The Drum I Could Not Afford to Fill

The Tuesday it landed

I was standing at the mixing tank with a plastic paddle in one hand and my phone in the other when the email came through. My hands smelled of pine, the way they always do by ten in the morning, because we had been decanting floor polish into twenty five litre drums since seven. My phone buzzed against the steel of the tank. I nearly ignored it. We get a lot of emails at Kefiloe Chemicals, most of them from suppliers wanting money or people wanting samples they never buy.

But the subject line had the name of a mining group on it, a big one, the kind whose logo you see on the sides of trucks on the N12. I wiped my hand on my overall and opened it.

They wanted a supply contract. Detergent, industrial degreaser, heavy duty disinfectant, and the pine floor polish that had somehow become our small claim to fame in Isando. Not a once off order. A standing order, month after month, enough to keep their change houses and workshops and canteens clean across three sites. They needed the first delivery to be large, a build up of stock so the sites would never run dry, and then steady replenishment after that.

I read it three times. Then I put the paddle down on the lid of the tank, walked out into the yard between our unit and the one next door where a man fixes forklifts, and I stood in the winter sun and I cried a little bit. Not sad crying. The other kind, the kind that comes when something you have wanted for eleven years is suddenly sitting in your inbox and you do not quite believe it is real.

What eleven years looks like

I started Kefiloe Chemicals from my mother's garage in Katlehong. I named it after my grandmother. In the beginning it was me and a second hand drum and a recipe for a general purpose cleaner that a chemist I used to work for had taught me, back when I was doing his admin and watching everything he did over his shoulder because I was too curious to only answer his phone.

I sold to spaza shops first. Then to a car wash. Then to a cleaning company in Alberton that took forty drums a month and taught me what it feels like to actually run out of stock because you cannot keep up. We moved into the unit on the industrial estate four years ago. It is not fancy. The roof leaks in one corner when the summer storms come and we put a bucket there and nobody thinks about it anymore. But it is ours, or at least the rent is ours to pay, and there is a little office with a kettle and a heater and a picture of my grandmother on the wall.

By the time that email came, there were six of us. Me, and Thabo who does the mixing and knows the disinfectant formula better than I do now, and Portia who runs the labels and the invoicing, and three others who load and clean and decant. Six people. Six families, really, if you count properly, because Thabo has his mother and two children and Portia is putting her younger brother through a diploma at the college in Kempton Park.

I do count properly. That is the thing nobody tells you about employing people. You do not employ a person. You employ everybody who eats because of that person.

The maths that kept me awake

So the mining contract was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. And within about a day, it became the most frightening.

Because here is how it works, and I did not fully understand it until I sat down with a pencil and my notebook at the kitchen table one night after everyone had gone home. To make that first big delivery, I needed to buy raw materials. Caustic soda. Surfactants. The fragrance and the colourant. Thousands of empty drums and the labels to go on them. The chemicals alone, for an order that size, ran into hundreds of thousands of rands. Money I would have to spend before I earned a single cent.

And then, once I delivered, the mine would pay me. In sixty days. Not on delivery. Not in thirty. Sixty days after the stock arrived at their sites, according to their supplier terms, which are not up for negotiation when you are a small operator in Isando and they are who they are.

Sixty days. I sat there and I did the sum again because I did not want it to be true. I had maybe a fifth of what I needed sitting in the business account. The rest I simply did not have. I could not buy the raw materials, so I could not make the product, so I could not deliver, so I could not invoice, so I could not get paid. And I could not get paid without first spending money I did not have. It was a circle, and I was standing inside it, and the walls were made of my own success.

I remember thinking, with a kind of sick clarity, that I might have to turn it down. The biggest order of my life. I might have to write back and say no, thank you, we cannot manage it. And the shame of that felt worse than staying small forever.

The nights I did not sleep

For about two weeks I did not sleep properly. My husband would find me at the kitchen table at half past one in the morning with the notebook and the calculator and a cold cup of rooibos.

