Our Journey
Let me introduce myself—I’m Lee Ziervogel, a qualified Chartered Accountant ‘CA(SA)’ with a deep passion for business, creating impact, and empowering women.
I founded The Athena Difference with a vision: to create a platform where women can rediscover their value, empower themselves, and make meaningful contributions to businesses. Through this platform, women bring their unique skills, experiences, passion, and energy, fostering both personal and professional growth.
During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to lead cross-functional teams across diverse business areas, with a key focus on driving strategic projects that weren’t landing as expected. This challenge inspired me to develop a comprehensive Project Methodology Framework. This framework incorporates technology, structure, process, and simplicity, all wrapped in a quality management process, to ensure delivery integrity. It blends best practices from both waterfall and agile methodologies, tailored to meet each client’s unique needs.
Today, The Athena Difference bridges the gap between critical business needs and exceptional feminine talent. We operate on a shared-value model, where team members are rewarded for introducing both outstanding talent and delivering exceptional client experiences.
Of Interest…
Currently, my husband runs The Athena Difference day-to-day operations, focusing on team training, methodology enhancements and client setup and support, whilst I continue to pursue personal dreams. Behind every successful woman is a strong man!
The Athena Difference is not an employment agency; it’s a channel that connects business opportunities with exceptional women, creating value for both sides.
While all work is done on a consulting basis, our environment encourages flexibility, allowing team members to manage their hours while committing to client deliverables.
The Athena Difference does not offer employment and is rather a channel for connecting business opportunity with exceptional talent. Contracting is on a back-to-back basis with Client engagement contracts.
Our Team currently runs over 100 projects concurrently.
The Athena Difference Methodology is successfully operating across our multinational clients in the Banking, Technology, and Payments sectors.
