The Prophecy.co.za Team
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 4:12PM Tweet How do your orders get fulfilled when you buy some awesome new piece of technology from Prophecy.co.za? Are the rumours of a team of cybernetic monkeys operating from a subterranean lair? Wonder no more!
Click through after the break to see who we are and what we do.
Paul - “The top 1% of the top 1%”
Paul’s forum nick is Artagra.
Paul is part owner of Prophecy.co.za, with myself (Henk) and Juan. We’ve been running the shop together since August 2005. Paul is a freakin genius. He reads a LOT and knows a LOT about pretty much everything.
Paul is responsible for the warranties and making sure that every customer with a faulty product ends up as a happy customer. The warranty emails are also his baby. He’s also the guy who talks to upset customers (yes, we get those!) and makes sure that they are less upset when he gets off of the phone. Other than that, he is the idea machine. He comes up with brilliant ideas which I get to try and shoot down (emphasis on try). He is more up to date on technology than any of us, because he reads like a machine! He also helps with marketing, and various other tasks like decision making and meetings and such.
In his spare time, Paul tries to convert the rest of us from crappy coffee drinkers (Nescafe) into cool coffee drinkers (filter coffee of various difficult to pronounce - for a clutch plate - coffee brands). He fails at this… miserably.
(Note from Paul: Lol, I’ll never live that comment down - “the top 1% of the top 1%”. I was trying to explain why I didn’t think the Kindle would become mainstream, because people don’t read anymore. Henk retorted that I read tons, and I was trying to explain why he shouldn’t imagine me as the average Kindle purchaser!)
Juan - Mr Rockstar
Juan’s forum nick is Garion.
Juan is our developer and part owner of Prophecy.co.za. He’s the one responsible for our sekzy website and all the neat features that makes our life an absolute pleasure on this site. If something breaks on the site, it’s his fault. :)
He’s been working with us for more than 3 years already and was our first employee. At that stage, he started helping with general order stuff, phones and the like. Right now, he only develops our site, all day long.
In the last 3 years, Juan has done everything from answering phones, to shipping, to driving to our suppliers to collect stock, to helping at trade shows. So, if the paw paw hits the fan (as it does from time to time), he can help out quickly. Also, if the world descends into post apocolyptic tribal warfare, Juan would be our key warrior - he’s our resident Ninja :)
Phillip - Mr Fashion
Phillip is our fashion guru. If Phill was more fashionable, he’d be setting the world standards of fashion. Phillip answers the phones and helps customers when they collect stock from us. He is responsible for making sure that the stock room is always up to date (products shown as in stock with us is actually in stock with us) and ships the orders every day. We ship a number of orders every day with two different couriers. He is responsible for making sure nothing goes to the wrong customer.
Christiaan - Mr Skinny
Christiaan is our driver / technician. He drives to Midrand every day and stops by all our suppliers (those who don’t deliver) to collect stock. He leaves the office at around 8am and is usually back by around 2pm. After that, he helps with shipping. He also is responsible for assembling machines (which he does after shipping and before he leaves in the morning), helps with testing hardware returns (warranties) and does the work for our services section (backup of data, installation of software, virus removals, etc, etc). He’s very technically inclined - when our truck’s remote stopped working, he promptly borrowed a soldiering iron from a supplier, scavenged parts from a cheap FM transmitter and repaired it on the side of the road!
Ivan - The Terrible
Ivan’s forum nick is Ivan (or IvanTheTerrible - depends on if Ivan is taken when he creates it).
Ivan is our in house products ninja. He makes sure that the products on our website is correct and that newly added products are loaded properly and moved to the right category. With 12 000 products, he’s a pretty busy guy. Infact, he’s a very busy guy. We get him to help with shipping / RMA’s / random other work every now and again to try and ensure he doesn’t go crazy from adding products. Prophecy found Ivan because he’s related to a guy who Paul met because they liked the same girl in highschool - he’s practically family!
Henk - The Clown
My forum nick is Firestar.
And I’m the clown of the office. I’m loud, apparently unapproachable, aggressive, and I joke all the time (which seems contrary to the rest, but it’s not). I worked in a corporate environment for 10 years before starting on Prophecy.co.za full time in April 2006. I was a programmer in a whole bunch of weird and useless programming languages, and now I sell stuff for a living. I receive the orders from the customers, place them with the suppliers, communicate out of stock messages to customers, follow up on backorders and make sure all order emails are answered and orders updated. Other than this, I work on live chat, answer forum queries, work on marketing (Google Adwords, Jump.co.za, Oneshop.co.za, and various other things) and recently took over our Search Engine Optimisation project. In my spare time, I write specifications for our new site, and am working on an exciting project I can’t mention because we don’t think our competitors have thought of it yet, and a few other things.
Other Staff:
Other than us ugly bunch, we also have two of the fairer sex working with us, both on a part time basis.
Christa is our accountant. She is responsible for confirming payments and updating orders to reflect this, doing our books, keeping our spending in check (quite a difficult job, if I might say so), and making sure that, over all, we make money (also pretty difficult, by the looks of things). She gives me and Paul a bunch of papers every month end, with some columns and figures on. It makes no sense to me, but Paul says we’re doing ok. Christa is our accounting and numbers expert.
Clare is our part time product loader. She loads products like the wind, and adds a ton of new products to our site every month. Between her and Ivan, we add roughly 2000 - 2500 products to our website every month. This is about 75% of the new products we get from suppliers every month.
Investors:
Other than staff, we have a couple of investors. Thus far, they’ve left us alone, and we hope to make them rich one day.
I hope this helps you understand who the Prophecy.co.za team is, what we do here, and where we come from. We hope to be your next purchase, and let us know if we’re not, and why not! We certainly want to improve the way we do things, and we definitely want to blow your mind away with your next purchase! Let us know in the comments, or contact us via our contact us page. We’d love to hear from you!
Reader Comments (6)
I am a little disappointed though - you didn't mention that Paul is also the 'ladies man' of the office :D
Good luck trying to get some culture into that tree of a man i.e. Henk :)