River of peace
Steven Braudo, head of Liberty Retail SA, tells Stephen Cranston about weekends at his place on the Vaal and his love of teeing off at the Parys golf club
We have four children, so as an actuary I am delighted that we have perfect symmetry: two boys and two girls. They are aged between four and 11. I don’t get much chance to see them during the week, though we always try to have breakfast together. Weekends are family time and fortunately Liberty rarely schedules meetings over the weekend. Most of the top management also have young children.
In the few weeks before interim and final results I will go into the office for a few hours on a Sunday — I certainly prefer that to taking work home. And sometimes I will host clients and intermediaries at rugby or cricket.
Meeting the people who have made Liberty such a success is always a pleasure, but fortunately I can do most of that during the week. In fact I make a point of spending at least a full day every week with people at the coal face of our business.
But usually in the summer on a Friday afternoon we go to our plot at the Vaal near Parys. We pooled resources with three other couples to create a really relaxing spot. We all have our own houses but we have a large common open area.
We decided we did not want our children growing up with their lives focused
84 on shopping malls.
Just seeing the river seems to take all my stress away and it is just over an hour from Jo’burg.
There is plenty for the kids to do as we have a pool, a boat with tubes and a cricket pitch. And we regularly braai. I sometimes treat myself to a round of golf at the magnificent Parys golf club with one of the other dads on the plot and there are quad bikes for the adults.
It is too cold around there to really enjoy the place in winter but for six months of the year it is the perfect getaway.
When we were building our property at the Vaal I realised that I found these building projects quite exciting. And I am now getting equally absorbed in the building of our new larger house in Linksfield, not far from where we are now.
We are bringing up our children as traditional but not ultra-religious Jews. They go to a Jewish day school and they are learning Hebrew. We have a traditional Friday night Sabbath meal whether we are at home or at the river. I take the children to shul every Friday night when we are in town and often on Saturday mornings too.
But I encourage them to participate in activities on Saturday. My two boys play club soccer for Highlands Park. My eldest daughter is a swimmer and acrobat.
I met my wife Leanne, who is an optometrist, on a blind date. Fortunately we did a lot of travelling before the kids were born, backpacking through America, Thailand and the UK. We probably won’t have time for that kind of holiday again.
Leanne used to work part-time but four young children with busy schedules is more than enough.
We are creatures of habit when it comes to our annual holidays — every year for the past 10 we have spent two to three weeks on a self-catering holiday in Umhlanga Rocks.
I will admit that most of my reading is business-focused, even at weekends. It includes Fortune and Institutional Investor as well as the Harvard Business Review. But I was moved by Out of the Depths, by Yisrael Meir Lau, the story of a holocaust survivor who rose to become chief rabbi of Israel.
On a lighter note, I am loading Mud, Sweat and Tears by Bear Grylls, the adventurer, onto my Kindle. I am certainly not an extreme sportsman but I enjoy his tales.