paulthérond.com

A web­site ded­i­cated to the inter­ests & chal­lenges of entre­pre­neurs, investors and quite hon­estly peo­ple who just want to be awe­some!

There are cer­tain keys and dis­ci­plines in life and busi­ness that when in place help us to really thrive in our per­sonal and busi­ness lives and to make an impact­ful dif­fer­ence on our fel­low man. This web­site will be full of such rel­e­vant top­ics that will inter­est, inspire and chal­lenge you.

It is also my guar­an­tee that by tak­ing the time to read this web­site weekly you will become a wiser, health­ier and more inspired indi­vid­ual. Writ­ten by myself Paul Therond, the prin­ci­ples explained do form part of a bib­li­cal world­view and there­fore it may be a good idea for you to hear my story.

PS: Let me also men­tion that all arti­cles are lov­ingly and thought­fully cus­tom writ­ten and not copied  from the web unless oth­er­wise acknowl­edged and cred­ited to the author in ques­tion with a link to their website. 

Now with that said, 

Let me tell you ONE of my stories…

 

Born in the lit­tle town of Port Eliz­a­beth South Africa, I was the last child in a fam­ily of four and in South Africa the name for a guy like myself is the laat lam­metjie of the fam­ily. (This just means I was the youngest in the fam­ily by many years, in my case 8–12 years.) I was brought up well and received a good edu­ca­tion and a strong foun­da­tion in spir­i­tu­al­ity and church involve­ment from a very young age as inspired by my parents.

 

At age 12 I had a dream…

 

My sis­ter who was the next youngest in my fam­ily (8 years older) is an excel­lent piano player and it inspired me to want to learn the piano. How­ever there was a prob­lem I had no piano to prac­tise on as my sis­ter had moved out the house with the piano she played on.

 

So I decided I needed to save up money to get myself a key­board (my par­ents in their wis­dom didnt just buy a key­board for me.) This was def­i­nitely wise as it was the begin­ning of my dab­blings in busi­ness. I decided I would sell cup­cakes in my sub­urb and save money to even­tu­ally pur­chase my key­board. So yes that means you can call me the Muf­fin man!

 

My mom helped me with the bak­ing, my Dad and brother helped me with trans­port to get around and myself I did the sell­ing and the result was in a rel­a­tively short time frame of about 8 months I was able to earn enough money from the sales to be able to go out there and buy my key­board and learn to play it with my sister’s help.

 

Now this started some­thing in me, which would take fruition sev­eral years later.

 

At age 16 I vis­ited the chi­ro­prac­tor and dis­cov­ered the dis­turb­ing news that I also had con­tracted a mild form of sco­l­io­sis (cur­va­ture of the spinal col­umn.) Now this was quite a shock to the whole fam­ily due to another fam­ily mem­ber who also had this and it was quite a seri­ous issue. Thank­fully mine was only a mild form but still some­thing that needed atten­tion and my chi­ro­prac­tor rec­om­mended a gym pro­gramme to develop mus­cles around the spinal col­umn to sup­port it. (I was bit of a skinny weak­ling before.)

 

Under my chi­ro­prac­tors rec­om­men­da­tion I got involved in the whole gym scene and being at that age of 16 became quite obsessed with the whole scene and stud­ied every­thing I could about train­ing, nutri­tion and health. Through nat­ural sup­ple­men­ta­tion and hard work I was able to pick up 20kg of solid mus­cle mass and became quite the story in my local gym.

 

As you can imag­ine after such an amaz­ing change of lifestyle I really became quite pas­sion­ate about this whole thing and one day I was look­ing at pur­chas­ing some more sup­ple­ments and walked into a local GNC sup­ple­ment store to buy some more and noticed a par­tic­u­lar brand that was on the shelf but not being that well promoted.

 

So I picked up the sup­ple­ment, took note of the con­tact details and sent an email with a pro­posal to pro­mote the prod­uct in my region. About a week later I got a con­tact dur­ing Math­e­mat­ics class (remem­ber I was only 16) and it was the direc­tor of this sports com­pany phon­ing me and telling me that he liked my ideas and that nobody was actively pro­mot­ing the prod­ucts and they would like to give me a go to see what I could do.

 

At the time that sup­ple­ment brand was really start­ing to take shape in the other areas of South Africa but in my region of the East­ern Cape it was fairly unknown so it really was excel­lent tim­ing for me to get in. At the time that I got involved the brand was doing about $8000 per month in sales. Fast for­ward 5 years later under my man­age­ment the brand was doing $200 000 per month and at age 19 I had an employee work­ing for me who was call­ing on our plus 200 phar­ma­cies and health shops in the region.

 

As you can imag­ine this was an incred­i­ble learn­ing expe­ri­ence and the expe­ri­ence that taught me an immense amount about busi­ness, life, peo­ple and ini­tia­tive. After 5 years I was forced to leave the com­pany due to a takeover of top man­age­ment and I had to begin again, which was a tough blow because bear in mind I am still only 21 at this time and have been used to a good qual­ity of life which has now all of a sud­den been removed.

 

Dur­ing this tough tran­si­tionary time in my life I took up a sales role with an edu­ca­tional com­pany and in a period of one year grew to become the top sales rep for the region and won an award for my efforts. Whilst I was work­ing with this com­pany I was also build­ing my own part time busi­ness doing what I am doing now and that is pro­vid­ing inter­net adver­tis­ing ser­vices and graphic design for web and print. 

 

In March 2009 I moved to New Zealand to begin a new adven­ture and to explore fur­ther oppor­tu­ni­ties which as I write this now has turned out to be very suc­cess­ful and a good grow­ing phase for myself per­son­ally. I look for­ward to the future with expec­ta­tion as my past leaves me with the firm con­fi­dence that there is a spe­cial things to come. 

 

And it is this same expec­ta­tion and hope which I have deep down that I hope will be stirred in you as you read the posts on this blog, because we all have a story and it is with these sto­ries that we learn about our­selves, oth­ers and our own future.

 

Join me on the jour­ney, I look for­ward to part­ner­ing with you, using this excit­ing online medium.

 

Here are some words from clients I have dealt with in the past in my cur­rent inter­net adver­tis­ing voca­tion.

 

• We have been so pleased with all the work done for us by “4Front Mar­ket­ing.”  Not only do we have a well designed and clean look­ing web­site, we also work with a com­pany that under­stands web mar­ket­ing and can pro­vide excel­lent inter­net tools to get us where we need to go! Thank you also for address­ing our requests in a quick and timely man­ner! - Susan Green­man   Pro­ducer of The Michael Dresser Show www.michaeldressershow.com

• Great job. Great ded­i­ca­tion to detail and to get­ting it right (in the eyes of the some­times very chosy cus­tomer — me). Thank you for hang­ing in there and for real­is­ing my dreams! — Thomas Witt of Thomas Witt Consulting 

  
  

• Your ser­vice is fan­tas­tic!! I got onto the 1st page of Google within the first two weeks of using your ser­vice. Will def­i­nitely be rec­om­mend­ing your ser­vice to oth­ers. — Alexan­der Hart of Green Electric

 

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