At 16, Jaen-Jacques “JJ” Nell started working as a cleaner at an informal cellphone accessories and repair shop to earn some pocket money. At the time, he had no idea that it would be his first step towards making multi-million rand deals with international tech brands, all within a span of ten years.
“I just wanted to be able to take a girlfriend on a date,” says JJ, who attended a sports school in pursuit of a dream of becoming a professional soccer player. He did not even take the right subjects to study business after school one day.
Today he owns the CMF Group, which sells IT products to major corporates, the general public through all the major retail online platforms and through his own online store, TrueTech.co.za.
Apart from building all of this before the age of 28, he also obtained a degree in International Relations at the University of Pretoria, paying for all of his studies himself – despite being diagnosed as severely dyslexic.
JJ’s amazing journey was fuelled by his strong focus on building relationships, an insatiable appetite for learning and a habit of saying “yes” to every opportunity that comes along.
One of his responsibilities at the cellphone shop was opening the store each morning. As he watched customers queue outside before the owner arrived, he seized the opportunity to learn more about the business, asking to be taught how to quote for cellphone repairs. What began as training on preparing repair estimates soon evolved into hands-on instruction in diagnosing and repairing the devices himself.
Within a few months, he began advertising his cellphone repair services on a large neighbourhood WhatsApp group, personally collecting and delivering devices by motorbike. His growing reputation soon led to an unexpected opportunity when one of his community clients asked whether he also handled corporate repairs. Confident in his abilities, he said yes and successfully negotiated a monthly retainer agreement to repair and maintain the company’s cellphones, marking his first step into the corporate market.
Then he was asked if he also sold new cellphones. He said yes and landed his first bulk orders for brand new phones. He started buying extra phones with each order and sold those online on platforms such as Takealot.
Always eager to learn, JJ taught himself not only the fundamentals of online merchandising but also the intricacies of coding. He went on to build his own e-commerce platform, which became TrueTech.co.za, as well as a custom inventory management system that enabled him to track sales, analyse trends and measure the performance of hundreds of products across his online store.
His growing sales success soon attracted the attention of major international brands, which appointed him as their official online distributor in South Africa. As the business expanded, JJ continued to invest in technology and automation, using the software he had developed to streamline operations and optimise performance. He credits these systems with enabling his team of just 13 employees to remain lean and highly efficient, even as sales continue to grow month after month.