Nicolaas (Nic) Richter
Business & Operations Strategist
"Let us build something remarkable together."
About
Cape-Town-based entrepreneur, inclusive-innovation researcher and soon-to-be Netherlands resident. My two French Bulldogs keep me grounded; big challenges keep me curious.
“A recent MPhil graduate who combines two decades of professional experience, including ten years building ventures, with evidence-based insight.”
In 2025 I’ll arrive on the Netherlands’ Zoekjaar visa, a programme that attracts global talent. Most holders are recent graduates; I bring 10 years of entrepreneurial leadership plus a freshly-minted MPhil in Inclusive Innovation. The permit lets me contribute on day one and convert seamlessly to a Highly Skilled Migrant or EU Blue Card within a year, giving any employer long-term continuity.Across two decades I’ve taken ideas from sketchpad to scale: introducing premium brands throughout South Africa, founding a salon that became a national training hub, and building an education-led distribution network that up-skilled 1 000+ stylists. Each venture sharpened my knack for blending hands-on execution with systems-level strategy.I complement that commercial grit with academic rigour. During my 5 years at University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business I turned real-world problems into living laboratories for strategy, logistics and customer insight. My research-master’s dissertation on cultural inclusion proved that combining data with empathy can redesign policies and markets so no one is left out.What I bring to Dutch teams:Entrepreneurial leadership that turns bold ideas into sustainable revenueResearch-driven methods for inclusive product, policy and market designA global network of experts, educators and supply-chain partners
"I am ready to bring the entrepreneurial grit and drive I forged in South Africa to the European market. If your team is set on turning bold ideas into measurable impact, let us build something remarkable together."
Entrepreneurship | Hed Kulture (2016 - 2021)
While still working full-time I spent my evenings delivering specialist keratin treatments in clients’ homes. The healthy margins on those after-hours services let me clear every personal debt and build R231 000 in seed capital. With that cash cushion I incorporated Hed Kulture in 2016 and went hunting for a flagship brand. When Mycro Keratin invited bids for its regional distribution, I pitched against established agencies that already handled global lines. The owners backed me because my plan centred on education-led selling and I could demonstrate the chemistry and technique myself. Ten months later the fledgling venture had invoiced R2.8 million in professional stock at a forty-two percent gross margin, revenue that financed our first IT backbone and inventory controls and proved the market was ready for a specialist player.
“With just R231 000 in seed capital, Hed Kulture built a R24 million sales engine in five audited years, lifting annual turnover by 160 per cent from launch to peak and staying profitable in almost every quarter.”
Momentum built quickly. In 2018 revenue climbed to R3.9 million, up forty per cent year on year, while the gross margin held steady. I reinvested aggressively, expanding stock to more than R840 000 so salons could rely on same-day fulfilment for orders placed before 11 am.That year I also ran a market experiment: a pilot shipment of the premium Australian brand Original Mineral. Although the range reached South Africa smoothly and confirmed our logistics route, the economy’s downturn made its price point a stretch for many salons. Rather than chase margin at all costs, I moved the remaining stock into The Keratin Lab, where it found its natural home as a boutique retail add-on. The exercise sharpened my reading of local price elasticity and proved the value of testing before scaling.The following year turned the strengthened platform into a springboard. Revenue surged to R5.9 million in 2019, a forty-nine-per-cent leap that justified buying a dedicated delivery vehicle, upgrading warehouse fixtures and adding a distribution-ready software stack. Even with these outlays the business delivered R369 000 in profit, demonstrating that growth and discipline can coexist.The real stress test arrived in 2020. Economic conditions tightened, yet Hed Kulture still pushed turnover to R7.2 million, its all-time high, by sharpening working-capital cycles and doubling down on the fastest-moving lines. Inventory peaked at R1.54 million, cash flow remained healthy and the company stayed profitable, a testament to rigorous demand forecasting and agile supplier negotiations.
