Pick n Pay founder, CEO and chairperson Raymond Ackerman, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 92, was one of South Africa's greatest entrepreneurs and a national icon.
Five years before his retirement in 2010 at the age of 79, and 43 years after starting the supermarket group, he was listed as one of the top 100 South Africans, and his was one of the most recognisable names and faces in the country.
His achievement was extraordinary by any standards. He was fired from the department store chain Greatermans when he was 35 (partly for the stand he took against collusion in the industry, he said) by which time he was MD of its 85 Checkers stores, the winner of an Outstanding Young South African award alongside Gary Player and already feted in the local press as a whiz kid who was going to go places.
When most people with his CV would have gone in a huff to the US, where he would have been snapped up, he decided to stay and fight back.
He invested his pension money and begged and borrowed some more to buy three nondescript stores in Cape Town trading under the name Pick n Pay.
Today all BCom students are taught that the consumer is queen, but before Ackerman, himself a BCom student at the University of Cape Town after matriculating at Bishops, it was an alien concept. He was the first businessman to put it to work. He built his empire, which now extends to more than 2,000 stores across South Africa and seven other African countries, and staked his reputation on it.
It was brilliant marketing, but he meant it and practised it.
A hallmark of his commitment to serving the consumer was his availability to the media. Although a past master at exploiting the value of publicity, this had little to do with ego or being a publicity junkie.
In fact, he was always quite shy, something his father tried without success to cure by making his newly graduated son glad hand customers at his store in Salt River for six months.
No matter where Ackerman was, how busy or how many meetings he had to reschedule, if a journalist needed an interview with the Pick n Pay boss, he would invariably get it, and promptly.
He was a ruthless negotiator who would sit up till eight or nine at night trying to squeeze his chicken suppliers for every extra cent.
There were sneering references to his “halo image”, but it wasn't entirely unjustified.
Ina Perlman, who started Operation Hunger, said the poverty relief initiative owed millions of rand to Ackerman’s personal, hands-on support over many years. He was the first major businessman she approached, and the first to say yes.
He was the first to admit he was “no angel”, and his suppliers were the first to agree.
He was a ruthless negotiator who would sit up till eight or nine at night trying to squeeze his chicken suppliers for every extra cent.
This didn't apply to the small black suppliers when Pick n Pay, quite late in the day, he admitted, started bringing them in.
“We’ve got to be less aggressive and try to accommodate them more,” he said.
He didn't believe in black economic empowerment, which he thought was a disincentive for entrepreneurship.
But he was proud of what Pick n Pay did to encourage entrepreneurship with their franchise stores.
When he stepped down as chair, the group had 108 black entrepreneurs who owned their own businesses.
He regarded the attempt to force affirmative action down his throat as an insult.
“You can’t force this at senior level, otherwise your business will collapse,” he said.
His succession planning was legendary, and he had two files with the names of possible candidates for CEO, just in case.
By the time he retired, there was still no black name on the list. His policy was to pick the best he could find, black or white, inside or outside, he said.
This applied to his own family too.
In pursuit of “the best” he commissioned an independent report which persuaded him that his eldest son Gareth would not be right for CEO, though he had set his heart on Gareth replacing him as CEO when the time came. Somebody else got the job.
One of Ackerman’s lowest points was his exit from South Africa’s 2004 Olympic bid committee, which he led until, according to him, a “terribly rude and abusive” Sam Ramsamy, South Africa's representative on the International Olympic Committee, accused him of hogging the limelight and, deciding that his position was untenable, he quit.
Without him the committee made a hash of things and South Africa lost the bid, which Ackerman believed “without a doubt we would have won”.
He is survived by his wife, Wendy, and children Gareth, Kathy, Suzanne and Jonathan.
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