From Dirty Machines to Global Success: How One Idea Brewed a Worldwide Coffee Revolution

Date: March 2026

Publication: Radio Interview

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Interview Transcript
00:00:00 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Tuesday evening. 

00:00:00 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

So as we do, every Tuesday evening, we talk to an inspiring entrepreneur. 

00:00:06 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

And I suppose the word SME grind and the word grind is particularly pertinent tonight because we’re going to be speaking to Judy Isaacman, who’s the co-founder of Cafe Nu. 

00:00:15 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

And this is a company that innovates around coffee machine care. 

00:00:19 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Now, I’m a big coffee lover. 

00:00:20 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

I don’t often think, in fact, I never think about how coffee machines need to be cleaned, but they do. 

00:00:26 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

And it’s a very difficult process. 

00:00:28 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

And so we’ll talk to Judy 

00:00:30 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Isaac Mann about this business idea and how they came to now be selling their products in over 50 countries worldwide. 

00:00:37 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

So thanks so much, Judy, for joining us on Power Business tonight. 

00:00:41 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Hi, Tehillah. 

00:00:42 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So great to be here. 

00:00:44 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

You co-founded Caffenu with your husband, Rowan. 

00:00:46 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

How did the decision to venture into entrepreneurship together come about? 

00:00:52 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

It was actually born out of a 

00:00:55 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

business idea that we both had where we started our first coffee business. 

00:00:59 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We were always coffee aficionados and very passionate about coffee. 

00:01:03 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So our first coffee business was actually called Coffee Capsules Direct, which still exists today. 

00:01:10 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And at the time, we just saw a gap in the market that a lot of people wanted to have better coffee experiences, but there was 

00:01:19 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

no way to actually get better priced coffee machines. 

00:01:22 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So we started renting out Nespresso compatible coffee machines to hair salons and businesses because they wanted to offer their customers better tasting coffee. 

00:01:34 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And I remember when we rented the machines, 

00:01:38 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

They came back to us having to get serviced and they came back to us so dirty. 

00:01:43 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Like we didn’t even expect them to come back so dirty. 

00:01:46 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

There was so much coffee buildup in the brewing unit. 

00:01:49 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And we just looked at each other and we were like, we literally cannot give this back to our customers. 

00:01:54 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

What are we going to do? 

00:01:56 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Because it was such a massive undertaking, opening up the machines, really cleaning them. 

00:02:01 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Like you said, it looked very difficult. 

00:02:04 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And my husband, who’s got an engineering background, he was like, there needs to be a better way, there needs to be an easier way to do this. 

00:02:13 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So he created one and he made the first ever cleaning capsule for Nespresso compatible machines at the time. 

00:02:22 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And it literally works like a coffee pot. 

00:02:24 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So you literally just flop it into your machine, you run a cycle and it takes out all the old coffee oils, literally with a press of a button. 

00:02:32 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So it obviously was a lot easier, the concept, than having to open the machines. 

00:02:37 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And 

00:02:38 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

you know, me wearing my marketing and branding hat said, hey, if we want to clean our coffee machines, maybe other people want to clean theirs too. 

00:02:47 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So how do we, you know, create a global brand around this? 

00:02:51 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And that’s how we started Caffenu. 

00:02:54 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And that’s what our business is today. 

00:02:56 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

So you really saw a problem and ran with problem solving. 

00:03:01 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

How did you, you mentioned how the different tasks and the different ideas came about. 

00:03:07 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

How do you work together as a husband and wife team? 

00:03:10 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

We haven’t spoken to that many entrepreneurs who work so closely with their partners. 

00:03:17 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Yeah, it actually has been very beneficial to our relationship. 

00:03:21 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I think when you’re working with your husband inside the same business, you have to really learn how to give each other constructive feedback without becoming upset. 

00:03:30 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

when your partner critiques something that you’ve been working on. 

00:03:34 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So I think that has really helped us in our business and in our relationship. 

00:03:39 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And I always, to be honest, I feel very privileged to be able to spend that much time with my partner, because I know a lot of my family and friends that they hardly see their partners. 