By 2021 the distribution model was battle-tested and valuable, but I saw a bigger opportunity in my salon venture, The Keratin Lab. I exited the supply agreement on my own terms, booking R4.3 million in final-year revenue, and shifted my focus to Master's Degree studies in 2022 and the expansion of the salon brand. The decision illustrated one of the most underrated entrepreneurial skills: knowing when to pivot and redeploy hard-earned capital and insight.Across five audited years Hed Kulture generated more than R24 million in Mycro Keratin sales, grew annual turnover one hundred sixty percent from launch to peak and maintained profitability almost every quarter. I built the distribution from scratch, financed growth without diluting equity, constructed a half-million-rand asset base and guided a team that could run complex logistics while still treating every carton as a personal promise to the stylist and salon who ordered it.
Entrepreneurship | The Keratin Lab (2018 - present)
When I launched The Keratin Lab in a single-chair studio in September 2018, the aim was clear: prove that a specialist, keratin-only salon could command premium prices in a crowded market and serve as a dedicated training hub for Mycro Keratin, where visiting stylists could master the treatment and carry the brand back to their own salons. By the end of that first trading year the studio had turned over R326 000, confirming both the market demand for a premium keratin service and the power of an education-led strategy to drive wider product adoption.
“From a single chair and thirty-two clients, The Keratin Lab is on track for R2.45 million in annual turnover, proving that a salon can build market reach by sharing its expertise, pivot online overnight in a crisis and still outperform the sector.”
Confident in the model, I scaled quickly. Early in 2020 I signed a larger lease, hired salaried stylists and lifted revenue to more than R930 000. Then the pandemic shuttered salons across the country. I reclassified Keratin Lab as an essential supplier of personal care products, built an e-commerce store in forty-eight hours and shifted retail online. The pivot kept turnover steady while fixed costs fell, transforming a potential cash crunch into a case study in speed, cash control and digital agility.The strategy paid off in 2021. Turnover climbed to R1.14 million and the business returned to profitability. Almost 40 percent of sales and bookings now originated online, giving The Keratin Lab a predictable demand engine that required minimal advertising spend.Throughout 2022 and 2023 I turned the salon into a live laboratory for the coursework in my Business Administration and my MPhil in Inclusive Innovation. I mapped every customer touch point from the first Instagram swipe to the post-treatment follow-up, redesigned scripts and rituals to lift retention, and A/B-tested digital ads that doubled our online reach. Simple dashboards taught each stylist to track conversion and client-lifetime value, while service-blueprinting sessions let the team remove friction on their own. Revenue held steady, average review scores climbed, and the team began thinking like co-founders rather than employees.By May 2025 the salon had already booked R1.02 million, setting a course for roughly R2.45 million in turnover for the year, seven times the revenue of that initial proof-of-concept season. Along the way I have built teams, managed landlords, secured shareholder finance, negotiated exclusive international supply deals to protect The Keratin Lab's IP, protected margins and converted a pandemic shock into an operating playbook for resilient growth.
Inclusive Innovation (2022 - 2024) | Why I chose the MPhil
My Postgraduate in Business Administration gave me all the classic levers of finance, strategy, marketing, operations and people management , but it also made one thing clear: growth that ignores people and planet is brittle. Rather than follow the habitual MBA route, I enrolled for the MPhil in Inclusive Innovation at the UCT Graduate School of Business, a programme that sits at the crossroads of business, anthropology and public policy. I knew it would be a stretch: the curriculum is rooted in the social sciences, my supervisor is an Oxford- and Stanford-trained anthropologist, and the research standards are closer to developmental economics than to balance-sheet analysis. That risk was deliberate. I wanted to wear both hats - commercial pragmatist and social researcher - and to prove that the two can reinforce each other.
“I ventured beyond business coursework, mastered unfamiliar methods, and turned those insights into blueprints that can grow profit, empower people and safeguard the planet.”
