It was as tough as tough could be. From his early years, life loomed like a clenched fist in the face of Teboho Twala. These days he drives a Porsche and is a classy and elegant young entrepreneur a world away from his often tortured childhood.
At the age of 10, he was sleeping under a wheelbarrow in the yard and lived on the streets for more than a year. The reason – a troubled childhood through a mother who turned to drink and violence when Twala’s stepfather left her. His job became protecting his younger brothers and sister while dodging drunken rages by sleeping in the open in Qwaqwa, in South Africa’s Free State province, a 300-kilometer drive from Johannesburg.
Twala was left stranded without a plan, but someone was there to help him.
The first saviour was the mother of a friend, Masabata Sophie Mokome, known as ousie Sophie. She was the only one that stood up for Twala while other neighbors were scared, he says. Soon after, she told his son to fetch Twala to live with them.
“She ran a bath for me and the next day she took us to Edgars and bought us clothes,” he recalls.
Twala was adopted for over a year before moving back with his grandmother after she heard he was homeless.
Sadly, the grandmother died while young Twala was in secondary school. Fortunately, after living alone for a while, he was taken in by his aunt who is a domestic worker.
<div id="attachment_5525" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5525" class="size-medium wp-image-5525" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Teboho-012-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Teboho Twala</div>
He didn’t have an easy childhood, but the hardships steeled him into the man he is now. These days he has a trimmed beard, articulate speech, and is always on the phone.
He is a 35-year-old entrepreneur who makes a hangover drink, which also doubles as an energy drink for those who don’t drink alcohol. It is called Zzero Hangover.
It is a legacy of high school where his second saviour, his principal and biology teacher, believed in him like a father.
“Mr Ntsane; he looked after me. He may not have given me money but pushed me and I pushed myself,” he says.
Twala did so well in school that his fellow pupils collected money to pay his registration fees at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).
“The whole school had to donate, R1, R2. Mr Ntsane and I had to go to taxi ranks and government buildings to donate and we raised R1,700 ($120),” he recalls.
Young Twala passed all his subjects and he bought himself a Pentium 1 computer for about R1,000 ($70). It was his first computer and had no idea how to operate it; he had to learn fast. He was doing his first year in a bachelor of science (BSc) degree and needed to do assignments.
Two years later, he dropped the BSc for chemical engineering; he passed and got a bursary with Gold Fields in Virginia, Free State where he was reunited with his land of birth.
Sadly, all didn’t go well. Gold Fields’ share price went down in 2004 and students had to go home. Twala was without registration fees, nor a job.
Stranded without a plan, in stepped another guardian angel.
“A friend of mine assisted me; he had just finished his master’s and started working. He paid for my registration at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). I did well there; I had seven subjects and got five distinctions,” he says.
Post-graduation, Twala worked for Impala Platinum and later got an offer to work for South African Breweries (SAB). Two years later, he got a better offer with a bigger responsibility from Impala Platinum, in Rustenburg, in the North West province. He went back and worked right through to 2011.
The blessings came in abundance. That same year, he got an opportunity to work for a German company looking for a process engineer. Through that, he got an opportunity to work in Nigeria and travel to Germany.
That is when his entrepreneurial interest developed. He was inspired by the young entrepreneurs in Nigeria.
“But also, I had a boss, Sir David Osunde that believed in me. He was an old man; he took me to big meetings. I could then do presentations to ministers. That’s the level I was at because of this man,” he says.
Twala and other engineers from other parts of the world lived in a camp in cluster houses; each owning one. Besides work, they had nothing else to do. So they would spend time at the bar.
One night, they went to a pub and had a little too much to drink. The morning after, one of the engineers had a heavy hangover and didn’t know how to get rid of it, says Twala.
He took that as an opportunity and researched what could kill a hangover.
A European at the camp told him there was a solution for that in their continent. It was in Slovakia, but it was a German product with their head office in Austria. It was confusing for the young man.
In 2013, Twala came back to South Africa for a holiday. He wanted to make the idea work and not go back to Nigeria. He contacted people from Europe and told him they have a person in South Africa with a franchise, he bought it. He started distributing the product.
“It was called Alcohol Kill, but now it’s dead,” he says.
After traveling to and from Europe, Twala lost the R1 million ($70,000) he had invested in the business.
He had to come back and rethink how he was going to make the hangover solution work. During that period, he met a neurologist who said she could make an energy drink.
“I wanted something unique; my mind was on a hangover solution,” he says.
They worked tirelessly together and got a formula after a year.
Before that, Twala’s entrepreneurial instinct had kicked in. He and a friend bought News Café; a cafe-bar and cocktail franchise restaurant founded in South Africa.
He used that as an opportunity for customers to taste his product at the bar. He was getting good responses and decided to start bottling, manufacturing and distributing the product.
Twala came across a company called Boxmore which specializes in packaging. He bought generic bottles and branded them. The next challenge was finding someone who could fill the bottles.
He was satisfied with Inhle Beverages in Heidelberg, south of Johannesburg, which filled for big companies like USN and Clover. Throughout the production phase, all the companies liked the brand and its uniqueness.
Zzero Hangover was now born and had a trial run in April 2016.
“We produced a few units and sent them to the shops. That’s when the story broke in the media which was good for us,” he says.
The product was launched in May. Today, it is found in big retail stores across southern Africa. Zzero Hangover is self-funded and directly employs 10 people and contracts about 300.
Twala went from sleeping under a wheelbarrow to driving a Porsche and looking like a hero in his childhood township in the Free State. The hangover from his tough childhood has gone.