00:03:50 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So while it comes with challenges, it also feels like somebody is on the sideline truly supporting you. 

00:03:58 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And 

00:03:59 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I think it also helps having very different skill sets. 

00:04:02 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

My husband is very much into product development and compliance and I’m more on the marketing and branding side. 

00:04:10 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So we really complement each other in the business as well. 

00:04:16 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

So it’s very clear skill sets that you both have. 

00:04:19 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

What are some of the biggest challenges you faced when launching Caffenu? 

00:04:22 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Did people respond to this product and say, okay, this is something that we’ve urgently been looking for? 

00:04:30 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

At the beginning, to be honest, we started very small. 

00:04:33 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We had no outside funding, so we bootstrapped our company entirely. 

00:04:39 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I remember just driving everywhere to go to every single networking event, trying to find partnerships, figuring it out as we went along. 

00:04:50 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We were also very lucky. 

00:04:51 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We got early support from the DTI and Wesgrow, which sent Caffenu onto 

00:04:58 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

a lot of international trade shows. 

00:05:00 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I think the one year we did nine international trade shows with Caffenu. 

00:05:04 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Wow. 

00:05:05 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So there was also government support that we leaned into. 

00:05:09 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And then we found reselling partners and distributors. 

00:05:14 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

That was the first part of our journey to try reach out to and establish a global network because you have to kind of figure out how to set yourself up globally 

00:05:25 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But you don’t have the funds or the capital yet to do it all yourself. 

00:05:29 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So we had to learn when to outsource and what to outsource. 

00:05:34 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And we were very lucky. 

00:05:36 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Our distributors that we onboarded early on, they got us onto places like Amazon. 

00:05:43 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

They got us into some retail stores in the UK. 

00:05:47 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And it really grew from there. 

00:05:51 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But I think one of the biggest challenges for us as we grew in our scaling journey was realizing that the distributors weren’t representing our brand exactly the way, in a unified way that we needed to be presented to scale further. 

00:06:08 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And a lot of the times they also only stocked like, let’s say three of our products because now we saw the need, you know, for 

00:06:17 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

South African made coffee machine care products. 

00:06:19 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So we developed, descalers and cleaning tablets and really expanded our range. 

00:06:24 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But the distributors weren’t necessarily obviously going to lay out all the capital to buy your full range or commit to it. 

00:06:32 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Right. 

00:06:32 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And. 

00:06:33 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Yeah, to be honest, I think what really helped us at that time was realizing that online was such a key channel for us and finding a partner agency that helped us with onboarding on Amazon globally. 

00:06:50 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And the first market we did that was in Amazon UK. 

00:06:53 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We onboarded 35 of our products, and it’s a huge success. 

00:06:58 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

It’s quite humbling. 

00:06:59 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We’ve just actually heard last week that 

00:07:02 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

In the coffee machine care category, Caffenu is now number two in the market share of the entire category, which is very humbling. 

00:07:10 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

That’s incredible. 

00:07:11 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

In a new market. 

00:07:13 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

I just wanted to find out from you, is your target market businesses or households? 

00:07:21 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

No, actually, you know, it was born for home users. 

00:07:24 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

You know, our first product was a cleaning capsule for Nespresso compatible coffee machines. 

00:07:29 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So I think the challenge right at the beginning was that baristas, they kind of know that you need to clean their coffee equipment. 

00:07:38 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But as you rightfully said, many home users don’t think about it. 

00:07:42 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And it hasn’t been communicated that much that home users also should clean their coffee machines or what the benefits are for home users to clean their coffee machines. 

00:07:52 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So we actually developed a lot of products for home coffee machines at first, you know, for Sage and Breble and Dalongi. 

00:07:59 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

and Nespresso, Vertuo, and Nespresso. 

00:08:02 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So it really was a passion of ours and still is a mission to educate home consumers about the amazing benefits of what you do for your machine and ultimately the coffee that you’re drinking out of that machine when you maintain it properly and when you clean it. 

