South African-born Daniel Raubenheimer is a passionate MBA graduate with cross-functional experience in tech, FMCG and manufacturing, he’s now CFO at Silon in Atlanta, USA, a leading producer of technical compounds and polyester staple fibres.
Today’s podcast is sponsored by Draftworx, which provides automated drafting and working paper financial software to more than 8000 accounting and auditing firms and corporations. CFO Talks is a brand of the South African Institute of Business Accountants.
CIARAN RYAN: What a pleasure it is today to welcome Daniel Raubenheimer, he is currently the CFO at a company called Silon LLC, a company based in Atlanta in the United States, it’s a leading producer of technical compounds and polyester staple fibres used in a variety of applications within the automotive, construction, hygienic and medical industries throughout the world. Before that, Daniel was a finance lead and senior project manager at the world’s largest brewer, Anheuser Busch in the Czech Republic, which, of course, is fairly well known to South Africans. Daniel completed his BCom in investment management at the University of Pretoria and then he went on to specialize as a management accountant, becoming a member of CIMA, obtaining a project management professional certification and in 2016 completed an MBA at Hult International Business School in San Francisco. He’s currently based in Atlanta and that’s where you’re currently talking to us from. Welcome, Daniel, good to have you on.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: Thanks, I appreciate the generous introduction and inviting me to talk on CFO Talks, it’s a pleasure to be here.
CIARAN RYAN: It’s clear that you’ve been out of the country a while, but you were born and grew up here, maybe just talk about your South African connection, so that people understand where you come from.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: I’m South African-born, as you can probably hear from the accent, I was born in Pretoria to a German and Afrikaans parenthood. I’ve got three other siblings, both my parents are in the medical field. My siblings are all in the business field, so all of them got diverted into business. I started my academic walk, a lot of people don’t classify primary school as the start of your academia, I really think it’s pivotal and fundamental because I think you build all your basic building blocks there. I started at the German school in Pretoria, I went to high school at Pretoria Boys High and then subsequently went to university at the University of Pretoria to study investment management. After my degree I got employed by a company called Fox5 as a finance manager and worked there for five years. Along that road as well I own a business there, as well as a non-profit still to this day, so I still have my roots in South Africa, I still really would love to visit, with the pandemic it’s been a bit hard, but hopefully within the next few months, crossing my fingers, that would be a possibility.
CIARAN RYAN: So you grew up with German and Afrikaans parents, what was your home language?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: It was a mix of English, German and Afrikaans at the dinner table, mainly Afrikaans and German. I was schooled in English, so we didn’t speak too much English at home but to be honest, it was a mix of all three.
‘We always say on a daily basis millions of people are in contact with our product, but they haven’t consciously perceived that the brand is Silon.’
CIARAN RYAN: Okay, tell us a bit about Silon and what it does, I gave a little bit on an intro there, but I think we need to expand on that, and also give us a sense of how extensive its operations are globally and its size in terms of revenue and staff.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: Silon is currently around the $300 million revenue mark and employs just over 500 staff. Our company dates back to the 1950s and is headquartered in Czech Republic, so we’re a global entity serving all seven continents. Our first root we can date back to a founder called Otto Wichterle, he’s a Czech chemist, mainly famous for inventing the soft contact lens. He also invented a groundbreaking process for nylon fibre. In a lot of countries, especially in Europe, you would still have the nickname or a synonym for the women’s nylon stockings would be silonky, so that’s where the name Silon comes from. We started as a fibre manufacturer, synthetic fibres, in the 1970s we bought our first injection moulding plant and rapidly extended into a product portfolio in compounding and extrusion. If the audience does not know what extrusion is, in simple terms it’s a several unit compartment, basically a lot of ovens connected to each other with twin screws or single screws, which mix, cook, knead, they shape and they form a final product. In our case, this final product we add and we change the physical thermal and electrical characteristics of our product. The product mainly goes into, as you mentioned earlier, automotive, construction and medical industries.
