On the night of his 20th birthday, Rob Stokes decided to start his first business called Quirk. Named after his cat, sitting beside him that night.

His entrepreneurial career is filled with grit, determination and lots of sacrifices that lead to various successes and a few wild stories of failure and near-death experiences.

In this episode, Rob talks about eating only carrots for two straight weeks to save money so that his business could survive. He tells me about a financial director who faked ovarian cancer and stole from another one of his businesses and how one piece of paper thrown in a trash can kickstarted his entrepreneurial endeavours.

Phil Tillman is a corporate man turned entrepreneur – To him, this is proof that an entrepreneur can learn the skills and doesn’t have to be “born that way”.

Phil believes he sleep-walked through his first 35 years and only woke up to his real-life at the age of 35 when he started his first business.

A single clause in his shareholder's agreement led to an unfortunate situation that cost him millions of dollars.

He put his personal wealth on the line to save his business from the grip of a listed entity.

In this episode of It's Not Over, Phil discusses his decision to get divorced and sell all of his assets to start a business which was nearly taken away from him at a ludicrously low price.

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Subscribe to It's Not Over:

Apple: https://apple.co/37gY2I6

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3E4wUbm

Google: https://bit.ly/3KBQgqG

Website: https://nicharalambous.com/its-not-over

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Phil's links:

Personal

https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-tillman-a514193/

Business

https://za.linkedin.com/company/surtech-solutions

https://www.facebook.com/surtech1/

https://mobile.twitter.com/surtechza

https://www.instagram.com/surtech.life/?hl=en

https://m.youtube.com/c/SurTechGroupofCompanies

Hiten Keshav is an accountant who wanted desperately to strike out on his own and build a business despite his parents desperately wanting him to take a different path to their own.

His first business opportunity was in an unfamiliar industry where he had no experience, no network and was burning through his hard-earned savings to survive.

It's not often that I get to speak to someone who chose to shut down a business, but in this episode of It's Not Over, Hiten reveals the pains of failure and the critical lessons he learned that allowed him to build a better business the next time around.

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Apple: https://apple.co/37gY2I6

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3E4wUbm

Google: https://bit.ly/3KBQgqG

Website: https://nicharalambous.com/its-not-over

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Follow Hiten:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hitenkeshave/

https://www.theunconventionalca.org/

The Daily Maverick is an important business. It’s a bastion of objective journalism in South Africa, a country that battles evil politicians, rampant unemployment, systemic corruption and myriad other social, political and economic issues.

Building a news organisation is no small task, especially in the age of social media, the duopoly of Google and Facebook trying to dictate how media organisations disseminate their news and make money from this news.

In the first episode of my new show, It’s Not Over, I spoke with Styli Charalambous who is the CEO and co-founder of The Daily Maverick.

Lauren Dallas is a Creator a Coach, an Educator, a Growth Marketer, a Hedonist and the CEO of Future Females.

She has started 5 businesses and shut 3 of them down.

In this episode Lauren talks about going broke, imposter syndrome, the realisation she cannot be a successful multi-tasking entrepreneur, how embracing her personal brand changed her business forever and how shrinking margins led to a breakdown that was the catalyst for her next business.

Subscribe:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/its-not-over/id1608333704

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3cix677zkpJ3FfnLgPuJc2

Google: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWRpYS5yc3MuY29tL2l0cy1ub3Qtb3Zlci9mZWVkLnhtbA%3D%3D

Website: itsnotover.show

Find Lauren online:

Instagram

Future Females

Sean Riley is the CEO of Ad Dynamo, the African advertising inventory behemoth. While fighting to stay alive, Sean was one month away from signing a deal with one of the largest social networks in the world.

In this episode we cover sales tactics, the difficulty of business travel, personal sacrifice and how to scale a business to allow the founder to work on the business and not in the business.

When his business eventually ended, it took with it his cofounder relationship, best mate and group of friends from high school.

Jason Bagley's company, Firing Squad, started out as a project-based service business. But thanks to his ability to analyse the data, he pivoted to a more profitable product-based retainer model focused on email management.

Unfortunately for Jason and his business partner, the data can only point you in the direction you need to go, the rest is up to you. Jason landed an enticing client who would mark the downfall of his company with late payment, all-consuming work and the promise of shiny silicon valley like growth and venture capital.

Jason's story is one filled with resilience, recovery, and an unfortunate lack of focus as a single destructive client grew in scope but not in profit.

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Subscribe to this show:

Apple: https://apple.co/37gY2I6

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3E4wUbm

Google: https://bit.ly/3KBQgqG

Website: https://nicharalambous.com/its-not-over

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Find Jason online:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbagley-copycheck/

https://getcopycheck.com/

Mike Sharman considers himself to be a creative and an entrepreneur. He used both of these traits to build a successful $1m social media agency called Retroviral, which is responsible for making more brands go viral than any other agency in Africa.

After successfully launching and then scaling Retroviral, Mike sold a majority stake in the business to a large corporate. That's when the gaps in his financial knowledge started to affect his role as CEO, the stability of the acquisition and put the day to day running of the business into a precarious position.

In this episode, Mike and I talk about his financial shortcomings, how he muddled through the acquisition and the impressive turnaround that followed.

Buy Mike's new book - http://brandalismbook.com/

Work with Retroviral - https://retroviral.co.za/

Follow Mike on Twitter - @mikesharman