About

Hi!  My name is Anja Merret and this is a bit about me. I started off my working life as a high school teacher with a degree and a teaching qualification.  Note to teachers, you have my full admiration. It’s a tough job. After four years I changed careers and joined my husband in his legal practice taking over all of the admin and book-keeping side of the business.

After just over ten years of this, a change was a good idea and I went back to Uni for my MBA with a specialisation in marketing.  Marketing is something that I really enjoy. It’s a mix of creative thinking and logic.  Good ideas do need to result in sales and have to ensure the business grows.

My experiences in marketing are wide ranging from very small to medium sized businesses over a period of twenty odd years. Single practitioner to companies with fifty plus staff. And they span many industries from adult education to manufacturing, service and hospitality industries.

As with many Baby Boomers, my generation, I went through a bit of a late life crisis towards the end of 2008 and decided that I needed to give back a little. I applied to VSO and was thrilled to be accepted as a volunteer.

During 2009 I attended the training courses, shut down the home, tearfully parted from my friends and my cat and lept onto a plane to Hanoi, Vietnam in September 2009 for a two year stint at Hold the Future. It’s a centre for disabled youth providing vocational training and employment in the manufacture of handicrafts.

This blog will continue to offer marketing views as well as reflect on some of the experiences at Hold the Future. Let’s see what marketing can do for a charitable institution. Interesting times indeed.

PS

The name of this blog is a reflection of my South African roots. The expression fundi stems from the Nguni word umfundisi meaning teacher or preacher and is popular in mainstream South African English.  It is most commonly used to describe an expert.