So if you think of your normal [unclear] pipe, we would be the raw material producer of that. If you think of automotive, you’d think of your dashboard, your wires, your cables, all of that, that would be Silon’s main product. So not the actual forming of the product or the production or the blow moulding or injection moulding of it but the product before that. Ideally, we always say on a daily basis millions of people are in contact with our product, but they haven’t consciously perceived that the brand is Silon. We’re a raw material provider, we currently produce over 100 000 metric tons and about 4500 trucks leave our facility every year, both in and then 4500 out, those are our recent statistics. The US operation is also our newest operation, we started about four years ago in Peachtree City, Georgia, it’s very close to the airport. The main reason for this was to expand our market into the north and southern Americas. Of course, looking back now with the global commodity crisis, transport being at an all-time high, raw material costs also being, in
our industry at least, on an all-time high, it’s been a great decision looking back at it. But hindsight is 20/20, you make good decisions, you make bad decisions. Luckily, this one is going in the right direction. It’s been good being in the US and at least representing other parts of the world.
CIARAN RYAN: You’re currently based in Atlanta, how long have you been in the United States?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: I’ve been here for three years. Before moving here, I worked for our company as a controller. I was here for a year focusing on establishing the business operations, really the processes, everything around the manufacturing facility in order to ensure that once we flick on the switch, that we are ready to go. After a year I was promoted to the CFO of the organisation, a very CFO/COO role and really spearheading the finance functions, the insurance, procurement, logistics, taxation, budgeting, controlling. So really all of the functions that a manufacturer needs to manufacture, excluding the production itself.
CIARAN RYAN: You mentioned that you’ve got a company still going on in South Africa and a non-profit, tell us about that.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: The company that that I have in South Africa is in Pretoria and the company is a sports club. We currently have four holding members of the company. The company is running as a sports club, Liverpool Supporters Club, so it’s the fourth supporters club in Africa. We currently operate out of a facility called Blue Crane and we generally use the funding that we have there as the non-profit to support the local area in any outdoor exercise, any fundraising we do goes to local charities for food and education. The company is currently run completely without my help, really big respect to our board of directors that side, we’ve got five on the board of directors right now. They host weekly events, it’s been a really strong performing business, both from a charitable side and a profit side. I’m really proud to be part of that and there’s a very strong team that side.
CIARAN RYAN: Okay, you’ve talked a little bit about your most recent company that you’re working with, Silonin the Czech Republic and Anheuser-Busch, but just go back a bit to the beginning and tell us about, you grew up in Pretoria, German and Afrikaans parents, where did you go to school and just take us from there?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: So I mentioned I went to the German school, Deutsche Internationale Schule Pretoria and, of course, the schooling was in German, really partly to appease our family heritage of being German, also getting that my language roots down, really not
not to forget the language, so a great decision there. Then moving straight into high school to Pretoria Boys High School, and it’s actually right next to the university.
‘I was a bit thrown off by the whole medical community with my parents not wanting me to go down that path.’
CIARAN RYAN: For people who don’t know, that’s where Elon Musk went to school.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: Exactly, Elon Musk and various other sportsmen, academics. I’d say it’s a very well-balanced school. The school ingrains ethos into young adults to become, I’d like to say real gentlemen but I hope I live up to that. The school really builds on that transformative stage in your life. Back then, edging towards university, I did not know what I wanted to study at all, so I went to a career counsellor, they gave me a thorough, three or four-hour long test, and they didn’t provide much guidance, they just told me that I’m very ambitious, I need to study something that can keep me busy. From an ability standpoint that really opened the doors to just about anything. I was a bit thrown off by the whole medical community with my parents not wanting me to go down that path, and I was really not enjoying the engineering part of things. The sciences part of things was always interesting, but I couldn’t see myself working in a lab. So just by the elimination of choice, it ran me down the BCom sector. I went to the career counsellors at the department at the university and they basically said, judging from who you are and the discussions we’ve had and your aptitude test, we’d either recommend accounting or investment. I went down the investment road, accounting was my major, so I definitely wanted accounting until final year. So that that gave me a bit of a broader macroeconomic plus the whole microeconomic overview from a finance point at least.
So I would say these were my, I call it the table stakes that got me to the table. So that landed me a very nice job as a finance manager in a company called Fox5, and what they do is they are an IT outsourcing company, so they’re an IT company on wheels. They facilitate a lot of the advocates chambers, a lot of the hospitals in Pretoria, a lot of big commercial clients, which pay retainer fees to host on their servers, to send emails, everything from your hardware and software support to your hardcore programming and setting up systems for companies. It was a very good learning opportunity for me for a first job, it was an excellent opportunity because I got to see the whole business from an operational point, working very closely with the CEO of the company, which today has been a great inspiration to me, really teaching me all walks about life. I was there for five years and I thought I’d change it up, after five years you learn a lot about a company, unless you are moving roles or expanding the company substantially and opening more entities and all of this, I felt it was time for me to move and to grow into new positions.
