● 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 audits and education — mapping where SA professional services firms are losing time and principal capacity, and producing a prioritised plan for fixing it. The audit is a one-time engagement. The diagnostic is free. The methodology is the same one I built for RhinoBerry.
Audit-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 audit finds.
The result that started this: one of our clients went from 35 leads per month to 79 — same ad budget — after we rebuilt their lead response and onboarding system. That wasn't a marketing win. It was a systems win. The marketing was always working. The practice wasn't capturing the output.