It was around two years ago when I found myself on one of those musty and cramped overnight buses headed from Cuzco to Lima in Peru. Tired of watching B-grade Spanish movies and eating Pringles to pass the time, I went online to Google my mom: Michelle Meyjes.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-30037 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Moving-to-France_2012-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Moving-to-France_2012-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Moving-to-France_2012-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Moving-to-France_2012-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Moving-to-France_2012.jpg 640w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
All the expected results came up: CEO, award-winning South African businesswoman, media mogul, a ‘proven leader’ and her face on a few magazine covers. There was even an article that declared her one of ‘South Africa’s top 30 wonder women’ alongside Graça Machel, Ferial Haffajee and Thuli Madonsela.
And there I was, slouching in that seat on a musty and cramped bus, the only child of this superwoman, the only hope of carrying forth the great business genes; now on my last pennies, eating Pringles and on a bus to nowhere.
We laugh about it now but it took me a good few years to learn that a shadow is no great place for the daughter of a businesswoman.
Mom and I have always been wonderfully close – we share everything (except underwear) and we’ve always celebrated our differences: she is humble as chips, I’m showy as a peacock; she’s astute with money, I never have any of it; she’s strategic, I’m creative. And she comes from the generation where you start work and you stay there your whole life whether you like it or not. It’s all you know, it’s what you’re good at, so just put your head down and shoulder the storm, dear woman!
For a while, I tried to play in the same work place, riding off the coat-tails of a phenomenal mother and industry role-model. I moved to Johannesburg to ‘pursue a career’ because that’s what the city promised our young, educated and ambitious professionals: work, money, commodity, stuff. I was groomed to ‘be MD in two years’ and told ‘you’re going to be just like your mother’.
And then one day, I couldn’t face getting out of bed. My phone was stealing my life – ting, ting, ting, beep, beep. Emails and text messages and phone calls from clients and the boss and my co-workers and more emails&#8230; I put my duvet over my head and tried to block it all out. At 24, I was sick from stress, burnt out and uninspired.
That night, I made the decision to pack it all in – leave the job, the boyfriend, the title and the money and head in the direction of goodness knows where. And the best thing of all was that mom remained my biggest supporter. Often she said, “Don’t do what I did, my baby.”
So I decided to live for living. I moved to France, I worked on a few super yachts and was fired once or twice. I met my future husband while taking out the rubbish and I learned to speak Swedish (he’s Swedish). I got a casual job in Tanzania and I backpacked through parts of South America. I studied as a Pilates instructor in Italy and moved to the outskirts of Monaco, where it’s okay not to have much money and eat cheap Indian curry. I don’t own a Louis Vuitton bag. And until further notice, we won’t own a car. I started writing again and mustered up a community of South African expatriates who were also trying to figure out why Europe still didn’t feel like home.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-30039 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Leaving-the-desk-for-the-deck_France-2012-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Leaving-the-desk-for-the-deck_France-2012-300x300.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Leaving-the-desk-for-the-deck_France-2012-100x100.jpg 100w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Leaving-the-desk-for-the-deck_France-2012-600x600.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Leaving-the-desk-for-the-deck_France-2012-150x150.jpg 150w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Leaving-the-desk-for-the-deck_France-2012-768x768.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Leaving-the-desk-for-the-deck_France-2012.jpg 843w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
And I spent time repairing, re-gathering and listening to the stories of other people. Whether it was a lesson from my homeless friend John or a moment spent making a bed for Arabic royalty, I came to learn that life has so many different angles and that success can mean so many different things.
I learned things about success that a career would never have taught me.
And in the end, I have come to terms with the fact that we have chosen different lives – my mom and I.
It’s a sad thing that success has become about money and things and a frantic, hard slog to the top, often in tough and abusive work environments that are especially hard on our women. For us women, success should be about time: spending time, having a good time, or simply having the time. Success should be about time with the right people, time with ourselves; or doing what we love while we still have the time to do it. Time makes us richer.
I may have walked away from a well-paved career but I never believed packing up meant giving up. I still admire those women who have the guts to survive in that world. And I thank my supermom for giving me the courage to choose differently.
The writer studied radio journalism and landed a desk job in South Africa before packing it all up for the more interesting life.

