Our plan is to become the go-to for event staffing in the UK.

For many South Africans abroad, “winning the away game” isn’t about a neat career arc or a straight line to success. It’s about grit, recalibration, and learning the hard way – often far from home. For Johan de Jager, Founder of Resolve UK, the journey from South Africa to London was anything but polished. Yet it’s precisely that lived experience – of hospitality floors, visa hurdles, risk-taking, and reinvention – that underpins the business he’s built today.

Resolve UK is a B2B tech marketplace tackling one of the UK’s most persistent post-Brexit challenges: staffing shortages in hospitality and retail. But behind the platform is a story that starts with a young South African who arrived in England with little more than determination, a few quid, and a sofa to sleep on.

A South African Start, a London Reality Check

Johan’s early years didn’t follow a conventional script. He finished school a year early, but admits he failed to leverage his advantage, instead working in hospitality and travelling South Africa. By 21, while friends were graduating, he had dropped out of two degrees and scraped through a marketing diploma.

His move to the UK wasn’t a grand strategy. “I arrived with a few quid in my pocket and a friend’s telephone number to arrange a sofa for the night,” he says. What began as “a bit of a get out of jail free card” – a chance to travel and reset – quickly turned into a tougher reality.

Studying at the University of Greenwich came at a cost. With fees reaching “an eye-watering £10K per annum” and no financial safety net, Johan worked his way through university in hospitality, learning first-hand how demanding and fragile the industry could be. That same work ethic helped him navigate the UK’s visa structures until he was able to naturalise.

From Hospitality Floors to Ownership

Hospitality wasn’t just a job – it became Johan’s proving ground. After years in the industry, he opened his first restaurant in London: Source Battersea, built around a nose-to-tail, farm-to-table ethos.

The venture was a success. After establishing a loyal following, he sold the restaurant in 2016 and moved on to complete an MBA. That exit wasn’t just a financial milestone – it marked a shift in thinking. Johan moved into the tech world, working across several marketplace businesses and learning how platforms scale, balance supply and demand, and survive competitive pressure.

Those lessons would prove vital.

A Market Ripe for Disruption

By the time Johan launched Resolve UK, the problem was impossible to ignore. “Hospitality and retail both suffered immense losses of staff when Brexit came along and then Covid really topped it off,” he explains. Long gone were the steady streams of European workers. “French, Spanish and Italians no longer came to learn the language and this left thousands of entry-level jobs vacant.”

That shortage hasn’t corrected itself. Resolve UK exists because the gap remains.

The platform connects hospitality and retail businesses with freelance temps in a few clicks, removing friction from a system that was slow, opaque, and unreliable. But the real innovation lies in how Resolve protects both sides of the transaction.

“We handle all the money for the freelancers, guaranteeing their pay,” Johan explains, adding that Resolve pays “the fastest in the industry without charges.” For businesses, the platform delivers unparalleled transparency on the freelancer profiles, including reliability, skill and previous employer data, enabling employers to make informed, confident hiring decisions.

Quality of supply is a core differentiator for Resolve UK. The platform doesn’t rely on anonymous placements, but on transparent, peer-to-peer referrals driven by real-world performance. Freelancers are surfaced based on verified skillsets and the businesses that have employed them before, creating a trusted loop where quality work is rewarded with repeat opportunity – and employers know exactly who they are bringing onto their floor.

It’s a solution designed by someone who has stood on both sides of the bar.

Scaling with Purpose

Resolve UK is already being used daily to cover peaks in demand, staff illness, holidays, recruitment gaps, and large-scale events. From Christmas markets to Michelin-starred restaurants and corner shops to luxury high street brands, the platform operates across the full spectrum of hospitality and retail. The ambition, however, is clear and measured. “Our plan is to become the go-to for event staffing in the UK first,” he says, “before challenging some traditional players in markets further afield once the UK is under our belt.”

There’s no rush to overextend – only a focus on winning properly, one market at a time.

The Mindset Behind the Marketplace

Resolve UK isn’t Johan’s only venture. Alongside the platform, he runs an affordable luxury men’s watch brand, De Jager London – a personal passion project with a distinctly South African heart. Johan donates £10 from every sale to SOS Africa, a charity focused on education and access for “the poorest of the poor” in South Africa. It’s a thread that runs through his story: build globally, but remain grounded.

That same ethos shapes how he engages with the South African diaspora. With a background firmly in hospitality and over a decade in marketplaces, Johan actively supports fellow Saffas navigating UK business terrain. He speaks openly about the challenges of building two-sided marketplaces – “the tricky chicken-and-egg space” – and the discipline required to get the flywheel moving.

Winning the Away Game – the Long Way

Johan de Jager’s story isn’t one of overnight success or glossy acceleration. It’s about persistence, recalibration, and understanding a problem deeply enough to build something that lasts. Resolve UK is the product of lived experience: hospitality floors, staffing shortages, Brexit, Covid, and the reality of building in a foreign market. It’s also a reminder of what South Africans do well abroad – adapt, hustle, and find opportunity where others see constraint.

As Johan proves, winning the away game doesn’t mean forgetting home. It means carrying that Saffa grit forward – and using it to fix real problems, properly.