From dog food salesman to one of South Africa’s most successful business leaders

Brian Joffe went from humble beginnings to founding one of South Africa’s largest and most successful companies, Bidvest. 

The former Bidvest CEO is known as one of South Africa’s most successful entrepreneurs and visionary business leaders.

It is valuable to turn back the clock to when Joffe was a young scholar in Johannesburg to understand his path to success.

Joffe was born in Johannesburg in 1947 to a South African father and a Lithuanian mother and attended Greenside High School.

As a schoolboy, he packed birdseed at his father’s micro grain and milling business, earning a few cents an hour. 

He diversified by helping his pharmacist uncle, who counted out tablets and dropped them one by one into phials.

“I learned you only make a profit by meticulously managing your assets, down to the last pill,” he told the Financial Times. 

He attended the University of Witwatersrand, where he started off studying medicine. Joffe explained this was “because that was my mother’s bent – every Jewish boy had to become a doctor”. 

However, within weeks, he decided the medical profession was not for him and switched to accounting, later graduating as a charted accountant (CA SA). 

In 1978, he started his entrepreneurial career by acquiring a 50% interest in a small pet food manufacturer for R49,000, which he had to borrow from his parents. 

Within six months, using largely discarded machinery on a makeshift production line, his business held 15% of South Africa’s canned dog food market. 

After two years in business, Joffe bought out his partner and acquired full ownership of the company. 

He extended the business into canned dog food, with his wife driving a forklift truck and storing pallets of cans with understanding neighbours when they ran out of space at their Johannesburg business.

He later sold his business to a major industrial group for about $1 million (today, R18.46 million). 

After a short spell in the USA, Joffe returned to South Africa in 1982, where he worked in various jobs.

In 1988, he founded Bidvest through its first acquisition, Chipkins, a food services company supplying caterers, which he bought for about R23 million.

After that, other deals and acquisitions followed fast, and the company was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange a year later.

“Joffe saw beyond apartheid to a democratic future in which South Africa would again be integrated into the global economy,” Wits University explained. 

He bought when others sold, consistently expressing his faith in his country’s ability to transform and grow.

He developed a uniquely empowered business model driven by autonomous entrepreneurs, each responsible for growing their operations.

Joffe said that he would fight to get anything off in the early days, whether it was “R30 or R300”. “We used to argue and argue until we used to get our deal,” he said.

Perceptions of his business manner are partly a result of Bidvest’s ability to spot the good in a bad asset, snap it up cheaply and turn it around.

“The contracts we used to enter into were always very important to us – we wanted to have the right deal. So maybe we did earn that reputation. I think even today a lot of people are intimidated to deal with Bidvest.”

He developed the “decentralised” conglomerate with business units run “independently and separately”. 

The founder remains hands-on but focuses on managing the money and monitoring those he delegated to.

“I’m hands-on in the management of people and I’m hands-on in the allocation of capital. Those are the two things that are quite critical.”

“If you’re going to get into this multi-business thing that we’ve got, what you can’t have is a very centralised business because then you need very skilled people to manage a diversified range of stuff,” Joffe said.

There have been some challenges along the way, including a flawed French deal that cost Bidvest about R300 million. 

Additionally, he said he still regrets overpaying to increase Bidvest’s stake in Adcock Ingram, a South African pharmaceutical company, from 4% to 34.5% during a fierce battle with CFR, a Chilean group, for control.

Bidvest eventually won the fight, but the victory came at a cost, with Bidvest writing off about R1 billion after raising its holding in Adcock.

“Dealmaking and entrepreneurship is not about perfection – you can’t have a 100% success rate. If you do, then it’s not entrepreneurialism, it’s just conservatism,” he said.

Today, Bidvest is one of the largest companies in the country, with a market cap of R92.53 billion.

The group has over 250 individual businesses and over 130,000 employees in South Africa, the United Kingdom (UK), the Republic of Ireland (Ireland), Spain, Australia and Singapore.

As the man behind the company’s impressive growth, Joffe has received numerous accolades and awards and is often referred to as one of the country’s most successful businesspeople. 

In 2016, he stepped down as chief executive of Bidvest and two years later he stepped down as the chairman of Bidcorp, the company’s the food services spinoff.

Apart from Bidvest, he was also involved in other ventures. In 2016, he founded, Long4Life, which owns the beauty salon chain Sorbet, as well as Sportsmans Warehouse.

This venture came as a surprise to Joffe, who had planned to take it easy once he left Bidvest.

“Before I retired from Bidvest, I really was intent on doing nothing, to be honest. But time erodes that kind of enthusiasm,” he said.

The company also has a beverage division, which owns brands like Score energy drinks and Fitch & Leedes soda mixers.

The company, which listed in 2017, struggled to find its feet and was hit hard by the pandemic.

In 2022, shareholders approved Old Mutual Private Equity’s (OMPE’s) bid to acquire Long4Life. This deal was valued at R 4.2 billion, and resulted in the company being delisted and Joffe assuming the role of chair.

He explained that his decades of experience had taught him one key lesson: “The one thing you need to know is you’re not invincible.”