I joined 1Nebula on 1 November 2012 as a Business Support Specialist, sitting on-site at one of our PetroChem customers, in the Foreshore in Cape Town, doing mobile administration work. I came in with pretty basic Excel skills - I didn't even know what a VLOOKUP was until someone taught me on my first or second day. But the company saw something in me early, because within three months I'd moved up to Team Lead for our Shared Support Services, and by June 2013 I was Head of Shared Support Services.
That period, from the start of 2013 onward, is really where things took off for me. I got thrown into the deep end - customer presentations, business cases, deep analysis, exposure to all of our customers. This was before OneView even existed, we were still running on the old original platform. But that grounding gave me an understanding of the business from the inside out that I still draw on today.
We served a lot of customers out of Johannesburg from our Cape Town base, and I travelled up there often. On one of those trips, our CEO , Danie, asked me - almost in passing - whether I'd be open to moving to Johannesburg to take over as Regional Manager. It caught me off guard. Johannesburg was completely foreign to me, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw it as a real growth opportunity. Looking back, that conversation was the pivot point in my career.
I moved to Johannesburg in June 2015, and joined 1Nebula's Executive Committee at the same time. A year later, in June 2016, I was promoted to Regional Executive for Gauteng. I was now responsible for all our Johannesburg customers, and I built strong relationships across that base - doing a lot of the hands-on analysis work myself, learning their business from the ground up: their challenges, their users' queries, what actually mattered to them day to day. One of the biggest lessons from that time, and one that's stuck with me ever since, is how important it is to really know the Product (OneView) and to get involved beyond just your own area - giving feedback to Product, understanding how Development works and what they're up against, what’s the Marketing team doing and what do they need from me. It's so much easier to work with people once you understand where they're coming from.
Another defining moment from those Johannesburg years was sitting down with Danie to build a massively detailed business case for a PetroChem customer (who subsequently became a customer). He took the time to unpack every part of it with me, and the principles from that business case are still ones we use in the business now.
By mid-to-late 2018 I knew I needed to move back to Cape Town for personal reasons - I'd genuinely enjoyed my time in Johannesburg, but it was time to come home. I relocated back in December 2018, and in January 2019 stepped up to Customer Success Executive, now responsible for all our OneView customers nationally rather than just the Johannesburg region. That role kept me close to new business development too - customer demos, value propositions, business case development, proposal work and ongoing product feedback.
In December 2021, I became a shareholder in the business, which shifted my perspective in a real way - you look at the business differently once you're not just an employee. Around the same time, things started getting interesting on the technology side, as the need for Cloud Expense Management started to emerge. I got heavily involved, despite knowing next to nothing about cloud at the time. Once again, I was thrown into the deep end and had to learn by doing.
That trajectory led to my current role: Global Head of Customer Success & FinOps, from October 2024, which brought both practices together under one roof. I'm still responsible for the full customer lifecycle - delivery, upsell, contract renewals, NPS - but now also go a lot deeper technically on the FinOps and cloud side, including the introduction of IT Expense Management, which wasn’t my brainchild, born out of work with one of our retail customers in Cape Town. Bringing those FinOps and IT Expense Management practices into a really strong, mature offering is the focus I'm most invested in today.