The taught year, completed in 2022, layered systems thinking, futures studies and design anthropology on top of my existing toolkit of cash-flow models and market sizing. I applied those methods directly to my companies, mapping value flows, redesigning customer journeys and testing new supply-chain pilots. The real test came with the dissertation, which pushed me beyond business and into education studies, a field in which I had no formal training. I immersed myself in education and social-science literature for eighteen months, then designed a study that met both academic and ethical standards.Dissertation in briefTitle: The Air Allowed for Hair: Cultural Inclusivity in Cape Town Private SchoolsFocus: How Afrocentric hair policies reveal the mechanics of exclusivity in fee-charging schools that brand themselves as diverse.Method: Constructivist paradigm, interpretive phenomenological analysis, AI-generated visual stimuli for interviews, and Python-driven web-scraping of school websites to triangulate discourse with lived experience.Data: Thirteen in-depth parent interviews across nine private schools and one Model C school.Outcome: Three school archetypes and a values heat-map that links institutional rhetoric to everyday restrictions on identity expression. Reviewers described the work as “PhD-level” in both methodological innovation and theoretical reach.What this means for my next employer:I can translate complex human questions into evidence by moving from rich pictures and causal-loop diagrams to dashboards that executives actually use.I am comfortable switching domains - from salon logistics to school policy, from cash-conversion cycles to constructivist epistemology - without losing rigour.I build interventions that respect profit targets and community wellbeing, whether that means phasing out single-use plastics or redesigning a code of conduct so every learner can show up as themselves.I work fluently with academics, operational teams and creative technologists, which means your organisation gains one strategist who speaks several professional dialects.
The MPhil was not a detour from business; it laid the next tier of foundations. It fused social-impact literacy with entrepreneurial execution, equipping me with a multidisciplinary toolkit to help companies and non-profits build sustainable, inclusive growth.
Business Administration (2020 - 2021)| research-driven methods
While completing the Postgraduate in Business Administration I treated every assignment as a live consulting brief for my own companies. Five integrated action research reports pushed me beyond intuition and helped me build a repeatable toolkit for diagnosing problems, designing evidence-based interventions and measuring impact.
“I turned every postgraduate assignment into a live consulting brief, building strategies that delivered measurable gains for my own companies.”
The programme turned systems thinking into my default lens. Whether I was unpacking a leadership breakdown or a Covid-era supply-chain shock, I mapped each situation with Rich Pictures, behaviour-over-time graphs and Causal Loop Diagrams, then distilled the dynamics into Context-Mechanism-Outcome structures and CIMO intervention maps. These visual models translate complexity into conversations that frontline teams and boards can grasp, anchoring every recommendation in clear cause-and-effect logic.Moving from insight to action, I adopted the small-wins discipline of Action Research Learning. Each report finished with micro-experiments such as new warehouse process maps, a standardised digital communication platform or values-based leadership workshops, rolled out, measured and refined in real time. That habit of piloting, iterating and scaling now underpins my change-management style.Quantitative rigour featured just as strongly. I benchmarked cash-conversion cycles and service lead-times after a lean-management intervention, used 360° feedback and the Competing Values Framework to calibrate my management practice, and plotted five-year revenue trajectories against cost-of-sale curves to test strategic options. These exercises sharpened my ability to turn raw operational data into strategic levers.The Emerging Markets module broadened my focus to include sustainability and policy. Through scenario planning and triple-helix thinking, I learned to treat climate action, technological disruption and social equity as interlocking factors, then design interventions such as phasing out single-use plastics or launching artisan-skills academies that advance profit, people and planet in tandem. That experience convinced me to step off the traditional MBA pathway and pursue an MPhil in Inclusive Innovation instead.The Postgraduate had already delivered the analytical rigour and core business pillars covered in an MBA. What I wanted next was a programme that deepened my ability to balance commercial growth with social and environmental impact. The MPhil offered exactly that, while keeping me fully embedded in the Graduate School of Business and its academic network.Throughout the Postgraduate coursework I layered Soft Systems Methodology for stakeholder sense-making, built digital dashboards to keep interventions transparent, and embedded ethics reviews in every proposal. The result is a methodology stack that moves smoothly from qualitative insight to quantitative validation and from workshop sketches to operational dashboards.How this translates into value for businesses and non-profitsI can enter a complex organisation, map its systemic drivers and chokepoints within days, and provide leaders with a single page that explains why symptoms persist and where leverage lies.By combining financial analysis with human-centred inquiry, my recommendations balance margin discipline with cultural health, a blend essential for high-growth firms and mission-driven NGOs alike.The small-wins, data-rich approach de-risks change; teams test an idea, see evidence of improvement and build momentum organically rather than through top-down edicts.The sustainability and inclusive-innovation lens ensures that growth strategies align with regulatory shifts, climate commitments and social-impact goals, protecting licences to operate and opening new funding streams.Finally, the 360° and self-awareness work means I model the adaptive, transparent leadership style I advocate, making collaboration with executive teams straightforward and credible.