00:08:22 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I get a bit sad sometimes, when I see people, putting so much effort into what beans they buy and what coffee they’re choosing, what coffee pots they buy, and then they run it through a dirty coffee machine. 

00:08:36 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So there’s a big part of our mission to also educate consumers and help them have a better coffee experience. 

00:08:44 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

That’s interesting what you’re saying, because I’ve never actually thought about cleaning a coffee machine. 

00:08:52 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

there’s been some talk in social media over the last few days, Judy, around funding of entrepreneurs in South Africa. 

00:09:00 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

What was the process like to access that funding? 

00:09:03 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Were there a lot of hoops that you had to jump through? 

00:09:07 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Yes, I’m actually very grateful that I joined a network which is called Entrepreneurs Organization. 

00:09:17 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

around three years ago when we initially started our global scaling journey, starting to take over distributorship ourselves globally. 

00:09:26 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So we were literally faced with this problem. 

00:09:29 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Now we don’t have a distributor paying us a deposit. 

00:09:32 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We want to go into the US, which was our biggest market, and we needed eight months capital to fund our inventory because the worst thing that can happen when you sell on Amazon is that you run out of stock, right? 

00:09:46 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So we needed to be able to fund that. 

00:09:48 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And through my global network entrepreneurs organization, we actually found a local finance provider called Secure Clear. 

00:09:57 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And they came on board when traditional banks wouldn’t give us a facility that we needed. 

00:10:03 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And it’s been really 

00:10:06 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

beneficial for me personally, also as a journey to be connected with other entrepreneurs that face similar challenges because I’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs can relate. 

00:10:17 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

It feels like a very lonely journey at times. 

00:10:20 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And once you start chatting to other business owners that have been there, you get great experience shares. 

00:10:28 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And 

00:10:29 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Part of the network, which I also really like, it’s never about giving advice. 

00:10:34 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I can never know what you should be doing. 

00:10:36 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I can just experience, share what worked for me, and you can take from that what you can use within your own business. 

00:10:44 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So I really… 

00:10:45 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Two businesses will ever be exactly the same. 

00:10:48 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

And the DTI support that you mentioned with Roadshows, how difficult was it to access that support? 

00:10:56 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Listen, I won’t lie, there’s a lot of paperwork involved. 

00:11:01 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We also found an agency company at the time that helped us with the first applications to learn how this is done. 

00:11:09 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So what I would always recommend, which would work for us, is to outsource things first to get you going. 

00:11:16 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And then once you understand the concept, you can do this yourself. 

00:11:21 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

It’s literally paperwork. 

00:11:23 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So it does take effort, but it is worthwhile. 

00:11:27 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We would have never had that sort of global exposure. 

00:11:31 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I mean, we went to so many different countries like Australia, Russia, I mean, you name it, Ukraine, we went to so many different countries. 

00:11:40 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Not all of them ended up being massive selling countries for us, but 

00:11:45 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

There’s always such an opportunity to learn about the market. 

00:11:49 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

You’re meeting other very driven entrepreneurs. 

00:11:53 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So I would highly recommend looking into that if you are looking at funding for your business. 

00:11:58 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

10 minutes before 8 as we wrap up the show. 

00:12:01 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

I’m speaking to Judy Isaacman, the co-founder of Caffenu, which is a coffee machine cleaning company on SME Grind tonight. 

00:12:10 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

If you have any questions, 0861-987-0000-083-303-70 

00:12:16 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

So, Judy, I’m interested in the manufacturing process. 

00:12:20 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

How does that take place and where does it take place? 

00:12:22 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So, it all takes place in our factory in Montague Gardens, Cape Town. 

00:12:29 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We initially set this all up to manufacture ourselves because we actually had a big hurdle in Germany where we didn’t understand chemical regulation when we first exported and that actually forced us to 

00:12:45 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We become experts in European chemical regulation overnight. 

00:12:49 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Europeans love regulations. 

00:12:52 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We are 300 pages, that’s all I’m saying. 