A Tough Hangover

Beer to brew and dragons to slay—it’s the top of the to-do list for South Africa’s small but growing brigade of microbrewers.
Brewers may have the dream of creating the perfect amber liquid and the business savvy to unleash it on the world, but the bureaucratic and legal hurdles to get their product to market are nothing short of a Kafkaesque nightmare.
South Africa has around 90 operational microbreweries at present and dozens more backyard brewers regularly making their appearances at brew-offs and small beer tasting events. But more than staking a claim on local palates, they want to capitalize on the craft beer revolution and become major players.
To brew, to distribute and to sell beer requires licenses and here lurks the untamed, fire-spewing monster. The licensing process is a notoriously clunky and costly process by the time paperwork and the attorney or consultant fees are thrown in. Worst of all, there are no apparent reasons why it should be this way.
Ndumiso Madlala is the founder of MadMead, the company brewing Soweto Gold. Madlala is a former master brewer for South African Breweries (SAB). In 2011, he decided to go it alone to become as he calls it a mini-SAB that is able to target the rising black middle class in Soweto.
“People in townships are getting robbed because they’re not getting to taste the beer styles that craft brewers are putting out there,” says Madlala.
Madlala is a 51% majority shareholder of his company. He had to secure private funding from a Swedish investor and get sponsorship from the Independent Development Corporation (IDC) to plug huge financial gaps before he even got started. It cost in the region of $790,000 to get his brewery on target to brew three million liters a year when they opened for business at the beginning of the year.
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“The license process has cost us R12,000 ($1,184) and we had to use a liquor license consultant too. We had to go through the usual things like tax clearances, police clearances and all of that but we had to wait month after month with no developments,” says Madlala.
Eventually MadMead struck a deal with established microbrewery Nottingham Road in KwaZulu-Natal to piggyback on their license to start brewing.
“You have to secure premises for brewing in a certain area, away from schools and churches and you have to have a lease agreement before you apply, which means you end up paying rent for months and not using it for brewing,” he says.
It is a frustrating wait and a blow to business innovators who are chipping away at a market previously cornered by the giants of SAB and Brandhouse.
Natalie and Stephen Meyer, the co-owners of the Clarens Brewery in the Free State, applied for their license in 2006, which she says may have been a time when licensing was a little easier.
They started out as seasonal home brewers making the most of windfall produce on their cherry and apple farm. When they decided to get into the industry to sell their brew, it cost them around $1,184, including lawyer fees and a four-month wait. When they moved to a more prominent location in the tourist town a few years later they had to reapply for their license. This time it cost them $1,677 and a nine–month wait.
“The typical process is that you have to eventually get a lawyer who starts legal proceedings against the liquor board, giving them 28 days to respond. Only then will the board get into action,” she says.
Meyer is frustrated that as a small business, an entrepreneur and an employer in a sector that ticks many boxes for success, they are not better supported.
“I know guys who have had to wait anything between two and four years and then eventually have to get lawyers on board, which of course costs money, to get a license,” she says.
“It makes no sense,” says Thea Blom, owner of Oakes Brewhouse in Modderfontein, west of Johannesburg.
It is an all-woman microbrewery that is a perfect addition for the historical village within the suburb.
“Craft beers are really on the map right now and we knew this would be a great fit for the village,” says Blom.
But they were forced to brew under court interdict until their license was finally approved, 18 months later.
“With the liquor boards making licensing processes so impossible, it just means more people will simply operate illegally. It’s crazy because the more people you have properly licensed the more people they could have on the tax base and they can audit them anytime,” she says.
Marius Blom of Couzyn Hertzog &amp; Horak attorneys, who does licensing applications in all nine provinces, says the long delays are stifling start-up businesses and tying up the liquor boards in court cases. Costs are ultimately passed onto taxpayers. These numerous failings have left the entire licensing process a sham.
“There is a lack of knowledge of the law; a lack of administration, which can be as basic as proper filing; and a lack of capacity or plain inefficiency,” says Blom of the majority of the provincial boards as well as the National Liquor Authority.
Blom says, in the years after 1994, the National Liquor Authority was decentralized into provincial boards with the intention of making licensing simple and cost effective.  The opposite has happened. He adds that while alcohol has been regarded a dangerous commodity for the last 100 years in need of regulation, 90% of all alcohol sellers in this country today do so illegally in unlicensed taverns and shebeens.
Microbrewers though must still face off the dragon of licensing and are left wondering why they are the ones left to put out fires.