Postgraduate study transformed my entrepreneurial instinct into a portable, research-grounded toolkit that is ready to help a cash-strapped non-profit rebuild its value chain or a mid-market company construct its next growth curve.
MBA Essentials (2020) | Stellenbosch University Executive Education
My long-term goal in 2019 was to earn an MBA at the UCT Graduate School of Business, one of Africa’s highest-ranked institutions. To test the waters I first completed USB’s MBA Essentials, an intensive overview of finance, strategy, operations and leadership that sharpened my board-level fluency and gave me the diagnostic frameworks I later used to judge my readiness for further study.As I progressed, however, the goal evolved. The Postgraduate in Business Administration, combined with my entrepreneurial experience, showed me that sustainable growth depends on people and the planet as much as on spreadsheets. That realisation redirected my path from a traditional MBA toward the more human-centred MPhil in Inclusive Innovation, where commercial rigour meets social impact.
Design Thinking (2021) | Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
Early in my studies at UCT’s Graduate School of Business I recognised how a human-centred approach could sharpen commercial decisions. To deepen that skill, I completed Rotterdam School of Management’s intensive Design Thinking workshop, covering empathic research, rapid prototyping and journey mapping. The course became my second formal grounding in human-centred design and served as preparation for the MPhil in Inclusive Innovation, where similar principles feature prominently. I put the tools to work straight away in my own businesses, redesigning client experiences and testing new service concepts. In 2023 this expertise led to an invitation from UCT’s d-school to speak on a panel at its Doference event, exploring the intersection of design thinking, Afrocentrism and entrepreneurship.
Research Methodology (2021) | University of the Witwatersrand
Before committing to a full research master’s, I wanted to be absolutely sure my academic foundations were sound. Wits University’s introduction to research methodology gave me that rigour, covering epistemology, research ethics, sampling design and mixed-methods analysis that most master’s programmes assume you already know. The foresight paid off: armed with these fundamentals I was able to design an ambitious MPhil dissertation, push methodological boundaries and meet doctoral-level reviewers.
Project Management (2021) | Stellenbosch University Executive Education
Eager to steer complex initiatives from concept to completion, I undertook Stellenbosch University’s full Project Management certificate. Grounded in PMBOK and assessed through a complete project-plan submission, the programme deepened my skills in scheduling, risk analysis, stakeholder engagement and earned-value control. I used these methods to keep our salon relocation and supply-chain upgrades on time and under budget, and they now anchor the critical-path plans for my European market-entry projects.
Import, Export & Logistics Management (2022) | University of Cape Town
When I concluded the Hed Kulture distribution business, I chose to formalise years of practical shipping experience and add academic weight to my credentials. UCT’s logistics programme deepened my grasp of Incoterms, customs compliance and trade-finance structures, giving me the regulatory fluency and cost-modelling accuracy required for my next cross-border supply-chain challenge.
Let's Chat
Ready to explore an idea, discuss a collaboration or simply compare notes on innovation and growth? Book a quick Google Meet and choose a time that suits you. Prefer to reach out first? You’ll find my South African and Dutch phone numbers, each with a one-click WhatsApp link, along with my email just below. I look forward to our conversation.
Durbanville, Cape Town, South Africa