Dinner with the Coach

Lerato Mathodlana is a business strategist, facilitator and Certified Executive and Management Coach. She is the founder of The Platform ZA, a Johannesburg strategic advisory practice working with revenue-generating South African businesses, and of Platform ZA Venture Academy, a business education institution delivering masterclasses and live founder cohorts under the line Build. Grow. Lead.

She writes as well as advises. She is the editor of The Founder Brief, a publication on strategy, capital and enterprise in South Africa, written to a standard she set herself: every statistic and market claim is traced to a verified source, and anything that cannot be verified is said to be unverified. It is a small discipline that explains a good deal about how she works.

She is the author of Two Word Wisdom, fifty-two two-word decision principles, published through Perusal Publications, which she also founded. Her second book, The Takeover Mindset, built on twelve proprietary frameworks, publishes on 28 November 2026.

Her career began in public service operations before moving into governance and risk, and then enterprise operations leadership. She built The Platform ZA alongside those roles from 2018. She has appeared on POWER FM, SA FM, YFM, Radio Veritas, Thobela FM and VUT FM, and has worked alongside Vodacom, Xero, Telkom and Nedbank.

Her position is a simple one. Most businesses are not held back by what their owners do not know. They are held back by decisions their owners have already made up their minds about, and have not acted on. That is what this evening is about.