Nigel Worthington has been a director at MAC Consulting for 24 years, and brings a unique mix of management and consulting experience, business know-how and English charisma to the team.

British born with a career that began at Proudfoot Consulting (now Alexander Proudfoot) in Australia, South Africa has been home for 30 years, and it’s here that Nigel is happiest investing his seasoned skills and consulting talent.

At MAC, Nigel has worked exclusively with its key mining clients, contributing enormously to streamlining their systems and business operations. For 14 years he led the team responsible for the design and implementation of a wide range of projects at Anglo Platinum, including the establishment of Group Supply Chain and Shared Services functions. He has also led improvement projects at Kumba, Lonmin Platinum, Anglo Alpha, ERGO, Kangra, Zimbabwe Alloys and Anglo Coal, working too with their associated issues of transformation and implementation of the Mining Charter.

Quick with a disarming wit, Nigel is keenly aware of the value of tactical personal interaction in the process of transferring technical capacity. “People sometimes think the world comes down to numbers and formulas, but that’s only half the picture. The ability to work with people from very diverse backgrounds is the other half. It’s a vital skill for business consultants,” he says.

Nigel has a BSc (hons) in Business Studies from the University of Ashton in Birmingham, diplomas in market research and financial management, and an MBA at Wits Business School that he completed in 1997. Business management and marketing define his early career, but this evolved to consultancy when he joined Proudfoot Consulting in Australia in 1989, moving to South Africa in 1991 to establish Proudfoot’s operational unit. From here he led numerous mining and other management projects both locally and internationally, including in Spain, the DRC, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

This impressive bank of experience is ideally utilized at MAC, and in turn, Nigel says he is happy to work in a team that he points out has “literally hundreds of years of experience under one roof”. “Between us we have developed a very detailed understanding of business operations in a number of sectors,” he says. The mining sector, where labour workforces are huge and safety is paramount, requires an acute understanding of all elements of this business, from drilling and blasting, logistics and processing, as well as supporting processes within Human Resources, Supply Chain, Shared Services, Finance and Engineering. It also requires a good understanding of the strategic impact of developments in mining rights, employment equity and community development.

“A good consultant should be able to dissect a new client’s operations within weeks. I believe MAC has some of the best consultants in the country, which is why we work with some of the country’s best organisations on a continuous basis,” he says. Nigel Worthington is indisputably one of them.