I was thinking of finding another job another job in the Cape, but it got me researching academic programmes. So I was researching different MBA schools and it really took me down the path of pursuing this MBA. After searching for quite some time for the ideal school, I sent my application to three different schools and the first one that responded was Hult International Business School. At the age of 25, they told me I was the youngest person in the class that has been accepted. It is the world’s most international business programme, so over 80 different nationalities in one class. I thought this was excellent and they also have global rotational campuses, so they’ve got campuses in Boston, Dubai, Shanghai and I believe London and in New York City.
So I chose my global rotations there to be in Shanghai and in New York City. So really one lap around the world throughout the business school. It really also taught me a lot of things, being based in San Francisco itself really taught me a lot of things with the San Francisco, that Silicon Valley mindset, the constant push on move fast, the growth mindset, really becoming something better every single day. This was it was a great learning opportunity, I met a lot of good friends all across the world, it really expanded my network into just about every single country on earth. It’s really great to say that you have you have a friend in every country, at least, well, in most countries. So that’s a very nice thing to have whenever you’re travelling to a new place to have some support structure there, both from a friendship point of view and from a business point of view. After that, I got a job offer from Anheuser-Busch, they were busy with the South African Breweries merger. At the time, I believe it was the world’s largest merger.
I got hired for their Czech team, leading a finance team, they were integrating a whole new business unit into the finance team and also integrating two different processes. So a lot of it was leading back office finance for the company. So a lot of invoices, accounts payable, accounts receivable, cash flow management, treasury working with procurements, so really the back office function at Anheuser-Busch, really pushing, making sure that everything works efficiently. A lot of project management taking place there on a daily basis. You run into tens, maybe twenty projects at one time, which led me into a PMP certification. So I completed this and I got a new offer there as a project manager, really integrating the people business service side of the company within their specific brewery. So this took me travelling throughout Europe with the various breweries in Anheuser-Busch at the time. So it was very, very fun and a big learning curve. Teams, very big teams, the team I had was about 3500 people, so very big back office teams supporting all the breweries across the world. It really was a ground-up learning experience, which took me to Silon, they sent me a job offer in the middle of 2017 and we start speaking, they touched on their prospectus of opening a facility in the US. They are a Czech company, so that’s how the Czech roots were born…
‘It was quite easy to adapt to a Czech company.’
CIARAN RYAN: Just on that point, German is obviously a big advantage in Europe, so you’ve got English and German, you’re probably fluent in both. What is the language in Czechoslovakian head quarters where you were working, is it English, is it Czech or what was it?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: English I would say is the company language but the majority of the systems and all of that, a lot of the staff there don’t speak English, so they speak Czech. The shareholders are German, so that helps me a bit, I can speak German to them or when they speak German to each other, I can respond, so that helps a lot. It’s a German-Czech company but all the senior executives in the company speak English, all our reporting is in English, all the standards are in English. So it was quite easy to adapt to a Czech company mainly for that reason.
CIARAN RYAN: Sorry, I don’t think you had quite finished that, so from 2017 you were talking to Silon, but it seems that they were looking for you to join them in the United States, is that right?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: Correct, I got offered a controller position, it was quite a tough gig, it was one week in Europe, one week in the US, one week in Europe and really following that pattern for about a year. The reason for this was the week in Europe is training and then you bring these processes back into the US and implement them. So you’re constantly back and forth, really learning as much as you can about the business on both continents. It taught me a ton about managing this processes, I believe Anheuser-Busch also taught me a lot on the manufacturing dynamics, not only from purely a finance point of view, but also operationally, which I firmly believe is a strong counterpart to finance. I accepted this based on that contingency really coming back to the US, seeing how it was, my first time around in the US was as an MBA student. It’s much different living on a South African budget and doing an MBA in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities, it’s a much different experience.
