From poverty to tycoon
MOGUL: SHABALALA IS ON THE WAY TO REALISING HIS 'AUDACIOUS' CHILDHOOD DREAM
No foresight of an entrepreneurial future growing up, only a hunger for success.
Even dreaming about becoming an entrepreneur was too much of a luxury for Christian Shabalala as he grew up in grinding poverty on the rural outskirts of Ladysmith.
Every day as he walked the many dusty kilometres back home from the farm school, gathering the family’s few cows along the way, his most audacious dream was of having a job as an agricultural adviser one day.
Dreaming of actually having a farm was just too far out of reach.
Today, he has a farm, a small holding, a trucking business, a verge-maintenance company and four fast-food franchise outlets.
It has been an epic, improbable journey for Shabalala, 40, who had no foresight of an entrepreneurial future growing up, only an ever-present hunger for success.
He attributes this to his mother, who raised her six children as a widow. She only had Standard 1 education, but could read the Zulu bible “and she was very ambitious for her children,” says Shabalala.
After matric, he studied horticulture but, as the second youngest sibling, there was not enough money to continue, and after a year he found a job as a technical assistant at the Agricultural Research Council – studying part time.
For his extended family and circle of friends, Shabalala’s fulltime, skilled job meant he had already made it out of poverty, and was doing exponentially better than his father, who never went to school and worked as a manual labourer all his life.
As a result, when Shabalala resigned from his job after just three years in favour of a year-long area-manager contract with the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, his family was shocked.
The criticism, which came from everyone he knew except his mother, who supported his decision, became a further motivator for Shabalala.
It crystallised his desire for success and, although he had no set path, he decided then that his financial security was never going to be tied to a mere job. He was going to achieve it through hard work and exploiting every opportunity that crossed his path.
Even before his contract with the department ran out, he won a grass-cutting contract for Umgeni Water and another for the fuel-pipeline parastatal Petronet.
Shabalala found he had chanced upon a golden opportunity.
Grass cutting and verge maintenance was relatively easy to get into, but in order to win these contracts, he needed a pest-control license because of the herbi- cides involved. A difficult qualification to obtain, Shabalala was one of only five license holders in the Midlands and the only black.
Today, the grass-cutting and verge maintenance industry is flooded with contractors, but in the early 2000s it was full of “low hanging fruit”, he says.
Shabalala demanded a high quality of work from his teams, no matter how small the job, and soon the number and size of his contracts increased.
The breakthrough was a contract for Transnet, for railway, siding and station clearing throughout South Africa.
True to his vow to exploit every opportunity he could find, he saved and invested every rand from his maintenance contracts, at first in property and then in vehicles for a transport business.
Shabalala describes his efforts to gain new business and explore opportunities from knocking on doors, leaving business cards everywhere and even, once a year for about three years, an extended business trip countrywide to all his acquaintances to actively look for investment opportunities.
Increasingly, he also grew interested in franchising and at first set his mind on opening a KFC in one of the few towns in KwaZulu-Natal that did not yet have an outlet.
But four years of preparation came to nothing when the company instead offered the site to an existing franchisee.
Undeterred, Shabalala continued exploring and then set his sights on opening a Skippers fishand-chips franchise in Estcourt.
A full-time job meant he had made it out of poverty Has clear figure in mind for his goals for profitability and job creation.
Christian Shabalala, KwaZulu-Natal entrepreneur
He was able to buy it for cash and from the opening day in 2011, the outlet was profitable beyond expectation.
His next move was to replicate that success with two further outlets, one in Ladysmith.
Having identified prime sites, Shabalala had to move quickly to secure the leases and the franchises. The banks were not going to be quick enough to put up the R1 million finance he needed, and so he approached Business Partners Limited.
“They were very quick,” he says, having been given a fiveyear loan via the Business Partners Franchise Fund, which provides finance to entrepreneurs for purchasing their own franchises.
Most recently, Shabalala has set up a King Pie outlet in Durban without outside funding and, as always, he is still looking for new opportunities.
In his typical open-ended style, he cannot say exactly the direction in which his business will grow, but what he does know is that he still hasn’t achieved his goals for profitability and job creation.
He does have a clear figure in mind and is determined to achieve it.