BusinessDay: BusinessDay
7 December 2009 - BusinessDay
Travel with Flair’s Johanna Mukoki.... This year the agency was named Africa’s leading business travel agency in the 16th annual World Travel Awards. Picture: MARTIN RHODES
SOME of our parents’ favourite sayings stay with us our whole lives. For Johanna Mukoki, it is her father’s motto, “Hard work never killed anyone,” that has guided her career.
Her father had a second motto: “People are attracted to those that glow,” and the 30-something former Miss SA finalist seems to have taken this to heart, too. Tall, slender and elegant in a black suit with a white frilled shirt, she exudes energy and enthusiasm.
Hard work and enthusiasm have propelled Mukoki from childhood in Soweto, where money was scarce and studies disrupted by political events, to MD of the business Travel with Flair that she and two partners started when she was 26.
In November she was named top young woman entrepreneur in the sixth annual Top Women Awards by TopCo Media, and also took the overall title of Top Woman of the Year in Business.
Travel with Flair has also won its share of accolades. This year it was named Africa’s leading business travel agency in the 16th annual World Travel Awards, as well as both SA’s and Africa’s leading travel management company.
After studying accounting at Rhodes University and completing her articles at auditing firm KPMG, Mukoki decided her outgoing personality was not suited to a career in accountancy and looked around for something else.
She did a short stint in communications before joining Robert Wilke and Tibor Zsadanyi to launch the travel agency in Pretoria 13 years ago.
Each brought a speciality: Mukoki in financial management, Wilke in information technology systems and Zsadanyi in hospitality (he was professor in tourism at Pretoria University).
Subsequently, Mukoki’s sister, former Miss SA Basetsana Kumalo, has joined as a director.
The agency employs 340 people, of whom 80% are women, and it has offices in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town.
Its speciality is corporate travel management although the Pretoria office services some leisure clients.
The focus on the corporate and government market rather than the leisure market has helped Travel with Flair weather the recession.
Mukoki says the clients on its books continue to travel for business, although they are making savings by scaling down to a lower class or a lower-cost airline. That means the volume of transactions is the same as before, but the value is less.
There have been no retrenchments, and Mukoki is proud of the business’s ability to retain staff. In an industry of high staff turnover, Travel with Flair’s retention rate is 97%. “People here work more as my partners than my employees,” she says. “They work overtime and never go home until their work is finished.”
She says her management style is “to lead by serving. As I walk past someone’s desk, she might say to me, ‘Sister boss, is my plug working?’ and I’ll look under the desk and check her plug is working. I’m part of the team. I’d rather treat people with love and respect and have them disappoint me than be the kind of boss with a whip.”
Mukoki believes women have particular strengths in the service industry. “Because we have this mothering instinct, we have more patience. You need that in our industry, with people changing their bookings back and forth. Women are more committed, more sincere, while men are more structured in their approach. They like to go straight to the punch line.
“In the service industry, clients like to feel that you care. We have one experienced employee who remembers personal details about clients and asks after their families before she takes their bookings. Clients do stay with us and the quality of our service has given us a competitive edge.”
Another strength of the business is its information technology platform, which she believes is the best in the industry. Travel with Flair is unusual among agencies in having its own IT department — even though it consists of only four people.
Clients receive confirmations of their bookings by SMS, something Travel with Flair instituted knowing that not all travellers are in touch with their offices all the time. It was a pioneer in the use of e-ticketing.
Mukoki is also the first person from Africa to sit on the international board of the Association for Corporate Travel Executives, which includes some of the Fortune 500 companies’ vice-presidents.
Board meetings are held regularly around the world, giving an opportunity to exchange ideas and learn at a very senior global level.
But Mukoki has learnt some hard lessons, after becoming embroiled in a court battle several years ago to protect her copyright when she was producing a television programme, Women on the Move . She says she is grateful it happened early enough in her career to teach her a useful lesson — not to expose all your ideas without taking steps to protect yourself. “Business doesn’t have to be cut-throat,” she says. “Decency is rewarded.”
Mukoki says proudly that she was a “straight-A” student — in difficult circumstances . Her mother was a teacher before her parents started a construction business together. Money was often tight. She recalls a Christmas with no money for food or presents and, as a small child, running under the turnstile at the railway station to avoid paying the fare.
As the top pupil in her junior school, she was selected for the privately run Pace Commercial College in Soweto, where she remembers with respect the quality of the teachers, many of whom were British or American. One of the courses was given by Dale Carnegie himself, and she won the prize for the best essay in his course — a personally signed copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People .
In 1986, the year she was due to write matric, riots threw Soweto into turmoil and her folks had to take her to Damelin College to complete her studies.
But Damelin College was well beyond her father’s purse — she recalls him being presented with a document to sign that “basically said if he doesn’t pay the fees when due, he will go to jail”, and being persuaded by her mother to sign it.
Then the family went to seek a sponsor. It was already two months into the academic year.
“We went to one of the smaller banks — the manager was a Mr Bosman,” Mukoki recalls. “He agreed to see me and I told him I wanted to go to Damelin. He said school had started two months ago, it was impossible for me to catch up. I said if you give me a chance, if I can pass the first tests of that semester, will you agree to sponsor me? He said if I could pass those tests, he would be happy to sponsor me. With his conditional letter Damelin let me register and the first exams were in three weeks’ time.
“I studied like never before — tough subjects like maths, accounting, statistics — and I was still living in Soweto and the electricity often went off, so I was studying by candlelight. But when the tests came I aced them. I ran to Mr Bosman — and that’s how I got to complete my matric at Damelin.”
Mukoki says she is a product of sponsorship and fundamental to her philosophy in life is that unless you do your best, you will never know how much you can achieve. “I never forget my past or take for granted where I am.”
