● About
I built a business, automated it, then started helping other SA professional services firms do the same.
Seven years building RhinoBerry
RhinoBerry is a digital marketing consultancy I've run since 2019. Over seven years, we've built it from a one-person operation into a team handling Google Ads, SEO, and CRM for a set of SA professional services clients: accountants, financial advisors, and specialist firms.
Most of that growth didn't come from adding more people or working longer hours. It came from building systems: workflows that ran without constant input, reporting that generated itself, onboarding that happened without my involvement. The practice was a testbed before it became a methodology.
Three years turning processes into systems
Around 2022, I started the deliberate process of mapping every recurring task in the business and asking a simple question: does this require my expertise, or just my time? The honest answer was that most tasks fell into the second category. That realisation started a three-year project of building systems, AI agents, and automation workflows that now handle most of what I used to do manually.
The result: more output from the same hours, a team that makes decisions without escalating everything, and reports that arrive without anyone assembling them. I started documenting the methodology after the third time a peer at another firm asked me how we did it.
CVV vs RhinoBerry: two different things
RhinoBerry handles marketing implementation for clients: Google Ads, SEO, content, and CRM systems. That's a service business with an ongoing retainer model.
Cobus van Vuuren (this site) is different. It's focused on business automation assessments and education: mapping where SA professional services firms are losing time and principal capacity, and producing a prioritised plan for fixing it. The assessment is a one-time engagement. The diagnostic is free. The methodology is the same one I built for RhinoBerry.
Assessment-first, not theory-first
Everything here is built on practice, not frameworks. The diagnostic questions come from real intake conversations. The tier system reflects what I actually observed across multiple firms. The guarantee exists because I've done this enough times to know what the assessment finds.
The result that started this: a client's marketing was working fine, but most of what it generated was leaking before anyone followed up on it. We rebuilt their lead response and onboarding system, and the same ad spend started converting. That wasn't a marketing win. It was a systems win. The marketing was always working. The practice wasn't capturing the output.