WORLDVIEW: The secret to getting SA back into becoming a beacon of hope for the world.

We're always fascinated with personal accounts by people well known to us. Especially when they have been through the mill and come out smiling at the other end. So it was for me with reading Magnus Heystek's account of how he started what is now officially South Africa's leading boutique financial advisory business.

Magnus started in journalism a few months before I joined The Citizen in 1980 – him then, as now, a larger than life character; me a wide-eyed stripling from a small town in KZN. First a horseracing reporter, when we met he had moved over to the business desk at Die Transvaler whose offices were a floor below ours in the Perskor building in Johannesburg's Doornfontein – an area that was even more seedy back then.

In the decades since we have broken bread, smashed golf balls, commiserated over personal setbacks, and, once my creation Moneyweb was big enough and he had moved into a more profitable line of work, struck business deals. Magnus is a good friend, possessing the admirable loyalty gene inherited by most Afrikaners.

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