‘Local is lekker’ when doing business

I’m a sucker for “local is lekker”. Perhaps it’ sa function of spending my formative years in newspaper buildings in small towns in the Eastern Cape.

I love being able to chew the cud across the counter with a local business owner, or contract a local artisan who is recommended by a neighbour, or complain to a real local entrepreneur when their service has failed, rather than be passed through a chain of invisible, third-party call centre operators.

It’s what prompted me to send an inquiry to Border Internet when our household finally decided to make the switch to fibre from our unofficial combination of a Telkom adsl line and MWeb internet service provider

— and the fact that our neighbour Stephan spoke highly of them.

It wasn’t that we were unhappy with the Telkom-MWeb combo, but it always bothered me that it wasn’t a one-stopshop. I always had to make two calls when the service was disrupted. And I was sure we could secure a price reduction with a new service provider.

The buggers who make life a hell in many neighbourhoods digging fibre trenches certainly did not impress me — we had at least three water fountains erupt in our street over the course of their operations.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me how Herotel Border Internet was structured and I only found out about the company long after I had signed up, when researching this article.

So it was a pleasant surprise to find that I was getting a service provider who thinks national and acts local, with a chief commercial officer in Rich Henn who also waxes lyrical about local being lekker.

I was also impressed with Henn’s clever way of dropping local references into the conversation — anything from Rance Timbers in Stutterheim to Friesland Dairy in Quigney.

It turns out Henn is a born-and-bred East Londoner, matriculated at Selborne in 1993, and his parents still live in the city. “EL is in my blood,” he says, and it shows.

Herotel now employ about 50 people in East London.

“Our staff live in East London — their kids go to the same school as your kids, they work in the same areas as you, there’s a real sense of understanding what’s happening in the community, we’re able to service the community by being part of the community,” he says.

And they make a commitment to cleaning up wherever they have installed network infrastructure.