the business of building dreams. We are a turnkey construction company that assists our clients with conceptualizing, putting down on paper and then building their dream homes. We have completed various types of projects in the past years ‒ from high-end residential developments to block offices and homes all over KZN.
for profit. We have since built in a number of luxury estates in and around KZN.
Describe your business model We didn’ t wait for government tenders but instead aimed for the residential markets that lacked the presence of professional black companies. We wanted to operate in a field where we could differentiate ourselves by being creative, knowledgeable and professional, and by bringing a fresh blend of enthusiasm and energy into a field that we felt was dull and unprofessional.
We recognised that most black contractors are technicians who don’ t understand the fundamentals of business ‒ they understood the technical work of building but not the business of building. We set out to be different from day one. We invested heavily in branding and marketing; we made a conscious decision to project a consistently professional image in everything we do ‒ from our branding, to our website and the manner in which we interact with customers and execute projects.
How else do you feel you’ ve set yourselves apart from other businesses? We strongly believe in securing customers solely based on merit and our ability to add value. We have managed to build a reputation of professionalism that always exceeds customers’ expectations.
Have you experienced any challenges on the way? We grew our company to a multimillion rand turnover, a fleet of three fully branded vehicles and employed 52 workers. Things were going well until market volatility hit us hard. Our turnover was slashed by 95 %, our employee count went down from 52 to five, and we had to sell our vehicles. We were left with our last R50k.
To keep our remaining employees on we decided to buy a plot of land in a developing township, with the intention to build a spec house and sell. We convinced Simphiwe’ s girlfriend to take a bond to finance the building. The house sold at slab level and we realized that we made more off the sale as developers then we would have if we were purely contractors.
That’ s when we decided to change our business core to contractor developers. We now buy land, in luxury estates specifically, with the help of investors. We then build spec houses under 300sqm and sell
62 FEBRUARY 2017 SA Real Estate Investor www. reimag. co. za