About Taz

I’ve never really fit into one professional box

About a 5-minute read

I studied accounting, built my career in start-ups, and have worked across finance, operations, systems, technology, projects and problem-solving. The common thread has always been figuring out what’s actually going on, understanding what’s wanted, and then doing something useful about it.

That’s ultimately how TR Support Services came about.

Why TR Support Services exists

When I started TR Support Services in 2023, I wanted to package what I did into something easy to explain and sell. So I focused on websites and digital systems.

Then I started talking to women about their businesses and working with them.

They might have wanted a website, but they also wanted help with their bookkeeping. Or choosing and setting up systems. Or organizing a growing workload. Or researching something they didn’t have the time or expertise to figure out themselves.

Sometimes they knew exactly what they wanted. Other times they needed information, another perspective and some good questions to help them make a decision.

As I worked with more women, I started to understand the gap I was actually filling: growing businesses that wanted experienced support and weren’t quite ready for permanent staff or a collection of specialized providers.

TR Support Services has evolved because I’ve listened to what my clients actually want.

The work I do now

Since starting TR Support Services, I’ve worked with:

I’ve built and rebuilt websites that have helped clients move forward with their businesses, pursue opportunities and secure contracts and jobs. I’ve set up books with sensible charts of accounts based on how businesses are structured and what they need for accurate tax and GST/HST reporting. I’ve designed media and marketing materials including newsletters, brochures and flyers.

I’ve also had plenty of initial calls with prospective clients that started as conversations to understand what they wanted so I could scope and quote the work, and turned into brainstorming, clarity, priorities and actionable to-do lists. Eventually, my clients realized that process was valuable in its own right and I started offering Clarity Sessions.

Increasingly, I’m also working alongside business owners on an ongoing basis: crunching numbers, organizing information, keeping track of priorities and tasks, solving problems and simply making the load lighter so they have more capacity for the work that only they can do.

I learn something from every client I work with. I get genuinely invested in their businesses and what they’re trying to achieve, and that doesn’t disappear when a project ends.

In fact, there’s something slightly bittersweet about the temporary nature of much of my work: I love working with my clients, but I also love helping them move forward to the point where they don’t need me anymore.

I love working with my clients, but I also love helping them move forward to the point where they don’t need me anymore.

There’s a lot behind TR Support Services

I studied B.Compt through the University of South Africa (UNISA) and did my articles outside public practice at the Automobile Association of South Africa. I have fond memories of driving around the Kyalami Race Track, where the AA was headquartered, auditing advertising signage!

I love numbers and data because they tell stories. Give me a pile of information and I want to organize it, understand what it’s telling us, find the patterns and work out what we can do with it.

I also spent more than a decade working in telecommunications start-ups in South Africa. My work crossed finance, operations, projects, sales, systems, data, technical support, back-end infrastructure management, process improvement and change management.

One of my favourite stories from those years started during a major service crisis. We had 1,000 affected customers, overwhelmed support systems, calls and complaints that needed triaging, communications that needed managing, and a six-month migration plan that suddenly needed to happen “yesterday”. I worked across the business with our CEO, CTO and teams to help coordinate the response and keep things moving.

But that’s not actually my favourite part of the story.

In the middle of all that chaos, our cleaning lady came to me and asked if she could help answer the phones. I gratefully said yes.

She went on to join the help desk. We supported her studies, she continued moving through technical support, and today she’s a senior technical support supervisor.

And that isn’t an isolated story. My telecom start-up years are full of stories about solving difficult problems, building things from scratch and, most importantly, working with some pretty incredible people.

How I think about work

I’m curious. I ask a lot of questions.

I like understanding what is happening before deciding what should happen next. I collect information, connect dots, spot patterns and look at problems from different angles. Then I want to turn that thinking into something practical.

Technology is part of that, and increasingly that includes AI.

I use AI in my own business and explore practical ways it can support my clients, from research and problem-solving to building applications and creating content that reflects their voice and values. That curiosity extends beyond work, too—I’ve even built an app to organize household chores with my daughter and keep track of who’s on dinner duty!

Relationships matter most to me

I like getting to know people—their stories, what matters to them and what they’re excited about. Working together is one way that connection happens, but it isn’t the only reason I want to have a conversation. I’m happy to share ideas, hear a different perspective or catch up over a virtual coffee. Whether we end up working together or not, I value the opportunity to get to know you.

Whether we end up working together or not, I value the opportunity to get to know you.