Six Hundred Ladders and the Bank Manager Who Liked Me but Said No

Aluminium and Patience

My father made ladders. That is not a sentence many people can say, and I used to be embarrassed by it at school, when other children's fathers were teachers or policemen or worked at the mine. Mine worked in a corrugated iron workshop behind our house in Seshego, cutting aluminium and riveting rungs, and selling ladders to builders, painters and anyone else in Polokwane who needed to get onto a roof.

I started helping him when I was eleven, holding the long rails steady while he drilled. When he died in 2017 I took over the workshop. By then I had a diploma in mechanical engineering, a wife, two daughters and absolutely no idea how to run a business, which I learned the hard way, one month at a time.

Building It Slowly

For the first five years we did what my father did, only a bit better. We bought a second-hand press brake. We added fibreglass ladders, which electricians need because aluminium conducts. We started doing platform ladders for warehouses and step units for shops. I employed four people, including my cousin Tumi, who can rivet faster than anyone I have ever met.

We were never rich. We were steady. The bank knew us, the suppliers in Gauteng knew us, and my wife Dikeledi kept the books on a laptop at the kitchen table, muttering at the screen in Sepedi when the numbers did not behave.

The Email

In February last year, I got an email I nearly deleted because I thought it was spam. A telecoms infrastructure contractor wanted a quote for six hundred fibreglass extension ladders, certified, for their technicians across Limpopo and Mpumalanga. Their usual supplier had let them down. Somebody in their procurement office had seen our ladders on a site in Tzaneen and asked who made them.

Six hundred. We usually made about forty a month.

I printed the email and took it home and put it on the kitchen table in front of Dikeledi without saying anything. She read it twice and then looked at me over her glasses and said, "Can we do it?"

I said yes. What I meant was, I do not know.

Working Out the Numbers

We spent a week on the quote. Tumi and I worked out how many we could make per week if we added a second shift. I phoned my fibreglass supplier, who could supply the volume but wanted half the money upfront because it was so far above our usual orders. The rungs, the rivets, the feet, the labels, the certification testing for each batch. I added it all up on a scrap of paper at two in the morning and then I added it up again on the laptop and got the same answer, which frightened me even more.

To fulfil that order, I needed to pay out for materials and extra wages long before the contractor paid me. Their terms were sixty days after delivery. My supplier wanted money in fourteen. The gap between those two dates was bigger than anything we had ever had in the bank.

We sent the quote anyway. I told myself we would cross that bridge if we got there.

Getting There

We got there. The purchase order came through in March, official, signed, with a delivery schedule in four batches. I stood in the workshop and read it out loud to Tumi and the others, and Tumi danced a little dance with a rivet gun, and I smiled and clapped and felt sick.

I had a piece of paper that said a reputable company would pay us a lot of money. I did not have the money to make the thing they were paying for.

The Bank Manager

I went to see our bank manager the following week. I have known her for years. She once came to the workshop to buy a ladder for her mother's house and stayed for tea. She liked me. I think she still likes me.

She read the purchase order and nodded and said it was a wonderful opportunity. Then she looked at our statements, our overdraft, our size and the fact that I had never borrowed anything like this amount before, and she explained, very kindly, that the bank could not extend us that much credit on the strength of one order. She said she was sorry. I believe she was.

I sat in my bakkie in the bank car park for twenty minutes afterward. I thought about my father, who never borrowed from anyone, and who used to say that a man should never promise more ladders than he has aluminium. I had done exactly that.

Dikeledi Finds a Word

That night Dikeledi did what she always does when I am panicking. She opened the laptop. She is better at searching for things than I am, because she reads the whole page instead of just the headline.

After about an hour she turned the screen around and pointed at a phrase I had never heard of. Purchase Order Funding. She explained what she had read: that there are lenders who look at the order itself, and at the strength of the customer who placed it, rather than only at the size of the small business that won it. The idea was that a funder would help cover the cost of suppliers to get the order made, and would be repaid when the customer paid.

I did not trust it at first. In my experience, when something sounds like it was made exactly for your problem, there is usually a catch hiding somewhere in small print.

Reading the Small Print

So we read the small print. A lot of it. We spent most of a week reading about Purchase Order financing, what it cost, and how it differed from an ordinary loan. Dikeledi made a list of questions in a school exercise book. What are the fees, exactly, and when are they charged? Who pays the supplier? What happens if the customer pays late? What happens if we deliver a batch late? What do you need from us?

We spoke to more than one of the Purchase Order Funding Companies we found. Some did not want to know us because the order was too small for them. Some were vague about their fees, and we crossed them off. Dikeledi has a rule that if someone cannot explain their costs to her in plain language on the first phone call, she does not take the second phone call.

What I learned was that it was not free money and it was not magic. It cost us a real share of our margin on that order. But the alternative was not a better deal. The alternative was phoning the contractor and telling them we could not do it, and watching six hundred ladders go to someone else, possibly forever.

The Second Shift

We took it. My fibreglass supplier was paid on time and the material arrived in April. I hired three more people, two of them young men from our street who had been looking for work for over a year. We ran a second shift. Tumi taught the new ones to rivet, swearing at them affectionately the whole time, the same way my father once swore at me.

There were problems. A batch of rungs came in slightly out of spec and had to be sent back. One of the certification tests failed on a single ladder and we had to rework the whole batch to be safe. I slept in the workshop office twice. Dikeledi brought me pap and chakalaka in a lunchbox like I was in Grade 3.

We delivered the last batch in July, four days ahead of schedule.

What Is Different Now

The contractor has ordered from us twice since then, smaller orders that we could fund ourselves this time. Two of the three new workers are still with us. The bank manager came to the workshop in October to see the new extension we built, and she told me she was glad it worked out, and I believed that too.

I still think about my father's line, about never promising more ladders than you have aluminium. I think he was right for his time. But I have added a line of my own, which I wrote on the whiteboard in the workshop where everyone can see it: the order is the aluminium, if you know how to use it.

Tumi says it does not make sense. Dikeledi says it makes perfect sense. I think the truth is somewhere in between, which is where most things in a small business live.