Justin Nurse

Maybe… I’ve never really thought about that. One’s strengths are one’s weaknesses with the volume turned up a little bit. I’ve always been incredibly independent, which has driven me to do a lot of the things I’ve done in my life. My privileged background also meant that I was never afraid to fail.

At university in Stellenbosch, I was disappointed with what I was being taught – it was very traditional, very “chalk and talk” – so I went out of my way to teach myself, which I really loved.

I then set up a learning centre – teaching the things I’d learnt – as a business on the side.

At the end of my varsity degree, I did my internship under the tutelage of Colin Hall, chairman of the Wooltru Group. He sat me down on my first day and asked me, “What’s your big ‘yes’?” By the end of my month-long internship, I’d mulled over his question long enough to know that I wanted to start a “cool school”. If I did that one day, I knew that I’d have lived a worthwhile life. The birth of TSiBA. I wanted to combine the new ways of learning that I’d taught myself. A school where students and teachers woke up in the morning and wanted to go to school.

I knew all these things about how to bring out the best in people, but I wasn’t seeing it in our schools. I was still too young to start a school, though, so I worked in the corporate space for a few years, advising companies on project management.

This taught me a bunch of hard core skills, and I rose very quickly. When I got too comfortable, I pulled the brakes, resigned and went off to start my school.

I didn’t know how or where, though. Colin, who’d become a mentor over the years, told me about Cida City Campus, a free university in Johannesburg. I phoned the CEO and said: “I’m coming to work for you, I need to know how your model works.”

I moved to Johannesburg and within 18 months we (myself and the three other cofounders) had seed capital to start TSiBA in Cape Town. I was 24 at the time.

Our seed capital came from Mark Shuttleworth, and his two conditions were that we spend a year planning, and that we document everything we do. So we wrote a recipe book on how you start a free university.

2004 was our set-up year and it was glorious. In 2005 we opened our doors in a seedy industrial park, with 80 students. At the end of that year, Old Mutual offered us their old training centre in Pinelands, and we’ve been there ever since.

We are now in our eighth year of operation, and now have 370 students. We have two campuses, the other in a rural area just outside George.

Do you struggle to get funding?

You never rest easy. Companies want to sponsor education. But we’re not just a nice CSI project – we produce graduates companies want to employ. So we make business sense.

As we expand, our budget continues to grow, and it’s an ever-increasing pot that needs to be addressed.

We’ve created a separate fund that has done some great broad-based black economic empowerment deals that fund more scholarships.

Funding is a challenge, but it’s not hard. You’ve just got to be willing to persevere and work as a team. And the great thing about us is that we do work as a team. I couldn’t have done this on my own. Sure, you don’t have weekends and you don’t have evenings… but looking back, it’s been worth working hard for. What’s next for you? Hmm… I’ve just become a mother. And I’m stepping down as MD, for a host of good reasons.

TSiBA has been my child for the past nine years, and now that I have a real child, it’s time for new leadership. The entrepreneurial spark is good for a while, but then you need a different kind of a leader.

One of us who started this has to take what we know, and help others replicate what we do. The government of Botswana has asked us to help them, so we’ll hopefully have TSiBA Gaborone set up by January. I’d like to be working on that.

What kind of a leader are you?

I’m definitely an affective leader. I’m an emotional leader – a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, gut-feel leader. My colleagues talk about my passion for people, and I hope that people know that I care. People always look at me and say: “You’re very young, what qualified you to do this?” And I say, Nothing, just my passion.

I’m not a details person, I’m not systematic. I can sell a vision, motivate people and work alongside them. Those are some of my strengths.

Are you hopeful about South Africa?

Incredibly. One of the joys of my job is that I work every day with this emerging generation of leaders.

We read the papers and we see the poster boys who don’t give youth a good rap, but on the ground there’s a lot of cool stuff happening. So I’m incredibly hopeful because I see this new calibre of leaders coming up. Visit www.tsiba.org.za

Nurse is a freelance journalist and founder of Laugh It Off.