The Soul of Sorbet: Building People, Culture & Community

By Ian Fuhr and Johanna Stamps Egbe

Sorbet is the largest beauty franchise business in Africa. In just twelve years the business has gone from being mistaken for an ice-cream shop to being a household name across South Africa. In 2018 Sorbet surpassed 200 salons.
The dramatic growth of the brand over the past five years has driven business leaders to ask the question, ‘What is so different about Sorbet?’

In 2005, despite advice to the contrary, Ian Fuhr set out to create a national beauty salon franchise business that would offer its guests a consistently high level of service, delivered with a uniquely positive staff attitude. He realised that the only way to achieve this and to stand out in the competitive beauty salon industry was to create a culture that focused on people first and laid a platform for exceptional service. The Soul of Sorbet is a guide for leaders and stakeholders in any business and industry who aim to build a lasting brand that is founded on a people-focused culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Jul 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770105515

Ian Fuhr

Sorbet’s founder and CEO, Ian Fuhr, is a serial entrepreneur. Over a 40-year period he has launched five successful companies. With each endeavour, he entered a new industry and successfully challenged the status quo. Over the years he cultivated a unique business philosophy that culminated in the launch of the Sorbet brand in 2005. Get that feeling, the story of Ian Fuhr’s background, his history and how Sorbet was born, is now also available as a paperback edition published by Pan Macmillan.

Book preview

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This book is dedicated to the memory of my brother, Tony Fuhr, who passed away suddenly on 28 April 2018.

First published in 2018

by Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19

Northlands

2116

Johannesburg

South Africa

www.panmacmillan.co.za

isbn

978-1-77010-550-8

e-

isbn

978-1-77010-551-5

© Ian Fuhr and Johanna Stamps Egbe 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Editing by Jane Bowman

Proofreading by Pam Thornley

Design and typesetting by Triple M Design, Johannesburg

Cover design by publicide

Ian Fuhr author photograph courtesy of Sorbet; Johanna Stamps Egbe author photograph courtesy of Sean Shannon

Acknowledgements

Author’s note: The story of the birth of Sorbet

Introduction

Chapter 1 Touching people’s lives

Chapter 2 It’s not a job, it’s a privilege

Chapter 3 A happy home

Chapter 4 People before profits

Chapter 5 Creating wealth – an educational journey

Chapter 6 Building community

Chapter 7 The power of a Rainbow Community

Chapter 8 Servant leadership

Chapter 9 Servant leadership in practice

Chapter 10 People serving people with passion

Chapter 11 The Total Guest Experience

Chapter 12 Putting it all together

Epilogue

Johanna Stamps Egbe for her tireless hours spent researching and collating the content and anecdotes for this book.

David Williams and Jane Bowman for their sound editorial guidance.

Andrea Nattrass and Terry Morris of Pan Macmillan for believing in this book.

My wife, Sandy Fuhr, for her endless love and support.

Reg Lascaris for his true friendship and for allowing me to spend two weeks at the beautiful Boekenhoutskloof wine farm in Franschhoek where the bulk of this book was written.

Steven Blend, my longstanding friend, partner and adviser who has stood alongside me through all my business ventures.

David Kneale, Amanda Graham and Karien Boolsen of Clicks, who had the foresight to identify the long-term potential of the Sorbet brand in 2010, when we only had 30 salons, and went on to develop the highly successful Sorbet product range.

Brian Joffe, who chose Sorbet as the first acquisition under his newly listed company, Long4Life.

The Sorbet leadership – Rudi Rudolph, Debra Rosen, Robyn Zinman and my children Brent, Jade and Courtney – who have all made a major contribution to the success of the brand. I may have founded this business, but they have taken it far beyond my wildest dreams.

The Sorbet Community, including the Sorbet support staff, our franchise partners and our citizens who have lived the Soul of Sorbet and built this brand one guest at a time.

And, of course, the Sorbet Guests who have supported our brand in their thousands and have made Sorbet one of the most loved beauty brands in South Africa.

‘Why don’t you open a chain of beauty salons?’

The sound of Liz Goldberg’s voice brought me back; I had been drifting. The soothing rhythm as she massaged the muscles of my tension-filled back had put me into a semi-conscious state.

I had been a client of Liz’s for a few years and seldom missed my weekly massage appointment. Liz was a professional skincare therapist who had previously worked as the national sales manager for the South African agency of Dermalogica, a leading USA skincare brand. When she fell pregnant with her first child, she opted to work from home. A friend had told me that should I want an excellent body massage, I should look no further than Liz.

‘What?’ I mumbled, trying to clear my head.

‘Why don’t you open a chain of beauty salons?’