00:12:56 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So that really actually shaped our company though, because… 

00:13:02 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We had to reformulate, and then we were able to reformulate eco-friendly cleaning products that were free of phosphates, free of chlorine. 

00:13:11 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And it became a massive advantage for us that we actually had to set everything up in-house and have our proprietary formulas. 

00:13:20 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And we have, in manufacturing, we have different rooms for our cleaning capsules, for example, or where we fill the liquid descaler and for our cleaning tablets. 

00:13:29 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So there is a lot of it that goes into it. 

00:13:33 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We independently test our products. 

00:13:35 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Also, I think that’s very important when you start something to have the credibility that your products actually work. 

00:13:42 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And that is also really something that I enjoy about selling online. 

00:13:47 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

You know, if you’re reading an Amazon review, 

00:13:51 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

and if you have you know on some of our products we’ve got like 10,000 positive reviews it really gives you the direct feedback that you get from customers also sometimes some negative reviews you know of how you can improve your product and that direct I really enjoy having that direct feedback because in the end of the day we want to listen to our customers and continuously improve that’s what we that’s what we’re in business for. 

00:14:17 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

So you read all reviews? 

00:14:20 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Well, no, not all of them. 

00:14:21 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But you know, you get like a star rating. 

00:14:23 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So if your product is at like a 4.8, you’re like, I’m doing good. 

00:14:28 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And then qualitatively, you can look into some of the reviews that may be saying, my descaling light is still on. 

00:14:38 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So sometimes people say it’s still on. 

00:14:40 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

It’s actually a big problem that customers face. 

00:14:44 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

they say that the scaling that is still on, but they don’t realize that you have to put the machine into a specific descaling setting, otherwise the machine will not know that you have descaled it. 

00:14:55 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So part of our education is also about getting in touch with customers and telling them how to use our products correctly so that their machine actually knows it worked. 

00:15:07 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And one of the big things we face with consumers, which is a general thing– and I don’t blame them because cleaning and descaling gets confused so much. 

00:15:17 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Because you always talk about you cleaning your coffee machine. 

00:15:21 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But a lot of people descale their coffee machine, but they don’t necessarily know the difference between cleaning and descaling. 

00:15:27 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So cleaning is really about removing coffee oils, residues. 

00:15:33 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

It’s about 

00:15:34 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

the cleaning the brew unit so you can have better tasting coffee, whereas descaling, which you’re using a liquid or a tablet, removes limescale. 

00:15:43 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So that’s mineral buildup around your heating element, and that will actually make your coffee cold, because the scale gets around the heating element, so it can’t heat up the water properly anymore. 

00:15:55 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

I feel like a lot of coffee shops have that problem. 

00:15:58 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Yeah, I’ve tasted too many coffees that are cold. 

00:16:02 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Yeah, that can be a real issue. 

00:16:04 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And with the commercial machines, to be honest, you have to get them serviced. 

00:16:08 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

They have to strip them down entirely, because often the pipes are connected to the actual water supply. 

00:16:14 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So that’s a bit harder to descale them. 

00:16:16 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But if you ask a professional barista how often they clean their coffee machine with cleaning powder, I hope they tell you daily. 

00:16:24 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Because they run about, I don’t know, 100 to 300 or even more coffees through that machine in an hour. 

00:16:31 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

they really need to get all the residue and all the dirt out. 

00:16:35 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Otherwise, you will taste old coffee or even mold in your next coffee. 

00:16:41 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And who wants to drink dirty coffee? 

00:16:44 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So that’s been a wake up call for me as well. 

00:16:47 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Right. 

00:16:48 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

I want to check in with you as a manufacturing business. 

00:16:52 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

And of course, you’ve also got the e-commerce size, but some manufacturing in South Africa has seen some real struggles due to power supply and now energy affordability. 

00:17:03 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

How have you experienced those? 

00:17:06 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Yeah, that has been quite a struggle. 

00:17:08 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We had to get a generator. 

00:17:10 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And in our factory, we also obviously use three-phase power. 

00:17:14 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

A lot of our machines, need three-phase power to run. 

