Ian Fuhr: Sorbet founder is hatching a revolution

Ian Fuhr, the man who founded the Sorbet chain of beauty therapy hubs, has hatched a plan to use his 45 years of experience as an entrepreneur and successful retailer to mentor executives on the softer skills required to run a thriving business.

Having sold 100% of Sorbet in 2017 to Long4Life, the listed investment holding company run by former Bidvest CEO Brian Joffe, Fuhr has founded a business coaching school, aptly named the Hatch Institute.

Though he spent a year working for Sorbet after the sale, he left at the beginning of 2019 to pursue his own interests. The idea of retiring never crossed his mind, despite having just sold a successful beauty therapy business with 211 outlets across SA — not bad for a guy born in Vanderbijlpark 67 years ago.

"I didn’t think about retiring," he tells the FM. "I think I retired for an afternoon nap."

As the founder of the Hatch Institute, Fuhr teaches SA’s next generation of leaders about what he calls cultureneering — the ability to build a fit-for-purpose culture in a diverse working environment that leads to exceptional customer service. The emphasis is less on cash flows and capital ratios and more on emotional intelligence.

One of Fuhr’s main aims is to teach executives about the importance of putting people before profit. He argues that the traditional focus on cost-cutting and the bottom line is a race to the bottom. It might help in the short term, but the long-term effect is a demoralised workforce and poor customer service. Instead of viewing people as expense items on an income statement, he says, you need to make them your most important value-adding asset.

"Culture doesn’t only help the bottom line — it is the bottom line," says Fuhr. "There are four elements we look at: people, leadership, culture and race relations."

While that’s simple enough to grasp, the lightning-rod issue of race relations is an interesting inclusion.

Despite SA’s past — and, indeed, its present — this is something most business schools would probably avoid for fear of igniting controversy. However, Fuhr says racial polarisation is one of the key causes of most of the problems faced by local businesses.

While cynics might scoff at this as simply swimming with the political tide, Fuhr has the credentials to back up his philosophy.

"I’m very passionate about the issue of race relations, which goes back to my early days as an entrepreneur in the 1980s, when I was working with mostly black staff who were politically active," he says. "I was exposed to a lot of thought leaders who taught me a lot about the impact of race relations on the workplace."

After "successfully dropping out" of university in his second year of studying for a degree in accounting, Fuhr took a job at Gallo Record Company.

Despite being a semiprofessional singer at the time, he lasted just 18 months before the entrepreneurial bug bit. With his brother Rodney having recently returned from the US, the two decided to start a new departmental discount store aimed at the lower-income market.

Though this was in 1976, just two weeks after the Soweto uprisings, Fuhr describes himself as politically ignorant at the time.

"Most white guys my age had no idea at the time what was really going on in the country," he says. "I went to a Jewish school and had quite a sheltered upbringing. We were actually very ignorant politically back then."

That would soon change. The Fuhr brothers, sons of one of the founding directors of Russells furniture stores, set about starting their new department store, naively named K-Mart.

Isolated in apartheid-era SA, the two thought nothing of using the established international trademark — a decision that landed them in court 12 years later.

But they had more immediate problems to contend with in the form of the security police.

One day Fuhr was approached by an employee, active in black consciousness circles, who introduced him to two friends who were struggling to find work. He happily offered them jobs, only to realise later that he now had senior members of the Azanian People’s Organisation working for him.

"One of them was Lybon Mabasa, who worked for us doing dispatches in the day and basically plotting the downfall of the government at night," he says with a wry smile.

After forging a friendship with Mabasa, Fuhr began to realise that a lot of the issues he was struggling with at K-Mart — low staff morale and poor productivity — were rooted in the deep racial polarisation of the time.

"Our staff used to tell us directly that they were much more concerned about freedom than productivity," says Fuhr. "I realised I had to change my management style to get the best out of our staff. The result was that we used to have a lot of workplace communication sessions where we ended up talking about politics."

Our staff used to tell us they were much more concerned about freedom than productivity

—  Ian Fuhr

That’s when the apartheid police came knocking. One of the issues for K-Mart was that apartheid laws forbade black managers from working in white areas. That attracted unwanted attention from the authorities.

"At K-Mart we were basically two white guys who owned the place, but all the staff were black," says Fuhr. "Our view was that our customers were all black, so why would we need white managers?"

After a few uncomfortable trips to what was then John Vorster Square police station — and some embarrassing media coverage of this enforcement of petty apartheid — the authorities eventually backed off.

Yet K-Mart couldn’t avoid getting caught up in the political turmoil of the time. It ended up going into liquidation in 1986 due to the consumer boycott of white-owned businesses.

Though the brothers were able to buy back the business some time later, the ever-entrepreneurial Fuhr had other things to keep him busy, having started a music company called Moonshine Records in 1981.

That venture, which later became Priority Records, led to meetings with musicians Caiphus Semenya, his wife Letta Mbulu and Hugh Masekela — all of whom were in exile because of apartheid.

The combined impact of these experiences in SA’s fraught political landscape left a lasting impression on Fuhr. His key realisation was that, instead of forcing a culture on your workers, you have to create a common sense of belonging and collective purpose. More importantly, you have to earn your staff’s trust.

"If people don’t have a sense of belonging in an organisation, it is highly unlikely that you’re going to be able to create a positive customer experience," says Fuhr.

"The customer experience can never be happier than the staff experience. If your staff aren’t happy, then your customers won’t be either."

K-Mart was eventually rebranded as Super Mart, and was subsequently sold to Edcon in 2002. Today, the business operates under the Jet Mart brand.

What is it like starting a new venture from scratch, after so many years of running an established retail chain?

"The business has only been going for a year, but so far it’s been pretty good," says Fuhr. "We obviously took a hammering with Covid-19, which resulted in a three-to four-month setback with the lockdown, but we’re up and running again."

The institute’s target customers are medium-sized companies, but its courses are also applicable to large corporates. It already has 15 clients — including Vida e Caffè, insurance broker i capital advisers, listed property group Arrowhead, the Bodytec gym franchise, and the IV Bar chain of vitamin drip outlets.

Fuhr says a big focus of the Hatch Institute is instilling the idea of putting service before reward.

"Most people think they come to work to earn a salary, whereas actually you come to work to serve people — the customers — and the end result is a salary," he says. "The edge we had at Sorbet was the culture of the organisation. When you’re running a franchise business, the consistency of your service and customer experience is not easy to achieve at scale."

Like many successful entrepreneurs, Fuhr highlights the important lessons one has to learn from failure. One of Sorbet’s missteps was expanding into the UK market too quickly, only to see all five retail outlets close their doors.

"Upon reflection, the person to blame was myself," he says. "It was my own arrogance in thinking I could transplant the same business model we had here in SA to the UK.

"But failures are also important because they teach us lessons."

Ian Fuhr’s experiences with employees during the apartheid era taught him valuable lessons about morale

While he is justifiably proud of Sorbet, he has no regrets in selling the company. He says he’s a lot happier starting new ventures than being mired in the operational nitty gritty of large established entities.

Fuhr is married, with three children. He works with his son Brent at the Hatch Institute, while one daughter, Courtney Truman, is active in the UK beauty industry and the other, Jade Kirkel, is launching a new brand of children’s footwear.

His wife Sandy is a successful franchiser of the Beauty Therapist Institute and owns 13 colleges, with two in Nigeria and one in Namibia.

A great lover of wildlife, he spends a lot of time in the bush. He also enjoys watching sport.

"But my real hobby is starting businesses," he says. "That’s what I enjoy."