CIARAN RYAN: So you weren’t doing a lot of clubbing or eating out?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: No, the whole MBA programme is a lot about networking and after the class, a lot of the classmates went for dinners and drinks, and I was always the guy going home, blaming it on studying or doing a project but meanwhile… But it’s beneficial because the MBA is also not a cheap programme, so I did get my moneys worth because you can always network during the day and study a lot during the night. So I took a lot of learning opportunity there. In a way, looking back, I don’t regret it completely. If I did it again, I’d probably do it exactly the same way. It’s probably best to be tightly strapped when you really want to learn.
‘You constantly need to think about automation, how you can be more profitable, how you can be more lean.’
CIARAN RYAN: Indeed. That’s a great summary there, a very inspiring story and I like the hardships, so you didn’t have the budget, so you just went and worked and studied, you used your time quite effectively. I want to get a sense from you of the duties of the modern CFO and maybe tie into this, you have been in the United States for three or four years with Silon, how has the growth in that market been, but specifically talk from the viewpoint of…your CV mentions stakeholder engagement, quite a lot of what you do and that’s quite apart from the technical aspects of budgeting and stress testing different scenarios and so on. There’s a lot of ground to cover, just talk about that, the role of the CFO and what this has meant for you in this new role because it is a new role, you’re opening up a new market for the company, talk about that.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: Yes, you’re completely right, it’s a new market, it’s a new role, it’s a step up from a controllership position. So that transition there has to be a transition in both my professional life and my personal life. A CFO is much more a strategic advisor, I see it at least similar to a consultant, you’re spearheading the business growth and your mentors, your shareholders, your peers, your teammates, your employees, everyone looks at you for direction. You have to know the business operations, you have to know stress testing and budgeting and all of these things. These are merely things that you really do need to understand thoroughly. But being in the CFO position, you really need to know the leadership and the strategic position that the company currently has and where we can be in a year, in two years, in five years, in ten years. So really a short, medium and long-term vision. However, if you touch on a modern CFO, you cannot have that strategic vision without understanding the here and now. You should be able to picture what you have and be able to draw exactly that to anyone who is not part of that business, who does not understand it as clearly as you do, and create actionable goals on that for your teammates. So it really is someone who can identify gaps and really the whole market has moved. I believe since I started studying it’s moved astronomically into the digitisation of these roles as well. So since I came into the workforce, when I started, the CFOs were really focused on the financials, preparing the financial statements, making sure that they are submitted in place, that they are accurate, transparent, verifiable. I believe this is changing much more to your role as a CFO is much more that you’re in charge of the technical processes behind those financials, every building block building up to the financials, and digital transformation is one of the trending topics, anything can be automated. So you constantly need to think about automation, how you can be more profitable, how you can be more lean, and how you can be as good to your people while you are achieving these goals. That’s in a nutshell what I’d say about that.
CIARAN RYAN: So what would you say were some of the more challenging assignments you’ve had in your career? This does seem like it’s a challenge in itself because you mentioned you’re traveling one week to Europe for training, then you go back to the United States to implement what you’ve just learned, while you’re opening up the market and everybody’s looking to you for guidance and you come from the controller position, not really that familiar with opening up a new market. Was that one of the more challenging things?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: I would say definitely. At Anheuser-Busch it’s a multi-billion-dollar company and the processes are put into silos, so there is limited interaction between these silos, and it’s a completely different thing at Silon, where in every single department you can stand up and walk to production, within five minutes you are there and you can speak to the production manager. Everyone knows each other, it’s a smaller manufacturing company, so the dynamics, the rules of the game have changed. It’s definitely on top of the most challenging assignments I have had. It’s also different being in a very mature manufacturing facility that already has the processes established and you are making them more lean as you go, versus an embryonic manufacturing facility, where you are establishing these processes from the ground up. A lot of the time these processes start and you have one person and this one person would be the head of the department, as well as the junior in the department, so he’d be the most junior, the most senior and covering all the roles, and I find that the toughest because you also need to have the strongest teams to cover these positions.
