She’s made movies with the likes of Collin Farrell and Salma Hayek. But Liesl Lategan, producer and serial entrepreneur, owner of production company Spitfire and post-production house Aces Up, says that it’s far more thrilling to spend a day making adverts.
“Making ads is like making a mini-movie every couple of weeks. And I love the pace – you’re working with people who have all of these great ideas, and you have to get them to come together instantly,” she enthuses. “Most of all, I love the creatives involved in the process. They’re clever, funny, sensitive, unique and smart.”
Liesl’s fascination with creativity isn’t surprising, given that drama was a central point of her childhood world. Her mother was a drama teacher and owned her own drama school for some time, and so the stage was a second home to Liesl. When it became time to choose her studies, she was instinctively drawn back to the arts – “but then I realised I didn’t want to live like a poor artist!” she laughs.
And so she chose a career on the other side of the spectrum – law. “To be fair, I didn’t have much time to decide. My mother really didn’t like the boy I was dating at the time, so one day she told me that my father was coming to pick me up and take me to university in four hours. It was all very sudden – so I picked law because I was good at public speaking and debating and thought I’d be good at it.”
It soon became clear that Liesl was not intended to sit behind a desk all day. “Law required a lot of parrot-fashion learning, and it nearly broke my soul!” The final straw came when she was interning at a law firm. Asked to research precedent for a case that involved defending family violence, she refused. “I was told that I just wasn’t made for the kind of law I wanted to do – it would destroy me.”
Now with no plans or direction, Liesl decided to try her hand at au pairing in Atlanta until she figured out her path. That’s when she found her groove: While the kids she worked with attended school, she filled her mornings working in admin at a film company. The work wasn’t especially exciting – sometimes, she had to stand in as a powder girl – but in return, she was able to attend their weekend film courses for free.
The bug had definitely bit, so when Liesl returned to South Africa, she enrolled at the then Natal Tech to study video tech. “It was really exciting, because I could return to my love of performance, but on the other side of the camera – something I’d never considered previously.”
Liesl remembers this as one of the most fulfilling times of her life. Although she worked incredibly hard – hard enough to become one of the top students in the class while also trying to flesh out her student budget by working as a bar tender and spraying male shoppers with deodorant as part of brand promotions– she loved her studies and relished the feeling of her achievement.
She got her first job on a film soon after. “It wasn’t often that people filmed movies in Durban, so when a production company started filming in the city, I walked into the office and handed in my CV – and was hired on the spot.” From there, her career trajectory took a steep upward turn.
After moving to Cape Town, Liesl soon became a regular on film sets, but she began to feel stifled. “Cape Town’s film industry felt very technical, lacking in creativity. I was just a cog in the wheel, and I wanted to be part of the entire process.”
She finally found her niche when she moved to Joburg to work full-time in producing commercials. “The first thing I did was go to Carlton Hair and ask them to cut off my long Cape Town hippie hair. Instantly, I felt like I belonged.” She loved her job just as much, and her passion and work ethic saw her rise swiftly through the company ranks. But, just when she should have started enjoying the ride, she took against it. “It had started to feel too easy,” she says. Yet again, she found herself asking: What next? And answered her own question by opening her first company, Aces Up, specialising in post production. “Even my mom was surprised that I became a business owner – it’s not something you’d expect from a girl whose nickname was the absent-minded professor,” Liesl admits.
There were no signs of that absent-mindedness as she took on one challenge after another, first consulting for various advertising agencies before joining one as an inhouse producer. But, what had started out as a lot of fun gradually became more stressful … with Aces Up still running, Liesl found herself increasingly bogged down by admin. It was time for another change – and so she approached AK Kyriacou, a director whose work she loved, to start a production company.
Ten years on, Spitfire, the company she shares with AK (who has since become her life partner) is more profitable than ever – and has become a breeding ground for young female talent. “My staff are definitely the best part of my working day,” Liesl says. “I love their friendship, but more than that I love seeing them grow and playing a role in their development.” Having grown up with a strong mother, Liesl says that female empowerment is part of who she is. “The thought that men are more capable or deserving is simply something I have never been able to understand. We’re mothers … we’re mentally and emotionally strong. Empowering others to think this way isn’t really pre-meditated, I simply act on instinct.” Driven by this ethos, she has mentored a former intern to become a shareholder in the company, while another has taken on the mantle of head of finance at just 26 years old. Still another has become a director – a rarity in an industry where most directors are still white males.
Although she mentors each employee personally (while also looking after her three kids), Liesl still has plans for her next entity: she’d like to create a black female-owned sister company to Spitfire, specialising in the production of long-form content.
In spite of these plans, Liesl still doesn’t see herself as an entrepreneur. “I wouldn’t be able to sell you a pen if I tried. I only know how to do things I love – and I love this.”
Details: www.spitfire.tv, @spitfire.tv on Instagram
Liesl’s tips for starting your own business
• Start as you mean to go on.
• Try to have a plan in place. Things will go wrong anyway, but you should have a route to get you to the end goal regardless.
• Rather be caught out for who you are than who you’re not.