I’d rather treat people with love and respect and have them disappoint me than be the kind of boss with a whip
SOME of our parents’ favourite sayings stay with us our whole lives. For Johanna Mukoki, it is her father’s motto, “Hard work never killed anyone,” that has guided her career.
Her father had a second motto: “People are attracted to those that glow,” and the 30-something former Miss SA finalist seems to have taken this to heart, too. Tall, slender and elegant in a black suit with a white frilled shirt, she exudes energy and enthusiasm.
Hard work and enthusiasm have propelled Mukoki from childhood in Soweto, where money was scarce and studies disrupted by political events, to MD of the business Travel with Flair that she and two partners started when she was 26.
In November she was named top young woman entrepreneur in the sixth annual Top Women Awards by TopCo Media, and also took the overall title of Top Woman of the Year in Business.
Travel with Flair has also won its share of accolades. This year it was named Africa’s leading business travel agency in the 16th annual World Travel Awards, as well as both SA’s and Africa’s leading travel management company.
After studying accounting at Rhodes University and completing her articles at auditing firm KPMG, Mukoki decided her outgoing personality was not suited to a career in accountancy and looked around for something else.
She did a short stint in communications before joining Robert Wilke and Tibor Zsadanyi to launch the travel agency in Pretoria 13 years ago.
Each brought a speciality: Mukoki in financial management, Wilke in information technology systems and Zsadanyi in hospitality (he was professor in tourism at Pretoria University).
Subsequently, Mukoki’s sister, former Miss SA Basetsana Kumalo, has joined as a director.
The agency employs 340 people, of whom 80% are women, and it has offices in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town.
Its speciality is corporate travel management although the Pretoria office services some leisure clients.
The focus on the corporate and government market rather than the leisure market has helped Travel with Flair weather the recession.
Mukoki says the clients on its books continue to travel for business, although they are making savings by scaling down to a lower class or a lower-cost airline. That means the volume of transactions is the same as before, but the value is less.
There have been no retrenchments, and Mukoki is proud of the business’s ability to retain staff. In an industry of high staff turnover, Travel with Flair’s retention rate is 97%. “People here work more as my partners than my employees,” she says. “They work overtime and never go home until their work is finished.”
She says her management style is “to lead by serving. As I walk past someone’s desk, she might say to me, ‘Sister boss, is my plug working?’ and I’ll look under the desk and check her plug is working. I’m part of the team. I’d rather treat people with love and respect and have them disappoint me than be the kind of boss with a whip.”
Mukoki believes women have particular strengths in the service industry. “Because we have this mothering instinct, we have more patience. You need that in our industry, with people changing their bookings back and forth. Women are more committed, more sincere, while men are more structured in their approach. They like to go straight to the punch line.
“In the service industry, clients like to feel that you care. We have one experienced employee who remembers personal details about clients and asks after their families before she takes their bookings. Clients do stay with us and the quality of our service has given us a competitive edge.”
Another strength of the business is its information technology platform, which she believes is the best in the industry. Travel with Flair is unusual among agencies in having its own IT department — even though it consists of only four people.
Clients receive confirmations of their bookings by SMS, something Travel with Flair instituted knowing that not all travellers are in touch with their offices all the time. It was a pioneer in the use of e-ticketing.
Mukoki is also the first person from Africa to sit on the international board of the Association for Corporate Travel Executives, which includes some of the Fortune 500 companies’ vice-presidents.
Board meetings are held regularly around the world, giving an opportunity to exchange ideas and learn at a very senior global level.
But Mukoki has learnt some hard lessons, after becoming embroiled in a court battle several years ago to protect her copyright when she was producing a television programme, Women on the Move . She says she is grateful it happened early enough in her career to teach her a useful lesson — not to expose all your ideas without taking steps to protect yourself. “Business doesn’t have to be cut-throat,” she says. “Decency is rewarded.”
Mukoki says proudly that she was a “straight-A” student — in difficult circumstances . Her mother was a teacher before her parents started a construction business together. Money was often tight. She recalls a Christmas with no money for food or presents and, as a small child, running under the turnstile at the railway station to avoid paying the fare.
As the top pupil in her junior school, she was selected for the privately run Pace Commercial College in Soweto, where she remembers with respect the quality of the teachers, many of whom were British or American. One of the courses was given by Dale Carnegie himself, and she won the prize for the best essay in his course — a personally signed copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People .
In 1986, the year she was due to write matric, riots threw Soweto into turmoil and her folks had to take her to Damelin College to complete her studies.
But Damelin College was well beyond her father’s purse — she recalls him being presented with a document to sign that “basically said if he doesn’t pay the fees when due, he will go to jail”, and being persuaded by her mother to sign it.
Then the family went to seek a sponsor. It was already two months into the academic year.
“We went to one of the smaller banks — the manager was a Mr Bosman,” Mukoki recalls. “He agreed to see me and I told him I wanted to go to Damelin. He said school had started two months ago, it was impossible for me to catch up. I said if you give me a chance, if I can pass the first tests of that semester, will you agree to sponsor me? He said if I could pass those tests, he would be happy to sponsor me. With his conditional letter Damelin let me register and the first exams were in three weeks’ time.
“I studied like never before — tough subjects like maths, accounting, statistics — and I was still living in Soweto and the electricity often went off, so I was studying by candlelight. But when the tests came I aced them. I ran to Mr Bosman — and that’s how I got to complete my matric at Damelin.”
Mukoki says she is a product of sponsorship and fundamental to her philosophy in life is that unless you do your best, you will never know how much you can achieve. “I never forget my past or take for granted where I am.”
I’d rather treat people with love and respect and have them disappoint me than be the kind of boss with a whip
Source: BusinessDay