I find this was probably the most challenging, you’re constantly have these steps forward and steps back, especially during this Covid crisis, we lost a lot of our employees being absent or going on governmental support, but if you lose one person in a small manufacturing company, you lose a whole department, a lot of your support structure goes. I’d say that that’s the aspect of this that was very tough and hopefully we are over that stage. So now we’ve got our departments set, we’ve got our teams in place, we’ve got very strong leaders because they have done A to Z. Everything is ready to go and we actually recently, a month ago, employed a new CEO, so everything is looking great to be here but it was definitely not an easy feat, I’d say a lot of the mentorship from our head office and our shareholders, there was a lot of mentorship going on, a lot of them guiding you through the process because they’ve been through this before it’s invaluable, I’ve had great mentors, some that are great friends.
CIARAN RYAN: I presume you still have family in South Africa?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: I do, both my parents are still in South Africa.
CIARAN RYAN: But it sounds like you’ve been out of the country for a long time.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: I’ve been out of the country for about six years now. I’ve been back a couple of times, of course, but my roots are here now. Hopefully one day we open a manufacturing facility in South Africa, and I can go back.
CIARAN RYAN: What do you do in your downtime? I see that you’re a musician, it looks like you play guitar and a few other instruments. You also mentioned the Liverpool football fan club. What else do you do in your downtime?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: In the beginning it was a lot of flying and you reset while doing this. Currently I have been situated on the ground, so I have been living in the US in one place for 18 months, maybe closer to the two-year mark. The city I live in is called Peachtree City and there is about 100 miles of golf cart tracks, so everyone travels around in a golf cart, the weather is very much like South Africa, great weather, the temperature, the humidity, the trees, it reminds me a lot of home. I love going for runs, I love going canoeing on the lakes on the weekends. Generally, I listen to podcasts, it’s a nice way to reset my body and my mind, doing two things in one. I also like reading, I do a lot of reading and I try to set a goal of reading a minimum of two books a week. I know that doesn’t sound like much but sometimes you get caught up at work, the two books is a real goal, but sometimes I read four books. It’s always nice to read a different story and, again, it’s taking your mind on a different journey, I like to learn and build myself into becoming a better person for tomorrow.
CIARAN RYAN: I just looked up Peachtree City in Atlanta, it’s a little bit north of the city and you said it’s quite close to the airport.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: It’s just south of the city, so I would say it’s about 20 minutes south of the Atlanta Airport. It’s a designer city, so pilots from Delta designed this city from the ground up, so that’s why it’s built around these golf cart tracks. It was like a little community city, so it’s a very pleasant city because when you drive through it you don’t know you’re in a city, there are trees everywhere blocking the houses, pathways and everything, the pathways g under the highways. It’s fascinating going to a Walmart here and seeing golf carts parked in front, it’s not very American.
‘I don’t think you get many CFOs/musicians.’
CIARAN RYAN: Interesting, okay. Are you still playing music?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: I do, I try to go to a music session here at a studio, I play the drums. I played the drums for two bands in college and in high school in South Africa. My passion was music, I love the creativity form of it, it’s really lovely. I wish if there were alternative career paths, it would probably be music. I don’t think you get many CFOs/musicians.
CIARAN RYAN: No, not a lot that I’ve encountered, that’s interesting. I’m also quite interested to know that you manage to get through two books a week. Talk about that, what kinds of books are you reading and what would you recommend?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: I like reading memoirs, I like reading fantasies sometimes but I also like reading real world stories that I can implement in my daily life or at least something that teaches me a lesson, something I can look back on. One of my favourite authors is Nassim Taleb, he wrote the books Black Swan, Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness, those are great books. I love the way he takes the opposite side of things and really arguing for that. I recently read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, that was something that I put on delay for about a year or two, but it was also a great read. Then general life rules, I like Hans Rosling, he wrote a book called Factfulness, it’s a very good book. It’s basically an uplifting story on why the world is not as bad you think. I would really recommend any of my doomsday friends to read it because I do believe that we don’t give ourselves enough credit on where we are going and where we’ve actually come from. I think we forget that quite easily. I also read a lot of psychology books, I love reading Jordan Peterson’s books, he’s got a book called 12 Rules for Life, it’s very, very interesting the way he argues certain points…
CIARAN RYAN: Fix your own life first and then fix the world type of thing, yes.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: Exactly, I believe one of the rules is clean up your bedroom before you start cleaning up the world. I love the stories behind everything.
