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It can’t be easy for a soft-spoken Durban woman of Indian extraction to hold her own in a Pretoria boardroom dominated by white Afrikaans men.
But Kogie Moodley has carved a niche for herself at Van’s Auctioneers, one of the country’s leading companies specialising in urgent asset disposal.
“It is still a man’s world out there,” says the company’s director of human resources (HR), “and I think the auction world is part of it.
“But I personally believe big strides are being made with regards to transformation, maybe not significantly enough in the auction industry itself, but definitely in allied industries like liquidations, where you increasingly find female attorneys involved with insolvencies.”
She’s quick to add, though, that “change is slow and could be accelerated”.
Moodley, who has a master’s degree in public management from the University of Pretoria and for many years specialised in academic programme management for universities, believes that transformation could be given renewed impetus through interventions at tertiary level.
First, she says, we need to find out a few things:
. How many women are enrolled at auction colleges?
. What training do they receive?
. What in-house training opportunities are there?
. Do they stay in the industry?
. Do they have aspirations to set up their own companies?
Having answers to these and other questions, Moodley reiterates, “would serve as an important indicator of how fast we are transforming the sector, particularly with regards to black women”.
She believes it comes down to a simple ethos: “We should always be on the lookout for opportunities and creating them where they don’t exist, in an effort to improve the lives of people.”
Seen through a broader view, transformation’s biggest aim is ownership, Moodley stresses.
“There are very few black-owned auction houses and those that are there, in order to get work in, are expected to be on par with some of the bigger, more established companies.
“It means that, apart from having the skills and the know-how, they need facilities, infrastructure and a solid, workable business plan to succeed in a very tough industry where the cake is getting smaller, people are looking for more creative ways to sell assets, and pressure mounts on auctioneers from a business, cultural and socioeconomic point of view.”
Responding to an allegation made by Tirhani Mabunda, the owner of a prominent black-run auction company and former first black chair of the SA Institute of Auctioneers, that not enough auction companies are reaching out to their black counterparts, Moodley says: “I wouldn’t agree with that statement. At Van’s, we certainly are doing as much as we can in terms of transferring skills. We are involved with enterprise development and provide a lot of support for black-owned companies.”
One of these is Maleka Auctioneers, which is run by Moses Moche, a longtime partner of Martin Pretorius, chief executive at Van’s.
Moodley points out that Van’s has a staff complement of about 40 people with a 50-50 black-white split.
“Van’s is a Level 2 BEE company – an extremely good recognition of our upliftment status if you consider that, in order to maintain a certain equity standard, you need to comply with four key elements of transformation: ownership, management control, enterprise development and procurement through BEE means.”
Moodley, a career academic who left the public sector in 2006 for a long-deserved sabbatical, only to join the private sector in 2014, says that the two sectors differ from one another in fundamental terms.
“In the public sector, where you have access to external funding, the pressure is off. But in this business, in the private sector, it’s a question of do or die. You can’t sit back and not worry about the end result because if you don’t look after yourself, after the bottom line, you’re gone.”
It’s a point she makes to illustrate the tremendous pressure companies function under.
“We work with the banks, which demand that we live up to transformation targets.”
It is but one source of pressure auction companies, which thrive the most from bank-repossessed and liquidated assets, have to cope with.
In addition, there is a “big push on companies” from the department of labour.
“They are constantly looking into equity statistics, exploring staff turnover rates and, if what they see appears to be people leaving from a particular group, they want to know what’s going on in your company.”
In this respect, Moodley seems to be doing a sterling job.
“We take pride in the fact that we seem to be holding on to our people. I think it comes down to our track record. We conduct ourselves with integrity and we try to foster a working environment that is conducive not only to professionalism, but personal progress.”
In a certain sense, the company started in 1964 by Phil van der Merwe, lovingly known as “Ou Vannetjie” – hence the brand – has managed to hang on to that personable essence. It could also be the reason Moodley doesn’t feel like a fish out of water when they have boardroom meetings.
“I don’t feel uncomfortable because I make my views heard and they [the men at Van’s] respect me. They want to hear what I have to say.”
Commanding credibility if you’re a woman in the workplace, particularly at management and executive level, makes all the difference, Moodley believes.
“Women have to make themselves count. They have to take ownership of their positions.”
