#131 Calvin Collett - CEO Melon Mobile Artwork

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Alex MacPhail Podcast

#131 Calvin Collett - CEO Melon Mobile

July 19, 2023 • Alex MacPhail

Calvin is the Founder and CEO of Melon Mobile, South Africa’s newest Mobile Network. While the service is recent on the scene, the team have been building the product for the past two years. Calvin has more than two decades experience combining entrepreneurship, internet service provider and providing efficient simple solutions to everyday life.

Calvin was born into a family of farmers, originally resident in Zimbabwe. During his school years his family moved to South Africa and continued farming in the Northern Eastern corner of South Africa, near Louis Trichardt, also known as “Fightertown RSA”, as this is where the Fighter Squadrons of the South African Air Force are based.

He went straight into business consulting with Accenture, before a family need brought him back to the farming town of Louis Trichardt once more. When Calvin’s father passed away, he was needed to help the family. It was during this period where Calvin put his entrepreneurial mind to the test, combining tech and farming. Calvin quickly made a name for himself solving farming problems with his simple tech solutions. The tech business pulled him back to Gauteng and his journey continued.

Years down the line, Calvin was head hunted to set up a business unit with the mighty MTN brand. The “big yellow machine” as he affectionately refers to MTN, wanted Calvin to set up the home fibre and mobile data division, to run in parallel to their already dominant voice business. Calvin rallied his team and dubbed the new division “supersonic”, and boy did the success come quickly. Within 2 years, supersonic won best Internet Service Provider in South Africa 2019.

Our journey crossed paths when he reached out to me to set up a remote call centre, during the crazy work-from-home and school-from-home era of 2020. Demand for internet rocketed and he needed to scale a team quickly. Digital Care was born to support supersonic with customer care.

Please enjoy this conversation with Calvin Collett. Send me a message with any questions or comments about Calvin or the podcast.

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