International Business Woman
The Beginning.
Inspired at an art festival, Karen and her sister started their 1st venture, Coco Brigatta. They created and sold the most beautiful unique hand screen printed t-shirts. Karen traded her t-shirts for a soul searching European experience.
She returned to South Africa and quickly found herself in a sales position in a big corporate. Her school in sales comes from one of the most difficult industries, but there was a huge blessing disguised in her career path.
Fast forward a good couple of years, and she landed on her all-fours back in the the role of Entrepreneur.
… a few hard lessons, and fortunately many wins …
Current Businesses.
Karen is a business woman first, where she is active daily with operations, sales and marketing in 5 companies of which 3 are operating internationally and the President of the Virtual Assistants Association of South Africa.
VA Connect help entrepreneurs and C-Levels with experienced virtual assistants that works remotely to manage a myriad of tasks for you. This is a really efficient way to buy more time, and to grow your business significantly though per-hour or retainer outsourcing.
Karen understands the luxury of time and uncertainty of permanent employment. She manged to grow a small two person business to one of Africa’s biggest VA Agencies, and is a proudly SA exclusive workforce. VA Connect services clients from many countries, including: USA, Ireland, UK, Singapore, Australia, Sweden and Holland.
Website: www.vaconnect.co.za
The goal of SnappSales is to assist companies with outreach activities to create awareness, trust and thought-leadership. We help our clients to build relationships with key people and enjoy a very natural way of warming up prospects to successful appointments.
SnappSales is a marketing agency that specialises in the IT and Software industries in South Africa, United Kingdom, and Australia. We help companies with campaign strategy, creation, optimisation and continued nurturing of prospects to point of face to face appointments.
Website: www.snappsales.com
Rethink Sales re-thought the whole sales recruitment process. We do it all differently, that’s the biggest driver for our success.
Rethink Sales is build and run from a Sales Director and Sales Manager’s perspective, as 100% of our founding partners fulfilled these roles prior to forming Rethink Sales.
We have developed a Risk-Share business model where we have just as much “skin-in-it” to ensure a successful placement. We do not believe in huge double digit percentage upfront placement fees for a rebranded CV.
We’ve taken the traditional way of recruiting and made it so much better! With our groundbreaking recruitment and coaching methodology we can assist you in placing the best salespeople, and retain them!
Now we’re going to hold your salesperson’s hand and coach them to navigate the first 6 months of working with you, facing the new landscape of sales in your business as they settle in to becoming an integral part of the team.
Website: www.rethinksales.co.za
A digital agency founded to service and focused on results. Karmak Creative was founded to allow smaller webdesign and social media agencies to confidently outsource bigger projects and to allow for international agencies to outsource their design and development work to South Africa with the white-label services we offer them.
Karmak Creative focuses on medium to high-end development projects. We help with brand development, digital development, web, and mobile app development. Because of the nature of the beast, we understand marketing really well, and offer Sales funnel Automation and lead nurturing services as part of the bouquet.
We help agencies and companies with Paid Advertising, Promoted Media, Content Distribution, Content Marketing, Video Marketing, Social Media Management, Graphic Design, UX and UI design and Development.
Website: http://karmakcreative.com/
VA Godmother was established with one sole purpose, to teach South Africans how to become a Virtual Assistant, to point out which pitfalls to avoid, and how to start and grow your VA agency to achieve financial freedom with more focus on wok life balance.
Karen takes you on this journey guiding you one-on-one condensing 10 years of experience and know how into a few sessions. Karen teaches you where and how to start, how to position yourself as a VA and most importantly, how to find clients and grow your own agency.
Karen believes in the opportunities for South Africans to establish VA Agencies, and she owns the biggest agency in Africa, she can fast track your business with her proven methodology and knowledge.
Website: www.vagodmother.co.za
Karen’s main focus with the founding of VAASA, was to create awareness for South African work-from-home parents that it’s possible, and to create a support structure to guide them on their own journey. It will also serve as a portal for entrepreneurs and business people looking for assistance to find quality and screened VA’s quickly and easily.
Karen has a huge passion for remote working, and she feels remote working offers great opportunities to drive foreign currency into South Africa while establishing sustainable job creation opportunities here.
Being a mother herself, she understands that a huge part of the workforce would like to work from home, offering great skills to their clients.
Website: www.vaasa.co.za
Want to make contact?
General stuff and media Q’s.
Email Albert: albert@karenwessels.com Mobile : 2782 574 0775
Wow your audience by bringing me in to speak:
Email Karen: karen@karenwessels.com