00:17:19 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So, and have remember the one time, literally our whole street was without power for two weeks, two entire weeks, because they couldn’t 

00:17:28 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

find the fault within the electricity line. 

00:17:31 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And yeah, it cost us about 50 to 80K in running the generator for that week. 

00:17:36 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And it was a cost that we needed to absorb. 

00:17:40 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But I also feel that because we are in South Africa, we’re always resilient. 

00:17:46 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We always make a plan. 

00:17:47 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We don’t rely on anybody to figure it out for us. 

00:17:51 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We just move forward and we come up with solutions. 

00:17:55 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

It’s actually something I really appreciate about living in South Africa. 

00:17:59 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

We always have to find solutions. 

00:18:00 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

That’s very, very true. 

00:18:02 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

So you mentioned the importance of having a network. 

00:18:06 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

How about mentors in your entrepreneurship journey? 

00:18:10 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Have they played any role? 

00:18:13 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

100%. 

00:18:13 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I remember when we only had our coffee business, you know, coffee capsules direct. 

00:18:19 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I had just come out of fresh of university. 

00:18:22 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I was 25. 

00:18:23 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I honestly did not know what I was doing. 

00:18:25 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I never had a full-time job in my life. 

00:18:27 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I worked in some agencies before. 

00:18:30 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And then I said to myself, how am I going to teach myself how to run this business, how to do marketing and branding? 

00:18:38 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And then I reached out to a marketing agency, Shift One, Dylan Kollstadt. 

00:18:44 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

She’s still the CEO and founder. 

00:18:47 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And I asked her, I give you a coffee machine. 

00:18:50 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

I provide you coffee pods. 

00:18:52 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Will you teach me? 

00:18:53 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So we did a trade-off. 

00:18:54 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And I used to sit with her once a month, bring my coffee with that, you know, her and her team could enjoy for the month. 

00:19:02 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And then she used to say, Okay, what do you want to talk about today? 

00:19:06 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And it’s really humbling. 

00:19:08 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And I’m very grateful of how many people invested in me at that early stage of my company. 

00:19:17 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But I also think you need to look for those opportunities. 

00:19:20 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Nobody would come up to you and say, do you want me to be your mentor? 

00:19:24 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Like I had to reach out and I had to make that first step. 

00:19:28 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So I would say never be afraid to ask because you’ll be surprised what happens. 

00:19:33 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

If you offer people free coffee, how many people do you employ? 

00:19:39 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Sorry, say again. 

00:19:41 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

How many people does Caffenu employ? 

00:19:45 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We are 45 full-time staff. 

00:19:49 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

Remember the one year we literally grew from like 20 to 40 people in the space of seven months. 

00:19:57 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

That was also quite a humbling experience, trying to, all of a sudden, having to find your middle management layer, things that used to work. 

00:20:06 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

We used to, every time it was somebody’s birthday, we used to get a cake. 

00:20:09 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And the whole team would get together and sing in five different languages to the person. 

00:20:15 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And at some stage, also, that whole culture needed to shift. 

00:20:19 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

So now we have team days, quarterly, where the whole team gets together to celebrate each other. 

00:20:27 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

It’s been a really big thing for us as a company to have a strong company culture, to take our team along on the growth journey. 

00:20:36 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

And to be honest, that’s probably been the most rewarding part of the entrepreneurial journey. 

00:20:43 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

It’s also one of the hardest to manage a team and provide for a team. 

00:20:48 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

You feel a lot of responsibility as a business owner to do well for your team. 

00:20:54 Judy Isaacman – Caffenu 

But seeing people grow in their roles and within the team, there’s just something that happened for sharing that journey with so many driven team members around me. 

00:21:08 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Thanks so much for sharing your journey with us tonight. 

00:21:11 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

Julie Isaacman is the co-founder at Caffenu, a coffee machine cleaning company based out of Cape Town, but available in 50 countries around the world. 

00:21:22 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

She’s been talking to us tonight on SME Grind. 

00:21:25 Tehillah Niselow – Power FM 

That brings us to the…