Latest News Archive
Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
02 January 2020
|
Story Valentino Ndaba
|
Photo Anja Aucamp
Refilwe Xaba, the founder and CEO of Glolooks.
Refilwe Xaba, Senior Assistant Officer in Entrepreneurship Development at the UFS Centre for Development Support, is the founder and CEO of Glolooks. This Bloemfontein-based company manufactures and supplies an organic, natural hair product range.
When she first developed the products, they were for personal use. Xaba evolved from an intrapreneur to an entrepreneur. She innovated a personal solution into a booming business idea. It was only in May 2016 that she decided to go into business, following growing interest in the way she maintained her hair. “I officially started in-depth research in October 2015, after years of making concoctions for myself.”
Business and books
Xaba reckons that a research background is beneficial for growing a business such as Glolooks that has a huge technical aspect. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Entrepreneurship with a focus on marketing and is planning to use her business as a case study.
Her undergraduate, honours, and master’s studies, which she completed at Kovsies, contributed to equipping Xaba with skills to grow her business. She believes in balancing education and business. “I have always been commerce-orientated. If there is a problem to be fixed, I fix it. However, people are at the centre of my heart.”
Growing Glolooks
In 2019, Glolooks opened a salon in Westdene, where customers can receive a holistic experience above and beyond merely purchasing the product. Xaba says this is one of the ways her business is being innovative when it comes to creating relationships with customers.
Academic addresses financial planning leaders at world summit
2010-05-04
 |
| Adv. Wessel Oosthuizen, Director of the Centre for Financial Planning Law at the University of the Free State (UFS), addressing financial leaders at the World Financial Planning Summit. |
Adv. Wessel Oosthuizen, Director of the Centre for Financial Planning Law at the University of the Free State (UFS), is chair to four Financial Planning Standards Board (FPSB) expert panels that guide the global Certified Financial Planning (CFP) certification programme. At the recent World Financial Planning Summit, held in Taipei in China, he challenged a group of global financial planning leaders to support the formation of a global financial planning body of knowledge with sustainable career-path development opportunities.
He said: “For financial planning to be recognised as a distinct professional practice and a global profession, the financial planning community must establish a universal body of knowledge that is supported by applicable in-depth research.
“We need to establish how professional bodies should collaborate with academia to integrate a more competency-based education and training environment that combines theory with practice. Fostering and promoting comprehensive research in financial planning topics is another key challenge that must be addressed in order to develop a tertiary knowledge framework for the financial planning profession.”
Adv. Oosthuizen, who is playing a big role in providing consistent and rigorous education and assessment tools for financial planning in 2010, said that a bachelor’s degree should be a compulsory minimum requirement for practising financial planners.
About the learning curve between the academic and work environments in the financial planning profession, Adv. Oosthuizen said: “Implementing a career-path model that supports a more structured approach to apprenticeships and supervised practice would complement a specialised financial planning body of knowledge and provide entrants to the profession with the necessary theoretical knowledge and practical experience to offer competent and ethical financial planning.”
The World Financial Planning Summit engaged global leaders of more than 17 financial planning standards-setting bodies, as well as regulators, financial planning educators and other invited guests in a dialogue about the steps needed to gain recognition for financial planning as a distinct, global profession.