. A second is flying helicopters, financing start-ups in London and cycling through the winelands of France. A third is building a fast-food empire in Johannesburg and Pretoria while taking time out on a game farm; a fourth is farming on the Garden Route.They`ve got it good and they know it. But, they say, they`ve paid their dues and are neither living lives of idle luxury nor crowing over ex-colleagues still turning the treadmill.While it must be blissful to live on a protea farm off the Cape coast, don`t expect to hear the gory details from the farmer concerned. Contacted for an interview, he was bluntly unenthusiastic, pointing out that he`d left the IT industry around five years ago. After reluctantly agreeing to “think about it”, he called back two days later with an emphatic no.The reason for the reticence? Being out of touch with IT, he`d bought a copy of Brainstorm at the airport on his way to a Johannesburg wedding and realised with a jolt just how turbulent the business had become. “People today don`t have the choices that I did back then,” he says. “I still have friends in the industry and I don`t want to sound like I`m gloating.”He`s not the only ex-exec to tread lightly on the feelings of those who`ve stayed behind.“We were just lucky with our timing,” says James Fitzgerald, MD of EDS between 1994 and 1999, and an outsourcing veteran since 1970. “The IT industry has changed, becoming more mainstream as opposed to being on an exceptional growth curve. There`s not the same degree of growth and innovation. I have no guilt about having made money doing what I did – when the timing is right, the timing is right – but I don`t wish people to have the sense that I retired or that I ‘escaped`.” Flying a rocketship“I didn`t want to get away from IT. It was great fun: satisfying, successful and I learnt a lot and made a lot of friends,” says Fitzgerald. “Then I realised I couldn`t carry on working so hard. Seven to seven, and weekends; it wasn`t a good model, it was personally unsustainable. The results were satisfying but it was a long haul – 29 years – and the process took a lot out of me. I wanted to get the balance back.”That called for career and lifestyle change. Now a venture capitalist, Fitzgerald`s London-based company Rocketship Ventures has “interests in interesting businesses where I get the ability to apply what I`ve learnt in outsourcing. Typically they`re not IT startups, although IT is a component of most companies these days,” he says, citing the example of Oxigen, which sells advertising on screensavers in London.Rocketship`s investments take up most of his time, including a week a month in London; but it`s not his only business interest. Fitzgerald is also chairman of Business Against Crime in South Africa (“I`m a passionate supporter of South Africa”) and a partner in a Midrand helicopter rental company.“Flying helicopters is one of my hobbies and they`re expensive beasts. The way to defray them is to make them do some work,” says Fitzgerald, who together with two partners rents out 18 helicopters to security and asset transfer companies, as well as for executive transport.Fitzgerald himself goes for regular whirls “for pleasure and when it makes sense” (as does a two-hour flight to Durban), clocking up around 150 hours` flying time a year. Combining business and pleasure is paying off. “What started as a means to an end has become quite a successful business,” he says, sounding mildly surprised.“It`s interesting that when you drop out there`s a sense that you`re retired. I`m very busy, doing quite a lot of fun stuff. I also spend more time with my kids, who used to have an absent father, and started playing golf a few years ago. Later this year, I`m going on a skiing trip and cycling through the winelands in France. There`s balance and what I do now is not stressful; it`s a good, sustainable model. Retirement isn`t even an option. I could go on forever.”Like Fitzgerald and the reticent farmer, people who`ve made more recent exits from IT are equally determined not to burn bridges. In fact, the only objects Johann Kunz might conceivably want to burn are hamburger patties and French fries.Staple fare of the fast-food empire he`s helping his wife Elize to build, mass-made meals leave him culinarily cold. To get Kunz cooking, pour him a glass of dry white wine and hand him a challenge like roasting a duck (“bloody difficult”) for the couple`s Christmas lunch.“In a restaurant kitchen, I`d be a disaster,” says the former MD of CS Holdings` IT services division.So it wasn`t Kunz who grilled your steak at the Spur in Rivonia, one of about six outlets in Elize`s fast-growing franchise business. Seldom setting foot in any of the eateries, his function is strictly back office. Tapping away on his laptop, either at his home-office in Pretoria or on a game farm just out of town, Kunz is using his big business background to streamline Elize`s company, without getting in her hair.“One of the reasons I left CSH was that Elize`s business was getting quite big and she needed a bit of help, especially with financial and support systems,” he says. “The time had come to make a call: leave things as they are, or grow. We decided to grow.”That decision also gave Kunz the chance to get back to his entrepreneurial roots, which first sprouted when he ran his own publishing company in his days as a law student at Tuks.“IT was also very entrepreneurial when I started out and it`s still a great industry, although it`s changing now, becoming more consolidated. And to some extent, my decision was a quality-of-life choice, too. You have to work very hard to grow as fast as we did at CSH. That`s stressful.” After about a year of pondering, he made the leap to small business in November 2002, having given CSH plenty of notice about his intentions – and taking pains not to land on Elize`s toes in the process.