At first I thought she was joking. Me? A man with absolutely no knowledge of the beauty industry. Surely that was female territory?

‘You’re kidding, right? What do I know about beauty? I wash my face with soap a couple of times a week and even then I sometimes forget!’

She laughed but stuck to her guns. ‘I’m dead serious. There’s a huge gap in the beauty salon business in this country. It is a fragmented industry with hundreds of small operators, just like me, and most of them are not in a position to build a branded chain.’

‘But no one will take me seriously. What would a middle-aged man like me be doing in a woman’s world? And I most definitely don’t have the looks!’ I cringed at the thought of my face on an advertising billboard promoting a new beauty business. ‘Surely we would want to attract female clients, not chase them away!’

Liz chuckled again. ‘The point is that you understand business and you have loads of experience. Trust me. Business is business, whether it’s beauty salons or retail stores. All you have to do is change the playing field.’

That struck a chord. Changing the playing field sounded like a stimulating challenge. Maybe Liz had a point.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, as she began kneading the knots out of my neck.

It was May 2004, I was nearly 51 years old and I hadn’t worked since I sold my previous business to the Edcon group at the end of 2003. Five months was the longest break of my working life and I was itching to start a new business. The problem was that this time I had no idea what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I wanted to do something completely different. Liz had said there was a gap in the beauty salon market. But was there a market in the gap? At that point I had a lot more questions than answers and the most compelling of these was:

Why are there no successful branded chains of beauty salons?

At the time there was nothing in the beauty salon arena; no well-known brands, only hundreds of independent small businesses, and if you asked twenty people which salon they supported, you would easily get twenty different answers.

Why was this industry so devoid of any multi-outlet chains of beauty salons under one umbrella brand? Had people tried and failed, or had no one really had the guts to give it a crack? What was the inhibiting factor?

My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to plunge into a world that I was totally unfamiliar with. ‘Should be fun,’ I thought to myself. The rest is history …

Bev Segal is a good friend of mine and a long-standing guest of Sorbet in Oaklands, Johannesburg. A few years ago she was diagnosed with a cancerous melanoma behind her right eye and sadly lost her eye. She had a prosthetic eye inserted and after several sessions of chemotherapy she was declared clear of the cancer. She carried on living a normal life until recently when she went for her annual check-up and was alarmed when her doctors picked up a few spots on her liver. She was booked in for a PET scan the following week for a more thorough investigation.

A few days before the scan, she went to have her nails done at her favourite Sorbet. She told her nail technician, Kenzi, with whom she had developed a strong and lasting relationship, that she was very worried about the scan and what they might find. Kenzi and her fellow Sorbet Citizens showed enormous empathy and said they would pray for Bev.

On the day of the scan, after receiving the results, Bev and her family were relieved to find out that the spots were harmless and she was still clear of the cancer. Remarkably, the first thing Bev did once she received the results was ask her husband, Rob, to go past Sorbet Oaklands and tell Kenzi and the other citizens she was fine and there was no need to worry.

I was deeply moved by this story. Something was happening in the Sorbet salons, something that was not only unusual in the context of South African customer service, but was almost magical.

Over and above the service provided, this was a tale of trust, friendship and empathy that went way beyond that of the traditional customer/employee interaction.

Several other powerful stories have since surfaced and one of them was captured on video. A bridal party was greeted at Sorbet Riverside by the entire citizen group standing outside the salon waving balloons, throwing confetti in the air and singing welcome songs of joy and celebration. The look of utter surprise and amazement on the bride’s face as she led her bridesmaids through the fanfare was priceless. The video clip was viewed over 35 000 times on Facebook.

These, and other stories, triggered some really important questions in me:

What was it about the Sorbet culture that had nurtured such powerful relationships between our guests (clients) and our citizens (staff)?

How had Sorbet been able to grow at a rate that was unprecedented in the South African beauty salon industry?

What was our true competitive advantage?

In a search for answers, my co-writer, Johanna Stamps Egbe, and I ran a workshop with our support office community and franchise partners and put these questions to them.

It soon became clear that Sorbet’s unique competitive advantage did not lie in our treatment offering because virtually every typical beauty salon in the country offered exactly the same treatments as we did: facials, nails, waxing, massage, etc.

Nor did it lie in our pricing. While we were always competitive, we were certainly not the cheapest in town.

Nor did it lie in the products we sold. With the exception of our own Sorbet brand, all our other products, such as Dermalogica, Environ, OPI, Gelish and Morgan Taylor, were sold in hundreds of salons around the country.

As we grappled in search of the elusive answer, several insights emerged from the team. They spoke of the ‘look and feel’ of our salons; the quirky marketing and freshness of the brand; the very popular loyalty programme; our strong retail focus; the nationwide accessibility of our salons and the overall quality of service we provided.