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Hopping Hurdles

It all started with a beer television advertisement. It shows a dreamer, called Vuyo, who starts selling boerewors (traditional sausages) rolls on the streets and becomes a global brand; ending with a party on his yacht.
Kubheka was impressed and did a bit of research, only to find out that the Vuyo’s brand and the character was fiction. He swiftly trademarked the name Vuyo’s and opened a restaurant based on the advert. The unintended consequence was that the ad was building the Vuyo’s brand.
“I saw the ad like everyone else. And I thought that’s actually a good ad. But for me it was such a positive story. It’s like true entrepreneurship starting from grass roots,” says Kubheka.
At the time, he was running a small IT and software firm called Notsi Group for five years, with a partner, following a seven year stint at Microsoft. This IT geek left his desktop to focus on the restaurant, with little knowledge about the food business.
“It’s one of those things where I literally saw an opportunity and I thought to myself, one can work their entire career and not build up that amount of branding needed that South African Breweries was putting into this thing [the television beer advertisement]. It was sitting there and nobody was doing anything about it. I think that was a compelling enough reason to go into an industry I didn’t know,” says Kubheka.
The entrepreneur started by selling at outdoor events, but this was too small for him. Like Vuyo, he dreamed bigger. Kubheka decided to move away from mobile units.
He went back to the advert with the premise of dreaming big. So naturally, the next step was to open a restaurant. He was turned away seven times by a landlord who eventually gave Kubheka the contract for a property located opposite the University of the Witwatersrand, one of the biggest universities in South Africa, a spot which would bring in the numbers. It was the same university in Johannesburg where he completed his IT and Master’s degree.
“Surprisingly most of my customers are the working class. They want to leave the office and go somewhere clean and uncrowded. In Braamfontein there are not many areas where you can have a fast casual dining experience,” says Kubheka.
He opened his restaurant in December 2012 to much fanfare and even ordered a flurry of artificial snow. This was a strange detail, but he claims it was to attract attention to the red and white restaurant. This was one of the dreams he had inked on a cupboard in his bedroom while growing up.
In high school, Kubheka wrote down a projected timeline for his goals on his wardrobe door: the year he would finish his final year of high school, own a car and make his first million. He has now achieved all of that.
Today, when you walk into the restroom at Vuyo’s, you are flanked by two walls full of graffiti, which might give you the impression that the place is not well looked after, but look more closely. In between all those scribbles and graphics are 10 of Kubheka’s goals for the restaurant: By 2018, he hopes to be FORBES AFRICA’s person of the year. By 2022, he wants to make Vuyo’s the number one global brand, and also to have opened around 1,000 stores all over the world a year before that.
He wants to make South African food world renowned and build something that lasts.
“One of my frustrations about the country is that there is no good South African restaurant that is franchised or gone global that sells good boerewors, dumplings or samp. There are none. More importantly, I just want South African food to be thought of no different from when you go to an Italian, French or Chinese restaurant and the like,” he says.
The 37 year old has achieved one of his first goals written on the wall. Vuyo’s signed a deal to have 300 branded mobile units outside Spar outlets, a grocery retailer, across the country. He says if each vendor sells 50 boerewors rolls at $1.9 each a day, they would make a net income of $1,160 a month.
“My big dream is to make other big dreamers, like guys who have a braai next to the stadium, so we can give them branded Vuyo’s carts for no upfront capital outlay. To me that’s what it’s about, to give other people a leg up. I had one or two leg ups on my journey,” says Kubheka.
In early November, Kubheka says they had started rolling out the mobile units at Spars in Johannesburg, while work is underway to open a second store in Bloemfontein, in South Africa’s Free State province.
At the main restaurant, they serve various traditional South African dishes ranging from pap, stews, morogo (African spinach), dumplings, samp and koeksisters.
“Our vision is simple. We want to make South African cuisines world class. And that’s how we’re going to change the world,” he says.
As lunchtime approaches and the restaurant starts filling up, Kubheka’s senses intensify. He looks around to see if customers are happy and whether they have received their food.
Kubheka is doing his best to make the Vuyo’s brand a success. Between his busy schedule of managing the restaurant, he even has time to have lunch with Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex and third son of Queen Elizabeth the second. He also presented his business model to Britain’s headline-grabbing billionaire Richard Branson.
“He was impressed with my business model and he is keen to invest in us [Vuyo’s]. We are busy with the due diligence,” says Kubheka.
This young entrepreneur is certainly not just a big dreamer and he is not resting on his laurels. He is too busy making strides in building Vuyo’s as the number one global brand.

Tag: South African Breweries

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

A Tough Hangover

Hopping Hurdles

Business On A Roll