Nicholas and Melanie Gard launched the Kloof office of WSI in November 2009.
Nicholas Gard
Nick graduated from Unisa in 2002 with a Bachelor of Business Administration. He has a long history as a restaurateur before joining WSI in 2008.
Nick’s focus is on marketing and social media strategy. He is in charge of frontline sales, client strategy and he is the driving force behind the business.
In his spare time, Nick likes to play golf, read and travel. His favourite TV show is (was) Top Gear.
Melanie Gard
Mel graduated from University of the Witwatersrand in 2003 with a BSc Honours. She joined Nick in the restaurant industry until 2008 when they embarked on their new venture with WSI.
Mel’s focus is on client delivery, specifically with Adwords and SEO campaigns. She is the organisational heart of the company, and is a well known local speaker. She is also the 2016-2017 Chairperson of KZN Women in Business and sits on The Durban Chamber of Commerce’s Women in Business Forum.
With two young kids, Mel says she doesn’t have much spare time but she loves cooking, traveling and reading. Her favourite TV show (at the moment) is Code Black.
Vaughn Lees
Vaughn has always wanted to be in marketing, and received a Diploma in Marketing from IMM in 2015.
Vaughn has a strong analytical background – in his previous position he needed to use sales data to predict trends and identify new opportunities. This makes him ideal to manage our Adwords client base. Most of Adwords is looking at a big data set and finding the changes and outlying data points. Vaughn just loves it.
In his spare time he runs. A lot. Hopefully he will be running Comrades in 2016, with the WSI team firmly behind him. His favorite TV of all time is Big Bang Theory.
Gonda Swanevelder
Gonda joins the team as our Salesperson, to make sure that Mel and Vaughn have enough clients to keep them out of trouble.
Gonda has a long history in sales in various industries, but also has experience in office management and client services. Her happy, bubbly energy brings a strength to the office and certainly makes our clients happy. She is happy to meet with anyone, anytime to discuss our services.
Gonda is an earth-child, and is passionate about environmental and social issues. Her favourite TV show is Ancient Aliens (really).