MBS094 - Pepe Marais & Gareth Leck, Joe Public [Sponsored by Entrepreneur Magazine]

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There is an old saying that nothing worth having comes easy and the story of Gareth Leck and Pepe Marais is no different. The idea was to take big agency thinking to the man in the street under a concept called “take away advertising” and a mission to disrupt the advertising space. Today the company Joe Public is South Africa’s largest independent agency with a turnover of R700 million and gross profits in excess of R200 million. But getting to where they are today was no easy feat and it involved an exit to a multinational corporate, the re-purchase of the company, bankruptcy and the rebuilding of the company from the ground up on more than one occasion. This is a classic story of the hardship and realities of entrepreneurship and running a business.

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