Pargo Gold: Setting Up The First Pargo Pickup Points For Success

Gather ‘round we’ve got some Pargo Gold to hand out. In the next couple of months, we will be sharing Pargo Gold – stories of blood, sweat and tears, entrepreneurial wisdom and never published before anecdotes from the fastest-growing smart logistics company in Africa.

First up, we have Adilah Ryklief, Senior Partner Manager at Pargo, a title she truly deserves as the very first Pargo employee. Adilah has walked a long path with Pargo and has seen the company grow from just 14 pickup points in 2015 to a proud nationwide network of over 2,500 PUPs (as we like to call them). Naturally, she has a wealth of stories to share but has chosen to talk about one from the early days that fully encapsulates one of Pargo’s core values — execute exceptionally.

“Hi, all!

The Pargo value I have decided to speak about is Execute Exceptionally. To me, this means we create exceptional output through hard work, smart work and dedication.

Being the longest working employee at Pargo other than our CEOs, Derk and Lars, I have so many stories that I can talk about and, in each of them, we can see Pargo’s values truly come to life.

The story I have chosen to share is about the first few Pargo App training sessions.

Back in the day, Pargo stores were trained in a very old-school way. Lars and Derk would drive out to towns, like Worcester, Caledon, Clanwilliam and Grabouw, and physically train the staff members on an old laptop and scanner.

My job was to check that the store staff were scanning in parcels correctly, updating them correctly and so on. Calling the stores was always fun because every call would be about my two sexy bosses, when they would be visiting again and how much they love Pargo. With that being said, training was certainly executed exceptionally by our very own CEOs.

Shortly after that, we introduced the Uphone. At the time, this was the strongest phone out there. You could literally throw it against a wall or off a building and it would still be fine. We installed the very first Pargo App on this phone. This development led to some of the first times I truly embodied the Pargo value of exceptional execution.

I would deliver these phones to the stores and train them on how to use the very first Pargo App — in some lekker dodgy areas I might add, but I survived. Those were my first successful training sessions and, till today, I still use those training skills with suppliers and pickup points when needed.

Today, the App has improved in so many ways and our leading white label stores, including TFG, Clicks and Homechoice, are using it for their internal Click & Collect. Now that we have the leading Click & Collect App in the country, it’s hard to imagine the early days of the old-school scanner app. To me, this progress is one of Pargo’s greatest successes and, while it demonstrates our core value of executing exceptionally, it also touches on another one of our values — embracing change. Though I tried to only speak about one of Pargo’s core values, from this story, it is clear that all our values are inextricably linked.

Right now, I can’t wait to see where the Pargo journey takes us. We’ve got big plans ahead.

I hope you enjoyed my little story down memory lane.

That’s it from me.

Employee number 001 over and out.

Adilah Ryklief”