Bok talent just the tip of the iceberg – ex-Springbok turned business strategist Flip van der Merwe

Former Springbok lock Flip van der Merwe has taken the lessons of high‑performance rugby into the boardroom, now working as a strategy consultant for business leaders. Living in Biarritz, France, he is also a co‑founder of the Lekker Network, which connects South Africans wherever they are. In an interview with BizNews, van der Merwe said many South Africans abroad share “a hunger to make South Africa work” and you don’t need to be an Elon Musk or Johann Rupert to make a difference. He draws on personal experiences from elite teams to guide leaders, citing role models such as Simon Sinek and Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus, whom he calls ahead of his time. Van der Merwe believes the Springboks are not only building a world‑class team but shaping great people off the field. And when it comes to rugby talent, he says, the Springboks we see winning matches today are only the tip of the iceberg, with even more talent emerging from Craven Week and the under‑21s.    

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Edited transcript of the interview

Linda van Tilburg (00:23.327)

Flip van der Merwe is a former Springbok businessman and now he's uniting South Africans from across the world as one of the co-founders of The Lekker Network. We've got Flip with us in the studio, all the way from Biarritz in France. 

Flip van der Merwe (00:37.142)

Thank you very much.

Linda van Tilburg (00:40.282)

And Biarritz, to remind people, is in France near the Spanish border.

Flip van der Merwe (00:45.73)

Yes, we are on the southwest coast of France. Very rainy, very wet at the moment, but a lovely place. Geographically, much like Cape Town. It's right on the Atlantic, cold winters, but lovely summers here.

Linda van Tilburg (01:02.302)

So can we start with how you reinvented yourself after your fantastic career as a lock for the Springboks?

Flip van der Merwe (01:13.09)

I think it's very much a work in progress. As we can say, we need to constantly evolve as athletes. Your main aim is to constantly be better. Every year you need to reflect on how you went and then become a little better. I find the same works in business. It's just little steps. I had a general sense of direction where I wanted to go. And then, yeah, we just kept on improving and taking new steps and new directions every year, little by little.

Linda van Tilburg (01:53.511)

So, always close to rugby still or totally removed from it?

Flip van der Merwe (01:59.074)

We're close to rugby in the sense that I still watch it on the TV every weekend. I love to watch rugby, see what's going on, probably the biggest fan of our Springboks and what they achieve and what they mean for our country. I also love local rugby and grassroots. I have two young boys, so I often take them on weekends to the local rugby club just to experience what it is to see the camaraderie around the field and on the field.

Linda van Tilburg (02:34.1)

And why did you think you needed an MBA from Cambridge? Because that's what you did.

Flip van der Merwe (02:37.997)

Why do I need it? I probably don't need it. I wanted one. It's been an ambition of mine ever since I was younger and I attended a well-known school in Bloemfontein called Grey College and we had a family friend that attended Cambridge and... When I was younger, I once saw photos of him attending Cambridge and it looked, you know, it was even before Harry Potter, but it looked like Harry Potter, you know, there's old buildings and all those old traditions and what comes with it. And then obviously a great education alongside with it walking in the footsteps of Darwin and Newton, et cetera. So, the aim was always to get into Cambridge in whatever sense.

Undergrad, as a South African, it's extremely complicated to get into Cambridge. Funding was one challenge, but then academically also because we're not on the same curriculum, so you have to write a lot more extra exams to get in there. So the opportunity came post-grad and as an MBA. Even though the process isn't as linear as you would think because I was a rugby player, I wasn't a corporate executive working in a company. I did study and luckily my marks as a student were good enough.

So first, I attempted in 2017 and got accepted for the MBA. But then at last chance I felt I still had two more years of rugby in my legs and wanted to enjoy it as much as possible. I went for the executive MBA in 2019, which actually was a better fit in the sense that the group was a little bit older, a little bit more experienced. So, you know, we could share the same battle scars, and it was a great group of people that I studied with. It was the point where I realised the line between professional sports and a professional career is similar. And there's a lot that we can replicate in that sense.

Linda van Tilburg (05:18.137)

And where did it lead to you in the business world? What are you doing right now?

Flip van der Merwe (05:21.953)

So ,I'm a strategy consultant, Linda, so before you fall asleep, I guide leaders and help them to make the difficult decisions, to make decisions as to where they're playing, how they want to win, what products the market needs. Just a little bit, get leaders out of their day-to-day work and make them... we take a high-level view of the business and just see what's going on and can we see the wood for the trees, you know, just guide them into a new direction.

Often leaders find themselves stuck in day-to-day work and they reach sort of like a glass ceiling as they call it. Can't seem to get out of it. So that's where I come in and we come very much with a leadership approach. So, find a cohesion between your management teams, your leaders, your coaches. And then what we've learned out of rugby is trying to make the players in each position be the best possible way they can. And yeah, that works well for me. So, I can share some personal experiences from high-performance teams that I worked with but also have the academic backing then to guide teams into making those decisions.

Linda van Tilburg (06:50.841)

And is there anybody that you see as a role model or somebody you'd like to emulate from the rugby world or business world?

Flip van der Merwe (06:58.817)

Yeah, I've plenty. I very much believe in role models and what they mean. Through the whole of my career, I've had incredible role models. The biggest living legend is probably a guy like Rassie Erasmus, which I had the privilege as a student to play with and then to play under as a coach.

Much of the innovation that they've carried through into the rugby world today is something that we can use in the business world. I had a lot of coaches and teachers when I was young that guided me. A little bit of carrot and stick, you know, the Afrikaans culture is a little bit like that. We motivate each other in different ways.