In their own right, each of these assessments made logical sense and had certainly contributed to the success of the business, but I was looking for that one thing that, above all else, gave us our true competitive advantage. That ‘pixie dust’ that had seemingly created a degree of extreme loyalty amongst our guests; that one thing that had lifted us out of the quagmire of the competition and carried the brand to unprecedented growth in difficult economic times. I was looking for something that went way beyond good business practice.

After some time, we managed to hit the nail on the head. Our competitive advantage was simply the positive attitudes with which our franchise partners and our citizens were serving their guests.

The discussion was then brought to a snappy conclusion when our group operations manager at the time, Liana Proost, proclaimed that our magic lay deep in the ‘Soul of Sorbet’. We loved this phrase and immediately adopted it as the name that perfectly described our community culture.

This was what had separated us from the rest and created the foundation upon which we built a franchised chain of over 200 branded beauty salons.

The unique nature of the Sorbet business model has been confirmed in other arenas. In 2012, the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) published a case study on Sorbet called ‘The Beauty of Sorbet’ written by Margie Sutherland. It’s easy to overlook the unique DNA of your own business and GIBS’s continued interest has made for a helpful ally through the years.

Here is the story in Margie’s own words. ‘I didn’t set out to write a case study about Sorbet as I was originally a guest. In fact, I was given a voucher for my first treatment at Sorbet and was so impressed by what I experienced that that first treatment led to many more and a genuine interest in what was happening behind the scenes of the business. At that first treatment, I asked for the franchise partner’s details and within hours I reached Ian on the phone and minutes after that we were scheduling interviews. I instantly understood that he was a different kind of CEO.

‘My field of work has always been performance management and I recognised something truly unique in that first Sorbet I visited and each Sorbet I’ve since visited. I originally wrote the case study from the perspective of how to manage staff but it has grown far beyond that over the years. The case study itself tells multiple stories in one, from human resources to marketing and beyond and to this day is taught to the same students in multiple classes. At GIBS what we are trying to get the students to understand, which Sorbet does so beautifully, is how integrated a business needs to be. Nothing can be done in isolation when it comes to business and all the elements must be closely aligned with the strategy. In the case of Sorbet this is get in, get out, get on with life.

‘Sorbet’s approach has seamlessly linked the divide between pay and performance. Why create a lengthy key performance indicator process when your customers can be the best tool for assessing performance. Did the guest pay? Did the guest come back? These are the greatest indicators for any business.

‘I distinctly remember one of the first sessions Ian presented to one of our classes when a student remarked to him after the session, Ian, thank you so much for sharing with us today. I have dreams of starting my own chain of beauty salons and you’ve just shared all of your secrets with me. The student said it with a hint of sarcasm but Ian’s response was 100% genuine, I’m so glad. I would be more than happy to meet with you one-on-one and do anything I can to help you on your journey.

‘When we first started sharing the case studies in our courses, about 10% of our students knew of Sorbet. Currently about 80% of our students know the brand. At the end of the case study, Ian mentions his aspirations to bridge the gap in the industry to male guests. Groups of students originally scoffed at the idea but a few years later, Sorbet Man is a franchise to watch in South Africa.

‘The case study has since become the most-taught case study at GIBS. In fact, it’s even registered as an international publication and is used in all academic programmes including all the executive programmes. When we start an engineering class with the Sorbet case study, the immediate reaction is, What in the world can I learn from a beauty business? By the end of the class they get it.’

David Kneale, the CEO of the Clicks retail group, with which Sorbet has formed a very strong working relationship, also recently highlighted what he believes to be the real strength of the Sorbet brand when he said, ‘You guys have done something that very few salon chains have been able to achieve around the world. You have created a multi-unit franchise that has been able to offer a consistently high quality of service across the entire country.’

I thanked David and responded, ‘That is the Soul of Sorbet at work.’

Since the birth of the Sorbet brand, I have run an Induction programme for every leader (franchise partner) and citizen (employee) in our entire community (company). I did this because I felt it was important to personally share the principles on which we founded the business. I still do that today.

In these workshops, I ask two questions. ‘What is the purpose of life?’ and ‘What is the purpose of work?’ They are simple questions but they go to the heart of everything we do. For the new recruits, their responses are largely about self. They are consumed by what they can get out of life rather than what they can put into it. Likewise for what they can get out of work: ‘I want to make money. I want to feed my family. I want to gain experience. I want to improve my lifestyle. I want to buy a car. I want to meet people.’ In short: ‘What’s in it for me?’ We call such people ‘I specialists’; people who are totally self-absorbed.

When I tell the recruits that the purpose of