The Civil Engineering Contractor July 2018 | Page 32

PROFILE

Piling into the opposition

By Eamonn Ryan
Greg Whittaker, MD of Mega Pile Inland, cut his teeth in geotechnical engineering in the Durban area, where most homes adjacent to the coast are constructed on piles.
Mega Pile Inland
Ground conditions are extremely variable, particularly in Gauteng. Over the years, Mega Pile has had to develop many of its own systems, installation techniques, and machines as its own IP, says Greg Whittaker, MD of Mega Pile Inland.

In the decade 1996 – 2006, Whittaker took his then-business, KwaZulu Natal Piling, from being a wannabe newcomer to one of the leading piling and geotechnical local businesses, to the point, he says, of being the company of choice by consultants and developers. Having been trained initially as a cost accountant, Whittaker joined his father’ s construction business and— like his own business later on— worked his way from the bottom to the top, dirtying his hands every inch of the way. The construction sector at that time was booming in the lead-up to the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup and the launch of the Gautrain, which was boosting the entire sector in its wake. He built the business to more than 200 employees, by which time it came to the notice of the larger players, where mergers among construction firms were all the rage ahead of a strong trend to list on the high-flying construction sector of the JSE’ s Main Board.

32- CEC July 2018
The new owner, Sanyati Holdings, had an aggregate annual turnover of R2-billion, and Whittaker hit the big time. However, he wasn’ t made for the corporate life.“ I missed the interaction with staff and clients and in 2009 left the business, and for the next two-and-a-half years, I was involved in property development in Durban and Johannesburg. This enabled me to spend time at home with my kids, but my passion was always in geotechnical engineering and I missed it. I decided to start anew,” he says.
A challenging career
Yet, the piling sector is a specialised and highly collusive business, which Whittaker initially found tough to break into in the Johannesburg market.“ I was an outsider in this region— even though I was born in Johannesburg— and it took a great deal of determination and hard work. Then in May 2012, Sanyati collapsed and went into liquidation, and I was able to buy back the plant and equipment and to employ the specialist staff I’ d left in Durban and Johannesburg.” He entered into a partnership with a friend and relocated the head office back to Durban, where the business soon recovered to its former glory. A year later, the partnership was dissolved and Whittaker, tired of the weekly commute between Johannesburg and Durban, decided to establish the business in Gauteng, named Mega Pile Inland. The culture was returned to the owner-managed family business he had been used to since working for his dad. He is always pulled back to piling, he says, because once he had been blooded in this specialist field as opposed to building, he was smitten with the“ incredibly technical and innovative nature of piling and lateral support”. One of the major challenges associated with piling is that“ a lot of geotechnical investigations are not accurate”. There