I'm ambitious. And soft.
Strategic and intuitive. Feminine and a bit of a hard-ass. I love business and I love my family more.
I'm Dawn. A former CEO, business strategist, mathematician, wife, mom and the woman behind Her Horizon.
I believe women can build extraordinary businesses, make serious money and have a life they actually want to be in.
I believe you can do both.
I just don't believe you can do it all, all at once.
I learned business by actually running one.
I became a CEO young.
Probably younger than I had any business becoming one, if I'm honest.
There was actually a benefit to that. Ignorance really is bliss. If I'd understood how much I didn't know at the time, I might never have been brave enough to take the job.
Luckily, I didn't.
I spent the next seven years running Integrity Software, and I genuinely think about 80% of what I know about business came from those years.
I learned how to lead people who were older and more experienced than me. How to hire great people and what happens when you get that wrong. How to sell, think commercially, build a culture and turn a big vision into something people could actually execute.
I learned to understand a P&L and use numbers to make decisions.
I learned what it's like to make decisions that affect people's livelihoods.
And I learned that you can be incredibly sure you're right...
and still be completely wrong.
I spent years investing in the wrong part of our business.
Clients were shouting about a problem.
I listened.
And because they were the loudest voices in the room, I assumed that must be where we needed to invest.
I didn't question the assumption enough. I didn't dig deeply enough into the numbers.
And for years, we put money, people and energy behind the wrong strategic priority.
The humbling part?
I wasn't even the person who figured out I was wrong.
It took someone on my senior management team months of working with me to help me see it.
I had let noise dictate my decision-making instead of getting clear.
I don't do that anymore.
So when someone tells me, “I know what the problem is,” I'm interested.
But I'm probably not going to take her word for it.
We're going to look. We're going to listen. We're going to question the assumption. We're going to get into the numbers.
And we're going to work out what is actually going on.
The numbers find
the problem.
Your gut helps solve it.
I have a degree in mathematics, so yes, I like numbers.
A lot.
But I don't think they're everything.
I use numbers to cut through the noise. To test assumptions. To work out where the business is actually hurting rather than where it feels like it's hurting.
Then we have to decide what to do about it.
That's where experience, judgment and intuition come in.
The numbers might tell us your pricing isn't working. They won't necessarily tell us exactly where the right price lands.
They might tell us you can afford another hire. They can't tell us which person is right.
I believe you need both.
Motherhood didn't make me less ambitious.
It changed my definition of success.
If anything, motherhood has made me believe in myself more.
I want Her Horizon to become huge. I want to make serious money. I want to make a massive impact on women and their businesses.
And I want to be a present mom and a wife.
I no longer see those things as contradictory.
But I'm also not going to sell you some bullshit version of “having it all.”
There are 24 hours in a day.
I can't work eight hours, be completely present with my family, exercise, have a great marriage, see all my friends, cook beautiful meals, look after myself and somehow squeeze everything else I want into the spaces in between.
There are trade-offs.
I just believe we should get to choose them.
Given the constraints, how good can we make the business?
Constraints aren't something to complain about.
They force strategic thinking.
I've chosen to build Her Horizon around my family.
Right now, that means I don't want to work eight-hour days.
Would the business grow faster if I did?
Probably.
Could I make more money?
Probably.
But the maximum amount of money I could possibly make is no longer my definition of success.
Your constraints might look completely different from mine.
Maybe you don't want 50 employees.
Maybe you want to collect your children from school.
Maybe you never want to work Fridays.
Maybe you want a R20 million business, but you don't want the life you've convinced yourself you have to live to build one.
Cool.
Now we have something to work with.
ONE THING YOU SHOULD PROBABLY KNOW ABOUT ME...
"Are you ok if I call bullshit?"
Because I think we need to have an honest conversation.
I'm direct.
But I don't believe direct needs to mean harsh.
I'm not interested in making someone feel small or being “brutally honest” for the sake of it.
But if you tell me you want my honest opinion, I'll give it to you.
And I'd much rather you try something and have it fail than spend six months standing still because you're afraid of getting it wrong.
Failure still means you are moving forward.
The only true failure is not moving at all.
If credentials matter to you, here they are.
FORMER CEO
Seven years leading Integrity Software, with hands-on experience across strategy, sales, leadership, culture, people, systems and commercial decision-making.
BUSINESS EXPERIENCE
Career experience including Mr Price Group and LexisNexis, working alongside leaders who shaped how I think about leadership, innovation and what's possible.
MATHEMATICS
BSc Mathematics, UCT
BSc Honours Mathematics, UKZN
FURTHER STUDY
Postgraduate qualifications in Education and Business Management.
COACHING
Coaching certification through the NeuroLeadership Institute.
I'm grateful for the qualifications.
But sitting in the CEO seat taught me more.
I don't just want more women running bigger businesses.
I want more happy women who own extraordinary businesses.
Women who create wealth. Make an impact. Employ people. Build things they're incredibly proud of.
And actually enjoy the lives those businesses were supposed to create.
Not happy in a roses, daisies and unicorns kind of way.
Business is hard. Leadership is hard. Life still happens.
I'm talking about something deeper.
Peace.
Knowing that the business you've built and the life you actually want aren't constantly fighting each other.
Because I think too many women build successful businesses and end up stressed, overworked, guilty and completely indispensable to the thing they created to give them freedom.
I'm not interested in simply teaching those women to cope with that better.
I want us to build better businesses.
Businesses that work.
Businesses that create wealth.
Businesses that don't require their founder to sacrifice herself to keep them alive.
And women who can look at what they've created and genuinely think:
I built this.
And I actually like the life that came with it.
If that's the kind of business you're trying to build, I think we'll have a lot to talk about.