Born in the Eastern Cape’s Nieu-Bethesda and raised in Cape Town’s Elsies River, Bertina’s parents were the driving force behind her success. Her father, a teacher, and mother, a nurse, had always valued education and had instilled her the drive to succeed. That drive resulted in her getting a law degree, rising her way through the ranks of every company she worked for and ending up as the CEO of clicks.
It was already in high school that Bertina began showing her future potential. Her Afrikaans teacher, Tobie Titus, saw that potential and applied for her to get an American Field Service scholarship so that she could complete her matric in the US. While in the US, she was encouraged by another teacher to enter the 1981 ‘Lions International Speech competition., which she not only won, but made history by becoming the first non-American to take the prize. The prize itself was a $6000 cash payment which, in today’s value, would be more than $20000 or about R380000.
In 1983, she used that prize money to register for a degree in Law at the University of the Western Cape,completed it in 1986, joined a law firm to complete her articles and in 1989, was admitted as a practising attorney of the Supreme Court. It was only in 1992 that she began to work in the business sector and it was from here that her rise to the top could be described as meteoric.
She got a job as a researcher at Transnet, was promoted to the position of assistant manager, then to Manager, then to Senior Manager, then to Corporate Manager and, in 1996, she was bumped up to Executive Manager.
Also during this time, she completed both the Management Development Programme at the University of Stellenbosch as well as a Masters degree in Commercial Law at the University of Cape Town.
In 2002 she began working for the Sea Harvest Group as the Group Organisational Effectiveness Director, then moved to Shell Southern Africa as both the General Manager for HR and Services and the Regional Manager for Shell Southern Africa as well as being appointed to the board as an executive director.
Another two years later however, she moved over to the Clicks Group, becoming its Group HR Director, a position she held for the next 14 years.
Starting in 2020, things started moving fast again, when she was appointed as the Group Corporate Affairs Director and then finally, in 2022, as the Group CEO. In her first year, Clicks profits increased by 9.2% to R3.3 billion, escalating to R4.2 billion (a 15.1% increase) in 2024.
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