Swimming Up stream

"After many years of playing at grown up in the farm store, I was quite disheartened. It was getting increasingly difficult to make ends meet and we had not had more than just Sundays off for many years. Every weekend I would worry about how I would meet Mondays payments and through it all I would look at the shelves and see gaps. Gaps, that represented so many products we could not replace.  It was clear that slowly the business was winding down.  Some days would be busy and it was thrilling, but we had not enough stock to make the most of those times.   To this day I still return to that place, in my dreams, to  that time, and the shelves are still bare and I get to feel inadequate all over again. 

Despite all of that I loved the interaction and banter with uncomplicated and largely good people. I knew all of my regulars and we had great fun. My Zulu was incredible and I could converse in a vocabulary that went way beyond what I needed to trade in the farm.  From the age of twenty to the age of twenty nine I was stuck in a small shop in the middle of nowhere. No neighbours and no future. The only conversation I had, other than with my wife, was in Zulu and while I was chained to the till, I had lots and lots of time.  I wrote letters and read books and practiced drawing and crafts and electronics and any kind of fine work that I could find. Each new project was an obsession and I would spend hours and days making hobby amplifiers and gizmos and any kind of fiddly thing I could get my mind around.  I had so many dreams.  In hindsight I can see that my dreams were very small and together with my inability to manage money, my lack of imagination has been the major stumbling block in my life.  I still suffer from this lack of ambition. I am too easily contented and I have come to accept that as a result I will never be really wealthy. It is just too much hard work.  

When my brother in law said he had just bought a computer I was intrigued. “What for?” I asked him. And I could not think, what one would buy a computer for. He said he needed it for his research at the University, and that I too could get a basic model. It promised to be quite amusing, and I used my credit card and bought a 286 with a 20Mb Hard drive, 230k Ram, and a black and white screen.  The fuse was lit! 

I spent every waking moment with the darn thing and had soon mastered the DOS operating system. I tried my hand at writing stories and found that I quickly reached the outer limits of my reach. I tried drawing on the very rudimentary drawing programs that I had and found that while I was artistic, I was no Da Vinci.  What I knew at this stage was a series of very cool party tricks. 

During a trip to Pietermaritzburg I to buy potatoes I mentioned my new knowledge to a vegetable dealer and he gave me a few floppies that he had lying around. He included a book on Dbase. What the hell was Dbase?  I went back and installed the strangest looking program that simply gave me a command prompt. What the hell was this. I then opened the book on Dbase and soon had a basic understanding of what was what. In a day I was creating databases with telephone numbers and organising my tape and record collection.  The net step was to automate the input of data and I was hooked. The government had just introduced the VAT system to replace the old GST and I quickly wrote a program to handle the collation and processing of my VAT return at the store.  Soon other shopkeepers who had the same need came to me and went away with an easy to use, simple VAT calculator.  My first program under the belt, with real users and I didn’t even know that I was programming. 

The area was in decline.  The local butter plant closed down and soon we were in the middle of a full blown recession.   All this poverty left me with more and more free time. I was completely engrossed.  Sinking, head bobbing below the surface, yet I was flying high. I was elated.   A child again. 

I looked at the successful businesses around me and wished that I could be like them. Tons of customers leaving behind lots of money. It all looked so good and unattainable. I prayed for a way out. 

Then I met Laura. She was a middle aged white woman who had moved into one of the farms. It seems she had some bad stuff going on in her life and she had taken refuge at her cousins small holding.  She looked like she was a mess. Once a day I saw her come in and handed her a 30 pack of Dunhill filters. She was a heavy smoker.  One day she asked what I was doing with the computer and I told her about the VAT program I had written. When she heard that I was using Dbase she asked me if I had ever heard of Clipper. I said I hadn’t and she promised to give me some stuff she had brought with her from her from her office in Johannesburg.  I was excited and it was good to speak to somebody who was interested in what I was doing. Even if she didn’t know much about the field.  

