The LRMG (Pty) Ltd birthday story written by Lorinda Ellis-Loots.
You never can tell . . . exactly how a brand journey will unfold. That first step leads to the creation of a dream . . . but beware! There will be some nightmares along the way. The trick is to keep dreaming and shape shifting a brand lit up by its purpose.
My business partner, Ricky Robinson’s purpose was always to uplift people in the workforce. Soon after completing his MBA at Cape Town University Business school in 1987, Ricky founded Concord Training Enterprises CC and scripted, produced and filmed two Industrial Relations training videos which starred his university friends Linda and David Thompson, Jeremy and Colleen Chennells, Richard Day, and Stuart Symington (Stu).
Ricky then enlisted the help of Stu to pedal the videos to corporations in South Africa for Concord in his spare time as a full-time teacher. What happened was extraordinary! With Stu’s self-taught selling skills and lively personality, he sold buckets of the two videos and was instrumental to the awards and acclaims the videos received, showing what commitment and passion can do.
The two training videos opened the doors of possibility
- Procedural Fairness – How to discipline an employee fairly, which won the Department of Education and Training’s Award for the Best Management Training video in 1989
- Substantive Fairness and the Disciplinary Enquiry became a best seller
In 1990, at the age of 29, I designed a logo and set up the business in our lounge in Mowbray, Cape Town.
No staff, no money, and no idea of how to run a business in direct marketing. However, we had an international training video distribution catalogue from Down Under (Australian corporate training videos produced by Wilson Main).
And so, my life of building my first brand began. With this photo on the back of our first direct mailing via snail mail, I launched our business operations with a series of Service Excellence training videos. While Ricky stayed in corporate just in case, I bombed. . . and I came close to bombing many times, learning that for brand creation cash is king, and service excellence in EVERYTHING!
How do you move ZERO?
I studied the science of direct marketing and learnt that, without a mailing list and target market contact database, you are at ground zero. So, the telephone book and I became particularly good friends. . . no internet back then, this was 1990… just pages and pages of the Yellow Pages. Let your fingers do the walking . .
- Step 1. Hand write company names and telephone numbers on a page in an A4 black book in alphabetical order with ruler drawn columns for HR Manager name: tick ✓, company telephone number: tick ✓ – yup, no PC or laptop in those days.
- Step 2. Call the number sourced from the Yellow Pages via their land lines – yup, no mobile phones then either. So, I called the receptionist of each company and pretended that I was applying for a job and asked for the name of the head of HR: tick ✓ (contact name in the black book), then I asked for the correct mailing address so I could post my CV to the HR manager: tick ✓ (snail mail address)
- Step 3. Hand-write five thousand A3 brochure-laden envelopes – people are more likely to open handwritten envelopes than typed, labelled envelopes. The deal was five videos at R500 each, with a series price of R2500. Fax me your order, mail me your cheque and upon receipt I would mail you the videos. Yup, no EFT in those days either.
- Step 4. Lick and stick five thousand stamps for the envelopes – drop it in the mail and stare at the fax machine. Yup, no email in those days either. I visited the post office and the bank twice a day.
- Step 5. Stare at the fax machine. Mail took two weeks. Yup, that didn’t change – still does
- Step 6. Pay the brochure designer, printer and envelope supplier. Do not pay yourself a salary. Watch your company bank balance go into overdraft. No cash left. If the fax machine does not light up with any orders – you bomb!
- Step 7. Stare at the fax machine. Pray and believe that orders will come in.
- Step 8. Stay on your knees. Test that the fax machine works and has paper in.
- Step 9. Deposit your last savings into the company account. Order in video stock and branded shipping boxes.
- Step 10. The fax machine lights up like a Christmas tree! Start packing up orders like crazy and check the post box every day for cheques. Deposit cheques and postal orders . . . and breathe . . . it is happening, you are building a brand!
Twelve months of building the business in our apartment – by which time the lounge, spare bedroom and under-cover veranda had become filled with video stock and two staff members: a tele marketer to help with tele sales (Lucille Johnson, one of our current staff members’ sister Gail) and Frieda (Lucille Johnson’s mother). We had secured another two international training video catalogues and were becoming known for service excellence, but we still did not have the coveted catalogue: Video Arts, starring John Cleese and Hugh Laurie (House).
It was time to set up an office to build the operation into a business worthy of pitching for the Video Arts catalogue. And so, we signed a lease for our first offices in Pinelands, Cape Town. Painted it blue-purple and created desks with doors I painted black and put on hardware store trestles – no money for office furniture. But . . . fresh flowers and lots of warmth from committed staff to create a memorable experience – one that clients would certainly not forget!
The very first team in our business. Two of them are still in the business today!
- Melanie Grobler dressed in black – our first receptionist
- Lorinda Ellis (in front) dressed in white
The magic: Service Excellence
Answer the phone within 3 rings: “Concord Training good day. This is Melanie – how can I help you?”
Never compromise – ALWAYS answer the phone in 3 rings or less, and always have a smile in your voice
I am leaving on a jet plane – gotta go get Video Arts
As soon as we could afford it, I booked at trip to Los Angeles to attend ASTD (American Society of Training and Development), a huge annual conference and expos where all the world’s best training video producers congregated. Tina Tietjen was the doyen who ran Video Arts in London, UK, and she rented a suite in the best conference hotel and ran back-to-back appointments with all her global distributors over two days. The Video Arts contracts was then with MAST, the biggest corporate training provider at the time. I tried every viable way to get her attention – no way, she was just too important and too busy to see me. And happy with MAST, why would she?
