Nicola Mawson|Published
Sumarie Greybe loves a good fantasy novel, particularly one that allows her to escape the world of business altogether.
The co-founder of insurtech company Naked is a fan of Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders series, which offers a welcome break from the demands of building and running a company.
“Fiction gives me a different kind of space: I can get absorbed in a story without looking for something to apply at work the next morning,” Greybe says. “Sometimes the value of a good book is simply that it takes your mind somewhere else.”
It is a different admission from someone who has spent much of the past eight years learning everything she can about building a business.
Greybe, an actuary by training, has read extensively about marketing, start-ups and other disciplines outside her professional expertise since leaving her position as a partner at EY to help establish Naked.
First love, maths
But her first love was mathematics, and Greybe once considered following her father, a mathematics professor, into academia. She had visited his office and lecture hall at the University of Pretoria from a young age, and mathematics was something she genuinely enjoyed.
There was just one problem: Her father thought she lacked the patience to become a lecturer. “Being patient. My father spotted my biggest weakness long before I did,” Greybe says when asked what she is terrible at.
Greybe says, “He was a mathematics professor, and when I told him I wanted to study maths and possibly become a lecturer, he suggested that my temperament might be better suited to business.”
This impatience has proved both an advantage and a challenge.
Pause, touch, engage
“I like getting on with things, which can be useful when you’re building something from scratch. But it can also mean wanting to move faster than other people are ready or comfortable to move at.”
That awareness has become particularly important as Naked has grown. Greybe worries about the bureaucracy that can creep into expanding businesses, where layers of approval leave employees feeling they need permission to do their jobs.
“When you’re a handful of people in one room, everyone knows what’s happening. As a company grows, you need more structure, but I’m very conscious of how easily that can become layers of approval and people feeling they need permission to do their jobs.”
For her, the challenge is to provide enough guidance without taking away people’s freedom to make decisions. It is also a lesson in learning to let go of her own opinions.
“I have strong opinions! But I want people to be able to change my mind. Otherwise, I’m asking for their input without really giving it a chance to influence the decision.”
Leap of faith
That willingness to reconsider extends to the advice she chose to ignore when she was contemplating leaving EY. A friend questioned her sanity when she revealed plans to walk away from a secure corporate career to start an insurance business.
Greybe understood the concern. She had a stable position, a family to consider and no guarantee that the new venture would succeed.
But Greybe also understood insurance and believed there was an opportunity to change the things that frustrated customers. “I’d reached a point where I wanted to feel that my work was making a meaningful difference,” she says.
Before taking the plunge, Greybe considered what failure would mean for her family and what sacrifices they would be prepared to make. Fellow Naked co-founder Alex also insisted she read Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, believing her optimism needed a healthy dose of realism.
“The lesson was that trusting your judgement includes looking honestly at what could go wrong – and deciding whether the opportunity still matters enough to try.”
Bread and roses
Away from insurance and business books, Greybe enjoys baking and tending to her vegetable garden and roses. She has also made a point of involving her daughters in her working life.
When Naked was being developed more than eight years ago, the girls, then in primary school, became some of the company’s earliest app testers. “If children couldn’t understand what we developed, we needed to make it simpler,” she says.
It was also a way of showing them what Greybe did, rather than making work something that took their mother away from home. She is equally candid about the compromises involved in balancing ambition and family.
Greybe dismisses the popular notion that people can have everything simultaneously if they are simply organised enough. “There have been stages when my career took priority and stages when my children needed more of me. Those priorities have shifted as my life has changed.”
Stop, start, continue
Greybe’s approach to leadership reflects much the same pragmatism. She believes capable people need the freedom to exercise their judgement, even when their decisions differ from those she might have made.
Greybe also asks colleagues what she should stop doing, start doing and continue doing. The answers are not always comfortable.
But for someone who admits patience does not come naturally, learning to listen may be one of the most important skills Greybe has developed. “And then there’s the simple matter of reliability: do what you say you’ll do and admit when you’re wrong. It’s difficult to build trust without that.”
IOL BUSINESS