Lately things have been going really well compared to the doom and gloom from the beginning of the year. This year has been all about the legal battles that were so unexpected not with is but with one of our clients and the implications of those have not made things very easy.
I will one day discuss this over a few posts because you would have no idea what we have been faced with besides being threatened personally and having drones used to spy on us along with corrupt police from us having to recruit mercenaries as body guards. I kid you not having these types of contacts is not what anyone expects as you just never know. Sounds like a block buster movie playing out in real life and this has not been fun times and thankfully the last appeal is being heard on the 5th November. This date is significant as it is Guy Fawkes day so maybe they will be blown up lol. I hope the judge does blow them away as we have won all our cases thus far with costs so this will hopefully be a formality. This has been a serious legal battle that has changed so many things and made me rethink what is important.
I have been concentrating on the packaging business for the last few months getting this back off the ground and running. This takes time like anything normally does where one client could take a few weeks or over a year to obtain their business. This week I am hoping to be on the final stretch landing a client I have been chasing since the middle of last year and expect this will take one more month. Prior to the lockdowns the packaging business was actually doing pretty well and due to a shortage of raw materials had no choice, but to moth ball this business.
The hardest part was walking away from clients I had spent years working on and it was more about not letting them down through false promises and hope. I did not want to ruin my good name in the industry as everyone knows each other. We did not shut for good and kept the factory in Durban ticking over with whatever raw materials we could get our hands on. The business is in a strong position now and it is time to flex our muscles.
Many other packaging manufacturers shut their doors for good and my business partner thought it would be a good idea to purchase some of the machinery. The bigger companies that succeed tend to grow and expand when there is a recession or downtrend in the market and once that period is over come out ahead of their competition.
With the price of fuel these days it has made us change our thinking and we now need a factory in Johannesburg. The transport costs are eating into the profits making our cost of product more expensive so we need to make those products in the region we are selling. Our prices are better than competitive so if we remove those transport costs we can start to dominate our competitors which is the plan.
The challenge now of course is to grow the customer base so the volume warrants a factory and why the pressure is now on. This is actually an exciting period knowing some time next year my son and I will be running a factory. The raw material issue is under control with imports via Dubai and India along with the one and only local supplier.
The local supplier reduced their pricing two weeks ago by 15%, but beggars belief they had zero stock available and is kind of expected. If there was a price increase I can assure you they will always have stock availability.
Learning new skills is always good news and have no clue how these extruding machines work and looking forward to doing this. The plan is still to move overseas when we have enough funds possibly to Portugal, but have also started to think more towards the US lately. Europe is not looking great with all the migrants and I need to think about my kids and grand kids and what type of future that may entail. They have lived a protected life thus far and I need to keep that going because they do not see the dangers I see with all of this.
The factory skills learned may be something that can be used setting up a similar factory elsewhere so who knows where this all ends up.