“I didn`t want to interfere too much,” says Kunz, “and I think the first month or two were horrible for her. I think she felt I was intruding, but now – I hope – she`s starting to see the value of the new systems and procedures.” But wait, there`s moreSensibly, the couple have lessened the potential for marital strife by keeping their businesses firmly separate. Apart from physically keeping himself at a working distance, Kunz has registered his own company, I3 Consulting (with the three I`s standing for Innovate, Initiate, Implement).He`s not just working for his wife, either. Kunz, who admits he gets bored easily, also holds a stake in a Gauteng-based marketing company, where he spends an afternoon a week, and is eyeing out some property investments, having just completed a property course.Nor has he completely cut his ties with IT. “No, I wouldn`t go back to the corporate world, but I still read my newspaper every morning, still have shares in CSH and I still have contact with some of the guys. The difference is that nowadays we braai together instead of talking shop.” Sailing into the sunsetOn 6 January 2003, former MGX director Aletha Ling and her husband Michael left Cape Town for Barbados on a yacht christened Radical Innovation. Just how long they`ll be gone is anybody`s guess.“The first thing about the future,” says Ling, “is that it is totally flexible.“We have planned only the first half year to the Caribbean, with broad plans for the following years,” she said in the month before setting sail. “We will, over the next few years, sail the oceans of the world. Of that I have no doubt. It is likely that after the Caribbean we will sail the Pacific Ocean, planning to trace some of the exciting routes opened up by Captain Cook.”Radical Innovation is certainly up to an open-ended adventure. Custom-designed to the Lings` specifications, the yacht has four double cabins, a “fabulous” galley and a saloon that can comfortably seat eight people for dinner.Not surprisingly, it`s bristling with tools of the technology trade, including fault-tolerant servers, a full LAN system, satellite phones, broadband connectivity, GPS and radar, not to mention Internet access so Ling can do some online research.“Both my husband and myself are from the technology business and so we have all the gadgets on board. This is the ultimate high-tech boat and we make no apologies for that,” said Ling. “And, in case you worry that we might become reclusive, we will be in constant e-mail contact with the world. I am really lucky to have some wonderfully exciting friends who will keep us in touch with what is happening at home in both business and our personal world. At various points of our journey we have friends flying from various places in the world to join us for certain legs of the journey. Who could ask for more, the joy of discovery and the pleasure of friends to explore with?”Quite obviously, this journey was no spur-of-the-moment impulse. “This is for us the realisation of a long-term dream and the culmination of nearly two years of planning,” said Ling. “It is time for a radical change in our personal lives.”For many years, she says, life was about business, with little time for reflection and self-discovery. “These years have been exciting and totally consuming, which is really what has brought me to this point,” said Ling. “I found myself lately on a much too familiar and, in many ways, conflicting treadmill. I found myself in a corporate environment with too many unresolved conflicts that I believe need pondering.” Back to the futureMore specifically, “I have enjoyed the exciting early years of a business that was small, personal and very focused on things that we believe mattered. I lately found myself back in the big corporate, where much of the vitality and spark of smallness gets lost in the bigness of the corporation. Surely there must be a way to marry these two models? A major learning, I think, from the 20th century, is that centrally planned systems don`t work. What then, are the alternatives that will drive the new century? This I think is a question worth grappling with.”While grappling with that conundrum, Ling will be keeping track of IT developments. “I continue to be fascinated with advances in technology across the board. There is so much happening in IT, such as nano-technology and in the new spaces of bio-technology. I am planning to give myself time to not only dig deeper into what is coming along but also time to think about the implications and opportunities which may result from this.”On top of that, she`ll be writing for various publications and catching up on a pile of reading, from the “great philosophers to the leading business thinkers of our time”. She`ll also be doing her share of yacht duty – “a regular schedule of duty at the helm, as well as the general work on the boat and the cooking”.As for the future, we may or may not see Ling making an IT comeback. “I have no doubt I will find the inspiration for the next business venture, whatever it might be,” she says. “It is very difficult to keep the entrepreneurial spirit at bay for too long. The mystery, of course, it is what it is likely to be. One certainly cannot repeat history, so I am hanging on to that moment of freedom before shaping the future.”Despite the different directions they`re taking, IT`s departees have much in common, apart from their obvious financial freedom.For one, as Kunz and Fitzgerald have already shown, they`re as little inclined to rest on laurels as they were when still punching the IT clock. For another, they`re quick to dismiss perceptions that they`ve fled an ailing industry. What they do hint at, though, is that IT may have lost some of its entrepreneurial spark.Perhaps Aletha Ling will come up with an answer.
05 March 2003
Former IT executives who`ve quit the rat race are making the most of their freedom. One has sailed off into the Caribbean sunset. A second is flying helicopters, financing start-ups in London and cycling through the winelands of France. A third is building a fast-food empire in Johannesburg and Pretoria while taking time out on a game farm; a fourth is farming on the Garden Route.
While it must be blissful to live on a protea farm off the Cape coast, don`t expect to hear the gory details from the farmer concerned. Contacted for an interview, he was bluntly unenthusiastic, pointing out that he`d left the IT industry around five years ago. After reluctantly agreeing to “think about it”, he called back two days later with an emphatic no.
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