My Father Borrowed Money Once. I Spent Thirty Years Refusing To.

What a mashonisa took from my house

I was eleven when the men came for my father's things.

I want to be careful here, because I have told this story badly before, in a way that made my father sound like a fool. He was not a fool. He was a panelbeater in Kimberley with a good hand and a bad year, and in that bad year he borrowed six thousand rand from a man in the neighbourhood who lent money out of a house with a green gate.

I do not know the details. Children never do. What I know is what I saw, which is that for about two years my father, who was a big man, became small whenever a certain bakkie came down our street. He would stand differently. He would look at the gate. My mother stopped buying meat on a Thursday.

And then one Saturday two men came and took the compressor and the welder and my mother's fridge, and my father stood in the yard and let them, and did not say one word, and afterwards he went and sat in the shell of a car he had been fixing for a customer and he stayed there until dark.

I have never forgotten his face. Not the anger. There was no anger. It was worse than anger. It was a man watching himself get corrected.

That is the thing that got installed in me at eleven, and it took me until I was forty-six to understand that it had been installed wrong.

Thirty years of saying no

I started my business at twenty-nine out of the boot of a Tazz. Overalls, boots, gloves, hard hats, hi-vis. Nothing glamorous. I would drive out to farms and small workshops and I would sell a man six overalls out of my boot and he would pay me cash and I would drive to the next one.

By forty-six I had premises. Not big. A unit on the industrial side of town with a roller door and a little office in the corner where the kettle was, and four people, and a delivery vehicle with my name on the side, which I confess I sat and looked at for a while on the day it was signwritten.

And in seventeen years I had never borrowed one cent. Not one. No overdraft. No vehicle finance. That bakkie was bought cash after saving for two and a half years and driving something that embarrassed my children.

Everybody thought this was a virtue. My accountant thought it was a virtue. My pastor thought it was a virtue. People used to say to me, Dineo, you are so disciplined.

I was not disciplined. I was frightened. There is a difference and almost nobody can see it from the outside, because from the outside fear and discipline look exactly the same. They both look like a woman who does not spend money.

The Tuesday

The order came in on a Tuesday in August. Email. Attachment.

A contractor doing work for a mining group needed kitting out. Overalls, boots, the reflective, the lot, in quantities I had never seen on one document in my life. It was, I worked it out that night on the calculator at my kitchen table, about four times my biggest ever order. It was more than I had done in the previous nine months put together.

I read it about six times. Then I did something I am not proud of. I closed the laptop and went and made supper and did not tell anybody, not even my husband, for two days.

Because I knew immediately, with a kind of sick certainty, that I could not do it.

The maths is very simple and it is the cruellest maths in business. To fill that order I had to buy that stock. To buy that stock I needed roughly eight hundred thousand rand I did not have. And I would not see a cent from the contractor for sixty days, possibly ninety, because that is how these things work and everybody knows it and nobody says it out loud.

So there it was. The biggest thing that had ever happened to me, sitting in my inbox, and the only thing standing between me and it was a gap of sixty days. Not skill. Not capacity. Not relationships. Sixty days.

I had spent seventeen years becoming excellent at a business, and the thing that was going to stop me was a calendar.

The argument at the kitchen table

I told Thabo on the Thursday. He read it and he went very still and then he said, Dineo, this is it. This is the thing.

And I said, we cannot do it.

And he said, why.

And I could not answer. I sat there and I could not produce a single sentence, because every sentence available to me was about a compressor and a welder and a fridge going out of a gate in 1989.

Thabo is a patient man. He has been patient with me for twenty-four years. He waited. And eventually I said, out loud, for the first time in my adult life: I am not going to owe anybody. I am not going to be him in that yard.

And my husband, who is not a cruel man, said the cruellest and most necessary thing anybody has ever said to me. He said: your father is not in this room, Dineo. Your father has been dead for eleven years. It is only you in here, and a piece of paper from a mining contractor, and you are about to throw it away for a man who cannot see you do it.