CIARAN RYAN: A good book to read for leadership is – just my opinion here – it’s a book called South by Ernest Shackleton, who led an expedition down to the Antarctic about 100 years ago, actually before the first World War. He got trapped down there for a couple of years and he had to lead this team, and he actually got them out without a single person losing their lives. It’s an incredible story of leadership and courage. It’s just one of those books, there’s a guy who led from the front. If you’re into that kind of thing, I would recommend that one for you.
Carbon emissions is becoming part of the language of business today.
CIARAN RYAN: I want to wrap up with this question, you probably saw the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, this is beginning to affect CFOs, it’s affecting all companies. Carbon emissions is becoming part of the language of business today. Are you aware of the enhanced sustainable reporting requirements imposed by COP26? Is this something that has landed on your desk as yet or is still a bit new?
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: Here in the US, we have to be aware of everything that happens globally. Anything that can affect us or anything that can change anything, the markets or from a regulatory point of view. I would say sustainability is probably, if not the most, important or the most defining issue issue that we are dealing with currently. I followed this conference from the beginning, and it was basically a formation and a unification of our accounting standards. They announced that they are basically establishing a new standards board called the International Sustainability Standards Board and this will comprise of two non-profit companies, the Climate Disclosures Standards Board and the Value Reporting Foundation. So the goal is to have this organisation running by June 2022, so they’ve got about six months to put all their frameworks in action.
I believe they’re searching for a chairman and a vice chairman as we speak. Basically, what the ISSB is tasked with is they need to work with the International Accounting Standards Board to create the bridge, the connectivity and compatibility between our IFRS accounting standards and the sustainability disclosure standards. Essentially what this will create is a lot of transparency within the market, it will give our investors the high-quality information on the sustainability aspect of the company, which to this day it has not been a legal requirement for a company to disclose. At the minimum there has not been a global standard for companies to disclose. So, of course, this increases your quality of information, and it also creates a baseline for companies to act upon. I think on a global footprint they want to release this all across the world, so the Americas, Oceana, APAC and EMEA, they want to bring this out across the board and standardise these standards throughout every single business.
My thoughts on this, initially we have to have transparency in these markets, we have to have teamwork, we have to recognise the role that it plays in our society and also specifically with climate. It’s again one of those things where one company cannot tackle it at a time, one country cannot tackle it alone but you do need multilateralism to approach this problem. I think this is the first step, and you can correct me if I am wrong, but I think this is the first big global step in sustainability and value reporting that we really have on an international basis. I think it’s really a reflection of the world that we live in, a world where any long-term thinking and sustainability is really at the core of business. I think it’s a great move, I’m really excited about it, I’m excited about what they will draft in July. I’ve seen a few provisional drafts, I’ve seen a few of the reporting prototypes, I read through that but I’m excited about what the final verdict there will be and all the companies that are going to take part in this.
CIARAN RYAN: I have no doubt that this is going to become a very important part of our lives, as accountants going forward. Like IFRS I think there’s going to be some alignment of standards, I think there’s going to be more compliance. We complain that there’s too much of it already but I think with going deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole, it’s definitely coming.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: It’s interesting because they did mention about making it electronic, so making it much easier to track and creating this standard across the board. So it does seem that they have their eye on at least making it a bit less strenuous on the accountants.
CIARAN RYAN: Daniel Raubenheimer, we’re going to leave it there, what a great discussion, it was an absolute pleasure to have you on and good to hear from you on the other end of the world in Peachtree City, Atlanta. I’m going to have to do some Google searching to see all these golf cart trails.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: There are over 100 miles of golf cart tracks.
CIARAN RYAN: So you scoot around and you go to the shops in a golf cart.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: I drive to work in a car but everything other than that is always conducted on a golf cart.
CIARAN RYAN: It’s like being in a forest because there are trees everywhere, you don’t see the houses.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: There are so many trees, you have these forest paths and lakes. Fishing is very big here, nature is very big here, I nearly collided with a deer the other day. I think any South African would appreciate the scenery.
CIARAN RYAN: Great discussion, Daniel, thanks so much for coming on. Stay in touch, please, I’m very keen to hear from you again and get you back on. Let’s see in the new year, new challenges, I’m sure the market will have grown, a new phase in the life and the development of Silon. So please, let’s stay in touch and get you back on.
DANIEL RAUBENHEIMER: 100% Ciaran, I do appreciate the time and it was a pleasure, thank you for hosting me.