I kept imagining Thabo's face. I had not told the staff yet, because I did not want to promise them something and then take it away. But I had already, in my head, started planning to take on two more people to handle the volume. I had already imagined telling them we had made it. And now I was imagining the other conversation, the one where I explained that we had won and lost at the same time, that the order was real but the money to make it was not.

I did what I always do when I cannot see the way through something. I phoned my old chemist boss, the one who taught me. He is retired now, lives in Benoni, grows tomatoes. I told him the whole thing, the mine, the sixty days, the money I did not have. He listened the way he always did, without interrupting, and then he said something that I have thought about many times since.

He said, you are treating this like a wall. It is not a wall. It is a gap. And gaps can be bridged.

I did not know what he meant. He said, go and find out about Purchase Order Funding. He said there are people whose whole business is bridging exactly the gap you are standing in. I wrote it down in the notebook under my terrible sums, and the next morning, instead of drafting a polite refusal to the mine, I started reading.

Learning there was a name for my problem

Here is the strange thing. For two weeks I had felt completely alone with this. As if I were the only person in the history of business who had ever been offered more than she could afford to make. And then I discovered that it is so common that there is a name for it, and there are companies that do nothing else.

The idea, once I understood it, was almost embarrassingly simple. When you have a confirmed order from a solid customer, a purchase order you can actually hold in your hand, that piece of paper has value. It is a promise from a serious buyer. And the funder looks at that promise, and at who is making it, and pays your suppliers so you can buy the raw materials and make the goods. You deliver. Your customer pays. The funding gets settled out of that payment, and what remains is yours. The mine's sixty days stops being my problem and becomes something the arrangement was built to carry.

I spent an evening reading about how Purchase Order financing actually works in practice, and what surprised me most was that it was not about my history or my little bit of collateral or the leak in the roof. It was about the strength of the order itself. For once, the size of the thing that had terrified me was the very thing working in my favour. A big order from a mining group was not my weakness. It was the asset.

I am not going to pretend I understood every detail the first time. I made a lot of notes. I asked a lot of questions that were probably obvious. But somewhere in that reading, the panic started to loosen its grip on my chest, because for the first time the sum came out differently. The gap could be bridged. My old boss was right.

Telling the staff

I called everyone together on a Friday afternoon, once I knew the funding would come through and I had signed what needed signing. We stood around the mixing tank, the six of us, and I told them about the mine. I watched it land on their faces the way it had landed on mine on that Tuesday.

Thabo did not say anything for a moment. Then he asked, quietly, how many drums. And I told him the number, and he laughed, this big surprised laugh, and he said we are going to need more space, and I said yes, we are, and we both stood there grinning like fools.

I did not go into all the detail about the financing. I said that we had found a way to buy everything we needed up front, and that the money side was handled, and that they should not worry about it. What I did not say, because it felt too big to say out loud in the middle of a working afternoon, was how close I had come to letting it go. How the not-sleeping and the kitchen table and the cold rooibos had nearly cost all of us this thing. I have since learned that plenty of small manufacturers reach exactly this point and quietly walk away from orders because they never find out that Purchase Order Funding Companies exist to carry them across, and I think about that a lot. About how many good businesses never grow simply because nobody told them the gap had a bridge.

What the yard looks like now

We took on the two extra people. There are eight of us now. Portia's brother finished his diploma and he comes in on Saturdays to help with the invoicing, and he is better with a spreadsheet than any of us. The corner of the roof still leaks and we still put the bucket there, because some things you keep just to remind yourself where you came from.

The mine has been paying, sixty days like clockwork, and each time the money comes in I feel a small echo of that first fear, and then it settles, because now I understand the shape of it. I am not afraid of a big order anymore. I am afraid of a small imagination, which is a different and much more manageable thing.

Last week another company phoned. A retail group this time, wanting our disinfectant for their stores. Bigger than the mine, actually. And when they told me the volume, and the payment terms, I did not go home and cry at the kitchen table. I picked up my pen, I wrote the numbers in the notebook under my grandmother's name, and I already knew exactly who to call.