I did not speak to him for a day and a half.

He was right. Obviously he was right. It took me thirty-six hours of ironing and cleaning things that were already clean to admit it.

Two in the morning, and a word I did not know

So I started reading. At two in the morning, at that same kitchen table, because I could not sleep.

And I discovered something that made me genuinely angry, which is that there is an entire category of finance built for precisely the situation I was in, and I had been in business for seventeen years and nobody had ever mentioned it to me. Not my accountant. Not my bank, who I had been with since I was twenty-nine. Nobody.

The thing is called Purchase Order Funding, and when I finally understood the shape of it I sat back in my chair in my dark kitchen and I said a word out loud that I will not write down.

Because it is not a loan against me. That was the thing that broke the whole 1989 spell. It is not somebody looking at my house and my bakkie and my father's face and deciding what they can take. It is somebody looking at the order. At the piece of paper from the contractor. The order is the thing that carries the weight.

Do you understand what that meant to a woman built out of what I am built out of? The risk was not sitting on my mother's fridge. The risk was sitting on the transaction.

I read until about four. Thabo came out at half five to make coffee and found me still there, and he did not say I told you so, which is why I am still married to him.

Learning to be a customer

I am not going to pretend the next part was smooth, because it was not, and I get irritated when people tell business stories where everything works.

I spoke to a few different places. Some of them were not for me. One of them wanted things I was not prepared to give and I walked away and I am glad I did. The ones that seemed to know what they were doing all asked the same kinds of questions, which I eventually realised was a good sign rather than a bad one. They wanted to know about the contractor, not really about me. Who are they, have they paid before, is this order real, can your supplier actually deliver in time.

The most useful thing I learned, and I will say this to anybody in my position, is that the good Purchase Order Funding Companies will interrogate your buyer harder than they interrogate you, and that is exactly the point. If somebody is more interested in your house than in the order on the table, you are having the wrong conversation with the wrong kind of person, and I know that in my bones because I watched the other kind of conversation happen in my childhood yard.

I also learned that it costs money. It is not free. There is a cost and you have to put it into your pricing before you say yes to the order, not afterwards, and I very nearly made that mistake. I was so busy being emotional about the concept of borrowing that I almost forgot to be a businesswoman about the sums.

I sat with the numbers for a week. Not out of fear that time. Out of care. There is a difference, and by that point in my life it was the first time I had ever felt the second one.

We filled it

We filled the order.

I do not know how to describe the day the stock arrived. My unit could not hold it. It went up to the roof. My four staff and I and two of Thabo's nephews worked until nine at night for four nights checking, sorting, boxing, and my daughter, who was seventeen and generally horrified by everything I did, came and helped without being asked and did not once look at her phone.

At about eight on the third night I went outside for air and stood in the yard and looked back through the roller door at all of it, at my whole unit stacked to the ceiling with things I had bought with money that was not mine, and I felt something I can only describe as vertigo.

My father in the yard. Me in the yard. Same posture, thirty-four years apart, completely different reason.

The contractor paid on day seventy-two. Twelve days later than the sixty everybody promises. That is a whole other story and it did not surprise me at all.

What it actually did

That was three years ago. We have used Purchase Order financing twice more since, both times smaller, both times without the two in the morning theatre.

The business is roughly triple what it was. There are eleven of us now. That is not the point I want to end on though, because everybody ends on that and it is boring.

The point I want to end on is my daughter.

She is twenty now and she is studying and she has some idea about a business, and she talks about it at supper, and she is loud and wrong about a lot of it. And last month she said something about needing money for stock and I opened my mouth to say something and I stopped.

Because thirty years ago, a man in a yard in Kimberley let two men take his compressor, and the thing he handed me that day was not a lesson about debt. It was a lesson about shame. And I carried it, without ever examining it, right up until I was forty-six years old and nearly threw away the best thing that ever happened to me because of a fridge going out of a gate in 1989.

I am not passing that on. She can be frightened of things she has actually seen. She does not need to be frightened of mine.