And then in the corporate world as well, a lot of friends doing great work. I've got a very good friend that I met through the Lekker Network, Justin Adrianus, that's guiding me every day and has massive success wherever he goes and he's got a great approach that contradicts mine and it's very good for me. But I also look up to guys like Simon Sinek, etc. that motivate others and get the best out of other people.

Linda van Tilburg (08:51.663)

And you are also uniting South Africans as a co-founder of the Lekker Network now.

Flip van der Merwe (08:58.751)

I think that is the aim of any South African living abroad is to unite the South Africans. What the people have done with the Lekker Network, Renier Lombard and Nic Latouf and the company is literally build that network where we can connect wherever we are.

I'm very bullish on South Africa and South Africans and what we do. Like myself, many of us are overseas for whichever reason and we've got a hunger to make South Africa work. I think the Lekker Network is a great vehicle to do that - the communication and transactions going through the network are quite incredible. You don't have to be an Elon Musk or a Rupert, etc. to have a positive effect on South Africa. It's normal everyday South Africans everywhere across the country that make a lot of difference.

Linda van Tilburg (10:07.894)

And you also translated that into a podcast.

Flip van der Merwe (10:11.669)

Yes, so with Justin that I've just mentioned, we've started Winning the Away Game podcast, which emulates exactly what I just said. It's like, you know, how do we, what does it take to win away from home? You know, as a sportsman, it was always, you know, three, four times tougher to win when you play away from home at the opponent's place. It's just because you're not used to the conditions, it's not your supporters, it's a foreign place, a little bit more hostile.

And exactly the same things we realized when you start a business in a foreign country, you have to restart your network, restart your support group. You know, the clients have a different approach. As South Africans, we're much more direct whereas in France you have to take a little bit of the wheel and deal, and you have to understand the little bit of a genus quo going around and the joie de vivre.

So, you know, it's very much of the same. And so, we started this podcast to instead of us just, you know, in teams meeting, sitting down and having one-to-one chats, as we said, these chats, we can actually spread them wider to an audience. Where we're interviewing successful South Africans abroad and retired sportsmen, sports people that have found their niche of the sport. And the conversations are incredible. It's not only a sports podcast. There's much more rugby lessons in there.

We're seeing different perspectives of how people appreciate the Springboks, which is actually quite incredible. You know, normal people that I would have never met in my life and we share very deep and vulnerable conversations, which is very good. And also then, you know, the biggest thing that comes out of it is how do we make South Africa a better place for everyone? And that is what we see from the expats is we take what works overseas and try and emulate it in a South African way.  And there's some incredible things coming from it, Linda.

Linda van Tilburg (12:39.265) And I also see that you ran an Ironman.

Flip van der Merwe (12:42.285) I participated in a half Ironman. In the Ironman community, it's very important to stay that little 'half'. It's still a very far way to do, especially for a big guy like myself. But yes, it was a great challenge, and I'm completely hooked. I'm definitely doing a few more this year or next year.

Linda van Tilburg (13:09.228) And we can't let you go without you talking about Rassie and the Springboks. I mean, what have you as an ex-player observed? 

Flip van der Merwe (13:38.636)  Rassie is doing, Rassie and his whole team of coaches, we have to say, and players are doing incredible work as Springboks. And I think we are going into an exceptional generation of talent that the Springboks can find. And also, I very strongly believe that we're only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of talent that's coming through.

If we see the talent currently at Craven Week guaranteed under-21 etc., there's so much talent still coming through South Africa. It's incredible, you know, in the November test series that we've seen the Springboks and every foreigner going to watch the Springbok - and I was lucky enough to go see the French and the Irish test matches - and you meet a lot of South Africans and it gives them a little bit more hope every time the Springboks win overseas. It just feels like, okay, well, that's good, I can go for another two, three years now, you know, I've got that South African pride that they can carry with them into meetings, etc.

On a pure sporting sense, the innovation is incredible that they can achieve with one team, and you can see how they became in less than 10 years ahead, shoulders above of any other team where it still stays a competitive arena and every now and then they still lose a match. But you can see they're building on something new. They're gathering the interest of South Africa, you know, not just a particular group of people, but you know, there's a wide interest in the Springboks and what they can achieve.

They're building great humans. You can see the Springboks themselves off the field. There's no bad news, unless they handle the media very well, but there's no bad news coming out. They're uplifting the community around their family and in the wider circle. I think in the Springboks group there's about five or six charities running now so they're giving back wherever they go. So that's a sign of a good team - we're not just building a good business but you're building good humans that contribute to the business, and I think that is what Rassie and his team is getting right at the moment.

Linda van Tilburg (16:06.863)

You said you played with Rassie, and you played under him as a coach. What did you observe from Rassie that you think no other coach in the world has?

Flip van der Merwe (16:18.573)

He’s ahead of his time. I think we see that with a lot of special coaches and also, we see that with business inventors. They're always a little bit of special characters and not everyone understands the way they think all the time. With some other fellows at Africans in the United States, we're seeing that a lot of time. Most of the time, they open their mouths, it's not great, you know.

But Rassie was way ahead of his time in the way he thinks about sport and competitiveness, but also about team construct and what everyone should do to get out of it is very good. Some of the ideas he implements today he already had back in 2003, 2004. That's 20 years that has been working and modelling the right way of implementing it on the sports field. He's an incredible innovator in the rugby sense and in the business sense. He's not a daft person. He does well off the field as well.