The next day she came in with a book on Clipper and floppy disk. She didn’t want any money for it and was just glad that I would use it. And use it I did.  Now I had a real book on programming and a tool to compile my programs. This was the breakthrough. The tipping point. When I think back at those times I am blown away at the amazing coincidences and amazing timing. I had finally found something that I was good at. Something I was really good at and I didn’t even know that I was looking. 

Soon people from far and near, friends and family came to me for advice. They asked me to buy PCs for them and I got them the best deals.  Soon I was setting up PCs all over the area and taking calls at all hours, offering free expert support to all and sundry.  Every Saturday evening I went to Durban and we stayed at my in-laws. Sunday mornings I got up early and went to ESP Computers in Musgrave Road. They were the biggest mass discounter of PCs back in the day. I hung around and did deals for my friends and soon made friends with the owner Wessels Le Grange.   

I put up my store for sale and thought to try and get into the computer business. At any level.  

One Sunday Wessels offered me a job and the next day I reported to work. My family repossessed the shop and left me with barely the shirt on my back. I reported to work in my wedding suite and became the first Non White salesman they had.  Mrs Le Grange took me aside and told me that I was white, not quite white and as a result the rest of the team might give me a hard time. She said I should come to her if  it got too bad.  What she hadn’t anticipated was that I was really good at what I did. They had 21 sales people who were pros and I beat them all. I was number one sales person from day one. Three months later I took home a cheque of R8000. This equates to R70 000 of today’s money! Real money! 

Then came the bomb shell and I found out that ESP was on the rocks! They liquidated and left be with a taste of what was possible. I could either suck it up and go back to the farm. Back to my parents. Back to subservience.  Or I could take the money that I had made and try to make it on my own. I was petrified, with a wife and two year old child to support and I gambled it all on a new company. I used my credit cards to raise some money, sweet talked the bank into a line of credit and took on two partners.  It was a crazy time and we did not know what we were doing at least half the time, but we made money and had a great time. It was the time of IT and everyone wanted a piece of the action. We were cheated out of every cent we didn’t have and we licked our wounds and got back into the game. I bought out me partners and again lost every cent I didn’t have in the process. But I was finally able to work really hard and see the fruit of my labour. 

Then once again an amazing thing happened.  One of our suppliers was a real pain in arse. He was arrogant and racist and just gave us a hard time. He didn’t like dealing with people who weren’t white like him. This much was clear. One day he gets a call from a non white company, and as he did not deal with the end user he had to pass the lead on to a dealer. He had never, ever sent us a lead, but this non white lead he immediately sent to us. This deal turned out to be a doozey. A two million rand deal for hardware. The client would buy software from the countries largest software house and we would put together the network and everything.!

We bungled everything. We under quoted and forgot to include VAT in our price. We submitted the highest tender. The client was intrigued by our pretty document that he asked to meet my friend Jameel and myself. We were summoned and we were scared.  He asked why we were so much more expensive and we showed him why the network he had planned would not work. We had completely redesigned the network and our solution was logical and, it would work. And we proved it. He asked how we intended to raise the money to buy the equipment and we were floored. I walked out with a cheque for one and half million rands!   Probably R10 million in todays money. He did not know us from Adam and he trusted us. And we were petrified of letting him down. And we did not. 

Once we had done a big deal, many others followed and we were all set.  I just wished we were in software and not hardware. Things were perfect except for this.  

Two years later the client called and said that the software house had messed up and that he trusted us to choose his new software. At this point I offered to write the software for him for a song. He accepted and the dream was a reality. 

Years later, with almost two thousand installations in five countries we are leaders in our field and I cannot think of my life any other way. 

Just think, if my prayers were answered all those years ago, and the shop got busy I would be in the farm living in fear of being robbed. The people I looked at as the role models, with successful businesses in hindsight are small potatoes. 

So many things went wrong in my life. So many wrong turns.  And they all led me to this point. I have mentioned just the few that come readily to mind. Just a fraction of the crazy and amazing, and did I mention crazy things that I have done, and the crazy amazing luck I have had.  So many mistakes, and bad decisions and errors of judgment and yet,  I here I am.  I have it all.   

When everything is going wrong,  if you swim against the current and you can break yourself against the rocks and perish. Or you can find the right wave and ride it.