Professional Speakers

Mandy Herold is a professional speaker and Gallup-certified CliftonStrengths coach with more than 25 years’ experience in education and leadership. A former school principal, she is recognised for translating behavioural science into practical tools for high-performance cultures. Her work explores Brave Leadership, emotional regulation, and what she terms Energetic Authenticity, equipping teams to strengthen trust, accountability, and connection under pressure. Drawing on classroom and executive leadership experience, she addresses educators, corporate teams, and female leaders seeking measurable growth. Her sessions combine research, structured frameworks, and lived insight to help organisations build resilient, values-aligned leadership at every level.

Cape-based Katlego is a fintech entrepreneur best known as co-founder and former CEO of Yoco, a digital payments platform serving more than 200,000 South African small businesses. During a decade leading the business, he scaled it from startup to nationally recognised payments and software provider processing billions in annual transaction value. He now serves as a strategic advisor, focusing on long-term growth and frontier initiatives. Previously, he worked in management consulting at Accenture and Delta Partners and helped build Jumia with Rocket Internet. He holds a Business Science Honours degree in Information Systems from the University of Cape Town.

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Cape based Saffron  is a sociologist, executive coach and keynote speaker specialising in human behaviour, organisational culture and performance in the age of artificial intelligence. Since 2013, she has run her own consultancy, delivering more than 10,000 hours of coaching and facilitation to leadership teams across sectors. Her work examines behavioural tipping points, trust dynamics and the social patterns that influence how people perform at work. Known for integrating live audience diagnostics into her keynotes, she provides leaders with actionable insight into engagement, culture alignment and performance readiness during periods of accelerated technological change and complexity.

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An international keynote speaker whose work on resilience, accountability and leadership under extreme adversity draws on a decade of wrongful imprisonment in Zimbabwe between 2003 and 2013. A former safari operator and pilot, he rebuilt his life after release and now addresses business leaders and professional teams on navigating crisis with composure and conviction. His presentations translate lived experience into practical insight on perspective, responsibility and decision-making under pressure. Based in Cape Town, he is the author of Beating Chains, a memoir detailing his imprisonment and personal transformation. "His story is “a life-changing experience that stays with you.”

Marc-Gregory is an Executive Presence and Visual Identity specialist who helps senior leaders understand how they are read, trusted and assessed through imagery. Drawing on more than 15 years of experience leading a large youth-focused agency working with brands including Apple, Coca-Cola and L’Oréal, he brings a commercially grounded understanding of leadership and culture. His award-winning work sits at the intersection of photography, psychology and leadership identity, focusing on how visual signals shape credibility and authority. Through a structured, purpose-led visual process, he works with executive teams to align how they show up publicly with how they lead sustainably.

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Based in Cape Town, Pierre is a strategist and author specialising in decision making under uncertainty. For more than two decades he has advised founders and senior executives on navigating complexity, drawing on systems thinking, behavioural research and direct commercial experience. His work examines how organisations respond to risk, ambiguity and accelerating technological change. He is the author of several books, including Train Naked, and his recent keynote, Analogue Advantage, challenges leaders to rethink automation as a source of differentiation. He argues that tangible experiences and considered strategy now create durable competitive advantage. Efficiency alone no longer ensures sustained relevance.

Aliyah Bulbulia is a Chartered Accountant (SA) and professional MC recognised for facilitating senior business conversations in high-performance environments. She completed her articles at Standard Bank, where she hosted and moderated strategic discussions with executive leaders across economics, strategy, M&A, and capital markets for audiences exceeding 500. Aliyah was awarded the SAICA Trainee Trailblazer Brand Ambassador Award, a national honour recognising leadership in public engagement. She has contributed to SAICA’s Blue Table Talk series and leads financial-literacy sessions through her Rands & Sense initiative, focused on early-career professionals.

Simon Hartley is an entrepreneur known for building and scaling WumDrop, a technology-enabled last-mile delivery business acquired by Walmart in 2024. Based in the Western Cape, he led the company from start-up to national logistics partner serving major retailers, navigating rapid growth, operational complexity and eventual integration into a global enterprise. Following the acquisition, he worked with Walmart International teams, gaining exposure to large-scale execution frameworks and cross-border decision-making. He now advises executives on growth strategy, execution discipline and organisational alignment, and serves as a non-executive director of the Ingwe Research Programme, contributing commercial perspective to research-led initiatives.