People of Vox: Caleb Rutters
At Vox, we believe our employees are the beating heart of our company, with merit and value built into all our available positions. In this edition of People of Vox, we meet Caleb Rutters, who works in the Stores Department as Team Leader: Vox Warehouse in Gauteng. Having been born and bred in Westbury, Gauteng, Caleb has faced and overcome challenges to become another valuable and award-winning Vox employee.
Caleb is proud to work in Stores and believes the equipment and logistics that his team manages every day is critical to the functioning of the company overall. He knows that behind every satisfied customer, there’s a chain of processes and people who made the required delivery possible. He might be proud to work for Vox Stores, but Stores – and Vox in general – is equally proud of him!
The Vox Stores department, which operates nationally across Cape Town, Durban and Samrand in Gauteng, is a central service point within the company, created to handle queries, give direction and ensure smooth coordination across the organisation. That’s why Caleb describes it as being vitally important to the daily functioning of Vox.
We find out more about his daily working life, and what he enjoys when he’s off duty.
The Internship that Began a Career
Westbury, where Caleb grew up and went to school, is known as being a challenging urban environment to live and work in. The area is characterised by deep-seated problems that are rooted in the past history of the country, as well as by gang warfare over turf in the present. However, the media stories don’t always reflect the enduring spirit and aspirations of its people – and Caleb is one of its visible success stories.
Aged just 18 years old, and with his matric exams still fresh in his mind – having finished school only three months before – Caleb was still wondering how he could start moving forward in life, when a stroke of luck arrived at exactly the right time. He found out quite suddenly about an internship opportunity with Vox and followed up on it by replying to an email late one Friday afternoon.
His innate talent and can-do attitude clearly showed in that first outreach, because Caleb quickly found himself liaising with a person who was keen to hire him, and who would go on to become his manager.
He explains: “I matriculated in November 2013 and, after a short period at home – which I found quite stressful while I was looking for job opportunities, which were rather scarce – I began working at Vox in March 2014 as an intern. A mentor whom I’d known at school found out about the internship and suggested to me, as well as a few of my peers from school, that we should apply. After a successful interview, I was offered the internship, for which I was very grateful!
“Over time, I was then able to work my way up through the Stores team, and my pathway included becoming, in turn, a Junior Stores Assistant, Senior Stores Assistant, Stock Controller and then Team Leader. I believe that my growth can be attributed to on-the-job learning as well as the mentorship of my manager, Parthosam Jairaj, also known as AJ, who has been responsible for much of my development and to whom I’m very grateful for the initial opportunity.”
(Editor’s note: Caleb modestly leaves out the fact that his growth can also be attributed to his desire to reach for opportunities and always give of his best!)
Eleven years later, Caleb is now the team leader of Vox’s Stores and Warehouse Team in Samrand (Centurion), responsible for the daily choreography of stock, shipping and returns that keeps the hardware related to Vox’s internet connections moving across South Africa.
“I’m proud of how far Vox has come,” he says. “I started at the company before Fibre and LTE were commonplace in South Africa, when services still relied heavily on ADSL and VoIP. Seeing Vox develop into one of the country’s leading ISPs has been a source of pride and motivation, and I’m grateful to be part of its journey as a company.”
Caleb has also come a long way in his career with Vox, having twice been a winner of the ‘Voscars’ during 2018 and 2023. The Voscars is Vox’s internal employee awards, a programme designed to recognise and reward employees who go the extra mile for their customers, with winners receiving significant cash prizes.
It’s a fantastic achievement to win the Voscars once – winning it twice is knocking it out of the park!
The Busy-ness of the Daily Routine
As team leader, Caleb oversees a compact and efficient team of five employees, not including himself. The team is kept busy with stock allocation, shipping and capturing stock in the system, processing large-scale orders, handling returns and managing billing queries, including situations where routers haven’t been delivered and where orders must be reconciled.
Caleb explains: “Without accurate inventory, logistics and shipping, customer connections don’t happen! And no two days are the same, which I enjoy. I am grateful for the mentorship I’ve received from AJ, as well as the daily interaction with my colleagues, who make work feel like a close-knit family! People are definitely the part of the job that I enjoy most. I like to lead my team with a practical, hands-on approach and make a point of being the ‘go-to’ person my colleagues can rely on.”
A typical morning begins early: Caleb aims to be at work by 07:00, which means waking up at about 05:00. “My commute can be long and subject to the usual traffic unpredictability,” he says. “Once I’m at the warehouse, the day is a stream of queries, urgent orders and escalations. I enjoy problem solving and when we’re working together as a team, there is a lot of joking and camaraderie to uplift us during our duties.”
Having stock of necessary items available and to hand in an organised manner is necessary for Vox’s proper functioning, and so monthly stock counts are conducted on the first working day of every new month. Caleb adds: “Every item, in every location, is physically counted and matched against the system. The process is critical for finding errors and discrepancies, whether from theft, mistakes or data mismatches. Across all Vox’s Stores locations, over 120,000 individual items are counted every month. It’s a huge task, but it keeps the Vox balance sheet accurate!”
A major operational milestone came in May 2024, when Vox consolidated several smaller stores locations in Waverley into a single large warehouse in Samrand. Caleb helped oversee the transfer: checking, boxing, labelling, transporting and then unpacking and verifying stock. It was physically demanding work and involved overtime and weekend shifts, but it also showed the team’s ability to coordinate under pressure.
The move took about a month to settle, and Caleb says the increase in space has been useful. After the move to Samrand had taken place, Caleb was also promoted to his current position, which speaks volumes about his ability and talents in taking on an additional challenge.
Music in His Veins
Caleb’s life outside work is centred on family and music, and he has some travel ambitions as well. He says: “I try to balance my time between spending time with my daughter as well as my own interests. Music is a lifelong passion that’s rooted in my family history, because my grandfather played saxophone in a band, and music was a constant presence in the house. And so, as a hobby, I occasionally do some DJ-ing over weekends – I enjoy playing music for other people when I’m able to slot it in around family obligations.”
He adds that in the future, he would like to explore South Africa more widely and see Cape Town, as well as travel to the United States, especially New York and other American cities that are known for their music and nightlife.
An Empowering Philosophy
Caleb’s personal mantra is a simple encouragement that he tries to live by and share with others. He says: “It’s important to believe in yourself… even small steps forward still move you closer to something great.” It’s a practical philosophy that he tries to live by as he continues to make steady progress in his chosen career through diligence, persistence and a willingness to go the extra mile.
Caleb and all his team members are vital cogs in the machine that is Vox, with their tried-and-trusted daily routines – involving managing stock, coordinating moves and motivating their colleagues – helping to make the promise of fast, reliable internet a reality for Vox’s customers across South Africa.
