What does it take to build a business that lasts for nearly five decades? For Margaret Hirsch, the answer isn’t just about products, profits, or expansion—it’s about people. Starting with a tiny showroom in Durban and just R900 in savings, Margaret and her husband Allan built Hirsch’s into one of Southern Africa’s most respected retail brands. Along the way, she’s remained a passionate believer in learning, growth, and developing others.
Five years after her last appearance on Leadership Lyrics, I sat down with Margaret Hirsch again. She is now based in Florida, yet her influence on the Hirsch’s team in South Africa remains as strong as ever. We spoke about how she and Allan built a culture at Hirsch’s that could scale with the business, and what other leaders can take from their approach.
1. Nothing happens by accident
After Margaret turned 50 and had trained under Tony Robbins, she and Allan attended Disney University and enrolled in classes focused on retail. Disney taught them that nothing happens by accident. As you walk through the parks, an entire structure operates beneath your feet. Garbage collectors drive through underground tunnels so guests never see them. Disney calculated that a person will carry rubbish for about 25 steps before dropping it, so that is exactly where the bins are placed.
Disney understood that customers want to see certain things, and that a great deal of the work behind the experience should stay out of view. Even the staff bathrooms sit beneath the public areas. Margaret made me laugh when she explained why: “Nobody wants to see Mickey Mouse going to the toilet.”
Everything is structured and worked out in advance. So ask yourself: how well have you structured your processes and your people? Have you decided what belongs in public view and what does not?
2. Happy staff at Disney, happy staff at Hirsch’s
What struck the Hirsch’s team most was the role of positive psychology. If your team is miserable, customers feel it immediately, so you have to shift your people’s mood and attitude before they walk onto the floor.
Hirsch’s runs training every morning. The sessions include motivation and gratitude reflections, and the team sings together before the doors open. The effect on everyone’s mood is visible.
3. Mindset: hire for attitude
When Margaret was 50, her husband sent her on a Tony Robbins course that changed her life. She wishes she had learned the power of taking control of her own mind earlier, and she has taught those lessons to their staff for years. Robin Banks has also been a major influence on her thinking about mindset and mindpower.
Margaret has always believed in hiring for attitude ahead of skill. Skill can be trained. Attitude arrives on day one.
4. Staff inductions that carry the story
As the business grew, the inductions Margaret once ran in person moved to video. Much of the content covers the founding of the business and its history, along with the success stories that shaped it, so every new staff member absorbs the culture from the start.
In the episode, listen for the story of the woman whose husband wanted to kill her. Margaret trained and appointed her, and she turned her life around. Today she is one of the top managers at Hirsch’s.
Margaret also shared how, before South Africa became a democracy, they sold the delivery vehicles to their drivers and helped them set up their own businesses, with the husband driving and the wife doing the books. That belief in family units and family business turned several divisions into small family enterprises, and 25 years later, those businesses are still going strong.
5. Lead by example
Margaret puts it plainly: your staff will not listen to what you say. They will do what you do. For the Hirschs’ leadership, that meant arriving on time and doing the work to the best of their ability, every day. Even as founders and top executives, they still worked on the ground. They served customers and greeted people at the door. They even cleaned the store themselves.
6. Customer service as a company value
As Hirsch’s expanded, central staff moved to the new branches to train local teams and bring them up to speed, so the same standard of excellence held everywhere. Customer service has always been central to Hirsch’s identity. They call customers after every sale to check whether they were happy with the products they bought and the service they received.
7. Succession planning
Margaret is now 76. She and Allan have moved to Florida and handed the business over to their son, Richard. In the episode, she describes how her children grew up working in the business. They studied, went overseas to broaden their worldview, and then invested what they had learned back into the family company.
Her view: founders can teach their children things about business that Harvard Business School never could. Informal learning and exposure from a young age make the difference.
To hear about their succession planning and their vision for the grandchildren, listen from 36:33: the evolution of succession planning and their thinking on family and business growth.
A question to sit with
If you lead a growing team, the question Margaret leaves you with is a practical one: what happens in your business by design, and what happens by accident?
The full conversation covers far more than I could fit here, including the succession story from 02:09 that every founder with children should hear. Watch the full episode on the Leadership Lyrics podcast.
Culture by design, not by accident
Everything Margaret described, from the morning training to the induction videos to the founders greeting customers at the door, points to the same truth: culture at Hirsch’s was built deliberately. Many teams I work with have had the opposite experience. Their culture formed by accident, shaped by growth pains and unspoken habits, and the cracks only become visible when performance dips or good people start leaving.
This is where my work at Y-Connect begins. Through The Kintsugi Method, I help leadership teams see their fractures clearly and repair them with intention, so the team becomes stronger at exactly the places where it once broke. If you are noticing fractures in your team, reach out and let’s chat.
Listen to our full podcast here:
Bio of my guest: Margaret Hirsch:
Margaret Hirsch is the co-founder and Executive Director of Hirsch’s Homestores, the largest independently owned appliance and electronics business in Southern Africa.
Born in Zimbabwe to parents from KwaZulu-Natal, Margaret was working as a receptionist when she lost her job while pregnant with her first child. Together with her husband Allan, a skilled appliance repairman, they pooled their resources and rented a tiny showroom on Umhlanga Rocks Drive in Durban, launching Hirsch’s in 1979 with just R900 in savings.
Over the years building the business, Margaret regarded herself as a true “jack of all trades” — selling goods, invoicing, demonstrating products on the shop floor, delivering to customers, and overseeing day-to-day operations. When the microwave came to market, she pioneered the first microwave cookery schools in South Africa, using in-store demonstrations to show the public what the technology could do.
By the late 1980s, Hirsch’s had expanded into home furnishings and electronics. Under Margaret’s leadership, the business pioneered experiential retailing in South Africa, introducing in-store cooking demonstrations, personalised shopping experiences, and virtual shopping options. By the end of 2012, the business had topped the R1 billion turnover milestone. Today, Hirsch’s operates stores in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape, with more than 2,000 people in their employ.
Margaret completed her MBA at age 70 and is currently pursuing her PhD. She holds numerous awards, including Business Woman of the Year (Entrepreneur) from BWASA (2012), the Sanlam Lifetime Achievement Award in Entrepreneurship (2013), induction into the Global Women Leaders Hall of Fame (2014), and recognition as one of the world’s 50 Most Impactful Social Innovators at the World CSR Congress (2018).
Margaret runs Women in Business networking clubs across all Hirsch’s branches and is actively involved in women and youth empowerment projects throughout Southern Africa, including the Girls with Dignity project and Safe Houses for Girls. Margaret Hirsch
Hirsch’s remains a family business: Allan serves as Chairman, son Richard as CEO, and daughter Luci as Brand Manager.