Why Zig When You Can Zagga with Alan Greenstein
from A Stranger, a Suitcase and a Story Hosted by Anton and Ben
He shipped 200 bottles of single malt to Australia — and paid more in duty than they were worth. Then opened his home every month and shared every single one. Within a year he had a network. Within a decade he had built a $3 billion business. None of it was an accident. Alan Greenstein didn't leave South Africa because things got hard. He left because he saw exactly where things were going, and he refused to let his kids grow up in it. A lawyer turned banker turned entrepreneur, Alan arrived in Sydney in January 2009 at 48 years old, knowing 14 people, most of them family. He'd just stepped down as Group MD of Sasfin Bank. He had no job, no network, and a container full of whisky. What happened next is a masterclass in reinvention. In this episode, Alan gets into: · Why he shipped 200 bottles of single malt — and turned them into a community · The court case that almost blocked him from ever getting an Australian visa · Three defining moments that made leaving South Africa non-negotiable · How a career across Mercantile, Sasfin and beyond prepared him for something he hadn't built yet · How Zagga — a name born from "zigzagging around the banks" — became a private credit business with $3 billion in transactions And through all of it — the reinvention, the whisky nights, the court rooms - one thing never changed: Alan's belief that the person doing the giving always gets more than the person receiving. "If you can't walk the talk, you shouldn't talk the talk in the first place."
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