Alas, I flew back to South Africa via London and lay over for a week to see new UK video producers. There I had a lightening bulb brave moment: what if I made an appointment with Tina in London at the Video Arts head office? So, I did, and I got an appointment. I walked into her office and as I sat down, she said: “Nice to meet you but not sure why because we have very good distributors in South Africa.” Gulp.
Think on your feet Lorinda, no sit down before the blood drains out of your head. Be brave and just speak from the heart and with confidence. My reply: “Thank you for seeing me, Tina. Concord Training is new to the market, and you need to know about us and watch what we do. We are going to become the biggest corporate training and learning content distributor on the African continent. You will want us to represent Video Arts soon.” Where did that come from? Guts, grit, determination, belief, and FEAR. It was my ‘feel the fear but do it anyway’ moment.
What I did not know, but Tina told us later, was that she had instructed her staff to call us sporadically for 2 years and check us out on service. Little did Melanie and I know that her 3 rings answer: “Concord Training Gooday, this Melanie, how can I help?” consistently over 2 years, made Tina reach out to us 2 years later to talk, and with Ricky’s stellar negotiation skills, we secured the BIG FISH. This was our first step to buying out MAST in 1997 which gave us the opportunity to register Learning Resources (Pty) Ltd with offices in Cape Town, Durban, Bloemfontein and Johannesburg.
We registered the Learning Resource (Pty) Ltd company in June 1997, a month before Ricky and my Savannah Robinson was born. And I designed a whole new brand and positioning to set us up for growth.
In 2004 I left the business to learn how to take a brand global, which I did for CCi (Pty) Ltd with their TRACC digital continuous improvement system which is used in twenty-four countries in fourteen languages. Melanie Grobler joined me at CCi. In 2015 I assisted CCi in securing an intellectual property sale to EY and joined the EY global team to embed the use of a digital product in their manufacturing consulting business and helped build yet another brand, EY Catalyst.
In 2019 I decided to move Down Under and could not secure my position at EY to work from Australia. Little did I know that at this time Ricky had conspired an incredibly special case study event to be used to honour my role in LRMG and to say ‘Goodbye’.
The LRMG people just loved me to a new level of gratitude and ‘celebrity’ that day with their shining eyes and warm hands and big smiles. Ricky’s words “Clients, colleagues, and friends of LRMG – it is simply this, we are all here because of Lorinda’s dream to build a business, and her courage. If not for her, none of you would be in this room today.” He had me at “If not for her, none of you would be in this room today.” Fast forward and Ricky offered me a contract as the LRMG Brand and Marketing Strategist.
Today I am back where I belong. Never say never! I brought Melanie back and built a super team with Mickey Geldenhuys, Nicholas Flemmer, Luke Victor, Elna Faasen and Savannah Robinson and soon we will welcome David Letswalo.
We believe that even though we are a tiny team with a very conservative budget, we have baboon dusk in our pockets. Legend says that when a lion attacks a baboon in the wild, the baboon kicks up a hell of a ball of dust, to make it seem more formidable. With that belief, talent, skills and mindset we are committed to taking on the challenge of lifting the brand up where it belongs.
We have completely changed the brand positioning, helped shape a dream for 2026 to set LRMG up to become a company worthy of lasting with these core milestones and measures:
- Baobab 1 – 10X superior financial performance (outperforming our competitors by a multiple of 10)
- Baobab 2 – Make a distinctive impact of the lives of people we employ and serve
- Baobab 3 – Create a lasting legacy
I now live Down Under with my husband Albert Loots and Savannah, who works for LRMG as a freelance graphic designer.
We both work virtually for LRMG across an 8-hour time zone difference. I have built a marketing team of six people and we use the latest best practice and a world leading Marketing Automation System to drive brand awareness and brand engagement. Yup! Now everything we do in marketing is digital. You never can tell . . . from posting, to faxing, to hand- writing to having everything automated with big data links.
My role is quite different today, as I am no longer running income generation businesses. However, our team has helped grow our brand awareness by 5000% in the last two years during the 2020/ 2021 Covid pandemic.
I love working with Ricky again and have teamed up with our Seniors Partners and Partners in the business towards our Dream2025 (Feb 2026).
The most important reflection of this brand journey is that it really is all about your customers and their happiness, the value you add to their business gaols and the loyalty you earn. With a rich tapestry of digital talent management and development systems and talent advisory services, and some of the best people in the industry, who care deeply about uplifting people in the workforce and helping companies grow. We are blessed with amazing customers . . . Customers who push us and help us lift our game again and again.
What a journey . . . from NOTHING and an overdraft in 1990 and ZERO sales, to becoming the ONLY organisation in the world that provides all these service under one roof:
- The worlds’ best OEM talent management systems (TMS)
- The world’s best OEM learning management systems (LRM) and Learning Experience Management (LXP)
- The world’s best eLearning content
- Best in class, fit for Africa, Talent Advisory services
- Edtech services and platform
We are by no ways at HERO status, but we strive, we improve, we reach every day.
We still have a long way to go to meet our promise to stakeholders and shareholders, but as Jim Collins says: “When the going gets tough, it’s the organisations that focus on what they’re good at that survive and thrive.”
What I hope to deliver in our pursuit of our Dream25, is to shine sunshine yellow light on our brand, our customers, our people and our products. And to remember my two mottos I live by:
‘People don’t move unless they are moved’ (connect to people’s heart with authenticity and a real will to serve) ‘Wonder-full' = keep wondering and be curious and your life will be full’
