Heritage Day is about where we come from. Mine started with a chess computer and a paper route.
Move by move
In standard 6, one of my favourite rooms at Hyde Park High was the library, and my favourite opponent was the computer. Chess taught me something I've never unlearned: the person who sees the consequences of a move before they make it usually wins.
I didn't just want to play the machine, though. I wanted to own one. So every morning before school I climbed on my bike and did my paper route. We lived in Riepen Park, Sandhurst, a neighbourhood so small it only had two streets, and there was a computer shop at the bottom of Conrad Drive, near Jan Smuts. One pay bought me a Super VGA screen. Another, a tower. Another, a motherboard with a 486 processor. Nothing was certain about that build. I didn't know if it would boot until the very last part went in. When it finally did, complete with floppy and stiffy drives, the chess was forgotten. I was hooked on the machine itself.
Learning the hard way, in the right order
Command prompt was my first teacher, and it was not a gentle one. Then I stumbled into Visual Basic and gave my machine a "visual menu", which felt like magic. My networking skills came from LAN parties: Doom, Counterstrike, and the quiet discovery that a network only matters when it just works.
Then there was the internet. I pestered my mother for it with a rudimentary business case about school projects and better marks. One afternoon I came home to an unfamiliar man in our house installing the Mweb Big Black Box. That box introduced me to HTML, and I was off again.
From breadboards to boardrooms
I matriculated with marks good enough for electrical engineering, and for four years breadboards and logic gates were my life. From there my career took me into product management and pricing at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, where I oversaw 13 countries and worked alongside the likes of Vodacom, Gateway Communications, Exact Mobile and Nokia. Different scale, same instinct: understand the system well enough that you can tell someone, with confidence, what it will do.
That instinct is where certainty comes in. Everything I've built, from the paper-route PC to enterprise pricing across a continent, comes down to the same thing: people can get on with what matters when they know the technology, and the people behind it, will hold. That's what I bring to the table. Not surprises. Certainty.
Why Enabler fits
Enabler's message, that certainty is freedom, isn't a slogan I had to grow into. It's how I already thought. What I didn't expect was how much the culture would work in both directions. [Your story: a moment where feedback from you changed how the team works, or where a colleague's challenge changed your approach.] The culture feeds me, and what I learn from customers goes back into the culture. That loop is the reason I can lead a customer through Optimise, Elevate and Evolve with confidence. I'm not selling a journey I haven't walked myself.
The next 90 days
Enabler is ahead of its FY27 target, and it's got there entirely on the strength of its reseller channel. That's a real achievement, and it's also the opening of my next chapter here.
My first priority is building a direct go-to-market, so the business has a direct relationship with the customer alongside its channel strength. That means we're in the room for the conversations that matter, steering the Optimise, Elevate and Evolve lifecycle ourselves, and delivering the Concierge Model the way it's meant to be delivered.
To make that real, I'm recruiting and training a direct sales team, one that understands precisely where managed services ends and being a business enabler begins. Around that team, I'm also building out customer-facing functions that haven't existed in the business before, because a direct go-to-market needs more than salespeople to support it properly.
None of that works in a vacuum. We also need visibility, so prospective customers understand who we are and what we do before that first conversation happens. Getting that right is a balance I intend to manage carefully: visibility has to add value for the customer, not add noise to their day.
Scaling all of this takes capital as well as intent. We're in stage three of a four-stage process with a global investment partner who sees the trajectory we're on and the space we're carving out. I'm hopeful we'll be able to confirm that deal, and the cash injection behind it, in the coming weeks.
Far from behind a desk
I haven't sold out to the commercial side. Right now I'm building a natural language system for one customer that reads the company diaries, welcomes guests in the lobby, notifies the host and offers the guest a coffee. For another, I'm building an on-premise local LLM that controls IoT devices in the building, a leak detection system and reports on stringent compliance requirements. My life is far from behind a desk.
That kid on the bike at dawn would approve. On Heritage Day, and heading into October, that's the heritage I'm proudest of: staying curious enough to keep building.
— Yves Kanda, Head of Commercial, Enabler Technologies