Case study · Education · South Africa
Seventh Star
A high-performance South African education company — sciences, mathematics and pathways into medical studies — running online and contact programmes on the Entrepreneurial Operating System. I joined in customer relations and earned my way onto the leadership team by building the systems the company runs on.
The context
Seventh Star teaches sciences and mathematics at a level that opens doors — including pathways into medical studies — through both online and contact programmes. The company runs on EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which means clear accountability, scoreboards and meeting rhythms are not nice-to-haves. They are how the business works.
I started there in 2020 in customer relations: the front line where registrations, payments, questions and complaints all arrive first.
The problem
A growing education company has a particular kind of problem: every customer journey crosses departments. A registration touches sales, finance, service delivery and the platform itself. When something breaks between those hand-offs, it is nobody's job to fix — unless someone decides it is theirs.
The operational knowledge that kept things running lived in people's heads and inboxes. For a company committed to EOS, that gap between the operating system on paper and the tools people actually used every day was the thing holding the machine back.
The approach
Take ownership of the whole problem, not the part that lands in your inbox. Every recurring issue that crossed my desk became a system: documented, built into a shared workspace and adopted by the people who needed it — with training and follow-through, not just a template dropped in a folder.
That meant building the company's Notion workspace department by department, wiring EOS structures into it and supporting the WordPress platforms, CRM flows and hosting underneath — so the same person understood the customer conversation, the process behind it and the code underneath.
What was built
Customer & operations
- Onboarding, registrations, subscriptions and payment support for every customer journey
- Email and SMS communication systems for programme launches and follow-through
- Complaint resolution, retention and cross-department coordination
Business systems
- Notion workspace across seven departments — Leadership, Academic Development, Service Delivery, Platform Development, Sales & Marketing, Finance & HR and Customer Relations
- EOS structures: accountability charts, scoreboards, recurring meeting rhythms and quarterly tracking
- Templates, documentation and hands-on employee adoption
Technical
- WordPress platforms, CRM functionality and customer access support
- DNS, Kinsta hosting, GitHub deployment workflows, Docker, Nextcloud and Nginx Proxy Manager
- Troubleshooting across the full stack — from browser to server
The outcome
I moved from the front line of customer relations onto the leadership team — not by changing lanes, but by taking responsibility beyond the limits of the original role. The workspace, EOS structures and communication systems built along the way now carry the company's daily operations, and the platforms underneath them are supported by the same person who understands what customers experience on top.
The kaizen part: I started in customer relations and earned my way onto the leadership team by taking ownership of every problem that crossed departments. The systems I built run the company's daily operations.
WordPress · Notion · EOS · Kinsta · Docker · Nextcloud · Nginx
Your project next
Systems like these, built for your business.
If your operations live in inboxes and spreadsheets, that is the starting point — not the sentence. Tell me what is not working.