Living-in-France-II_Nov-2014

Nothing Like A Businesswoman

Doyenne of advertising – check. Industry veteran – check. Supermom – check. Late hours – check. Sleepless nights – check. Time taken for self – “What’s that?” says Michelle Meyjes, the CEO of MEC Group and CEO of GroupM based in Johannesburg.
GroupM, WPP’s consolidated media investment management operation, has 36% share of all advertisements placed in the South African market. It serves as the parent company to some powerful media agencies such as Maxus, MEC, MediaCom and Mindshare.
Helming an operation of that stature and with an unstoppable career spanning over three decades, Meyjes’ question, then, is valid.
She makes two inferences here. One, that often women, in their relentless pursuit to balance work and life, don’t make enough time for themselves; most of what they do is “at the expense of the self”.
And two, that she is yet to take the sabbatical she had promised herself, 13 years ago.
Ever the unassuming CEO – her 27-year-old daughter Bianca calls her “humble as chips”, Meyjes, by her own admission, is not comfortable giving interviews. But when she speaks, she speaks genuinely and of matters close to her heart.
Not surprisingly, she begins with the state of the education system in South Africa (SA), and consequently, the lack of quality talent.
“I have that dream of giving the same amount of passion and same amount of drive I have given the ad industry, to the education department. I would go in there and start again. To me, that probably is an area we need to fix,” says Meyjes.
The topic leads to her own education. She had dropped out of Rhodes University (in SA) in the second year of her bachelor’s degree.
“I regret it to this day, it was a stupid decision,” she says. “I came from a very humble and disadvantaged family, [but] my mom got funding for me from friends to send me through university. Had I applied myself to it, I would have completed it, but I didn’t.”
Meyjes forayed into the publishing world, starting with Readers’ Digest on the sales side, then moving to Republican Press (now Caxton) where she worked across a number of titles.
“Then I went to the client side. I got into classical marketing, which is really where my heart lay.”
And then it happened. Her First Big Break – Panasonic, where she stayed for over a decade. She was the only female director on the board in the group’s history in SA.
“Panasonic gave me experiences in the marketing field that only a big brand can do today. We were playing in the big field. I worked with exceptionally creative individuals and great leaders. That’s what inspired my career,” says Meyjes.
Those were also the days when ‘Media’ was an in-house department in the creative agencies. Gradually, it started breaking away into specialized standalone agencies. That’s when Meyjes decided to “pack in” her corporate career, and join a business associate who was running one of SA’s first start-up media specialist agencies.
“Interestingly enough, I did it when I was 40 years old. In the corporate world, you have everything at your disposal – legal, financial, every possible function. And now I had become an entrepreneur, and got the biggest shock of my life! You do everything, you collect your own money and you only have each other.”
It was a successful partnership as the duo received offers from big brands. Soon, they sold out 100% to WPP and the business was rebranded Mediaedge, which is today MEC.
“At the time, my [business] partner said she wanted a sabbatical. I said, ‘strange you should say that, because I am tired too’. Building a business is not easy. So I said ‘you go, I will go later’ and came to an agreement with the shareholders that I would take a sabbatical later, which I might add, to this day, I have not taken,” laughs Meyjes.
She carried on, leading MEC. The group witnessed exponential growth. Currently, it is the fourth-largest media agency in SA with 11.6% industry share and billing of $370K. Meyjes has won some crucial awards along the way.
But for the second time during the course of the interview, she asks (for all women): “When you get to a role at the top, do you look back and say, ‘has it been at my expense’?”
“I don’t think women actually know what they want. I just see so many, you can tell they don’t want to be at the workplace, and have no option but to work. It’s circumstantial. Question is: are they going to make the most of it, or go by on just the bare minimum? …You have to work hard, there are no short-cuts. You have to make sacrifices and the biggest sacrifice is your own self. I think if you can get that balance right, that to me is the most critical.”
Meyjes is happy that her only daughter, who she calls an exceptional child, chose to break away from the corporate world, to follow her dreams, traveling the world, yachting and living in Monaco.

Tag: Michelle Meyjes

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Nothing Like A Businesswoman

The CEO And The Pending Sabbatical