Start where you are
"Poverty is not a bad thing, it's just a card that life dealt you." Tim believes circumstances shape your hunger, not your ceiling.
Built from nothing, built to last.
Tim grew up in Toekomsrus, Randfontein, the second youngest of five children. His family sold koeksisters and bunny chows to make ends meet. At 11 he was selling sweets on the streets, watching queues of people board buses to Sun City and wondering why places like that were out of reach for families like his.
He matriculated in 1996 but could not afford tertiary education, so he took a free security course and went to work as a guard. While on the job he heard about an IT bursary. He applied, failed, applied again and eventually won it, qualifying as a Microsoft certified engineer. That opened doors to Dimension Data and later EOH.
Tim lost both his parents in his twenties. "That is where the Tim Hogins story started," he says. When he was retrenched from EOH in 2010, he turned an idea he had been nurturing into a business: outdoor gyms that bring health and fitness to people who cannot afford a commercial gym. The first went into a park in Soweto.
Today Tim is chairman and chief executive of Hogins Enterprises, a group with interests in recreation and lifestyle, technology, manufacturing, e-commerce, property development and insurance. He co-owns Happy Island Waterworld and is developing Memorial Gardens, a private cemetery on his land in Protea Glen, Soweto.
Then came the hardest fight of his life. Tim was diagnosed with cancer, and he faced the treatment, the hospital stays and the uncertainty head on. He fought it, and he came out of it determined that no one else should have to go through cancer alone. That is why he founded Cancerverse, a global community that connects patients, survivors, caregivers and doctors.
Growing up poor is actually a good thing. It gave birth to ambition, it gave birth to my desire to be successful.
