The Shaka Residence of the Tshwane University of Technology is a remarkable residence. The complex of a dozen bright buildings rises above the countless rows of houses in Soshanguve. Set among sports fields and manicured lawns, it provides students with fully furnished rooms, unlimited Wi-Fi, a fully equipped gym, and 24-hour security. But the most remarkable thing about Shaka Residence is the entrepreneur who built it. While the 700 students housed in Shaka Residence are studying towards their various degrees, Tshepo Letjane, the owner of the complex, will also be writing an exam at the end of this year – the last three subjects that he needs to complete his matric.
At 47, Tshepo employs more than 1 500 workers in a security company, a holiday-resort business, and a property development firm. Given Tshepo’s background, any one of the three businesses is an astounding achievement on its own, but the fact that he ended up providing accommodation for university students is particularly touching. Tshepo grew up without any schooling and spent stretches of his life homeless.
He was born in 1976 on a farm near Lydenburg, 50km from the nearest school. His single mom did not have the means to get him to school, and in those days the farmer had neither the legal obligation nor the inclination to facilitate the education of the children living on his farm.
As a child labourer, Tshepo impressed the farmer who told him that he would make foreman one day. But despite the isolation and illiteracy, Tshepo knew even then that he was not going to spend his life working for R250 a month.
Aged 16, he left the farm to live with his grandmother who always saw untapped potential in Tshepo, enrolled him in the local primary school and so the 17-year-old took his place in the classroom among small children. There were lots of jokes and nicknames like Grandfather, but the children and the teachers loved him, and intellectually he was quick. He tutored as much as he was taught and worked in the teachers’ gardens to supplement his grandmother’s inadequate pension grant.
Over the next few years, he quickly advanced to Standard 8 (today’s grade 10), and excelled academically, but his grandmother had succumbed to alcoholism, lost their home and could not sustain him at school.
Homeless and desperate, Tshepo left school and found a job at a building site in Witbank. In a pattern that would recur many times in his career, he caught the eye of management and was promoted up the ranks. During a brief stint in the construction company’s warehouse, Tshepo exposed a large-scale stealing scam in the company and was threatened with death by the perpetrators if he stayed on at the company.
He fled to Gauteng where he spent the first few weeks sleeping in stormwater drainpipes while he looked for work. He washed taxis for a while until he walked into a large furniture and appliance store in Tshwane to ask for a job. There were no vacancies, but at his insistence they agreed to take him on as a volunteer worker so that he could learn. In between packing shelves and listening to the salesmen’s banter on the shop floor, he soaked up all the information he could about the products and appliances.
A few weeks later, one of the four salesmen went on leave and Tshepo stepped in to try his hand at selling. That month, he sold more than all the other salesmen combined, caused a stir that caught the attention of the head office, and was immediately employed. Tshepo found that his innate sociability that had always stood him in good stead wherever he went, turned into a raw superpower in a sales setting. It also helped that his background, for all its deprivations, had equipped him with fluency in all the main regional languages.
His whole life changed. He rose all the way up to national sales manager. Soon he was headhunted into the auto industry where he continued to excel at sales. What did not change was his hunger. Rather than slowly getting used to the trappings of corporate life, he started dreaming of working for himself.
In 2006 he started his own security company with sixteen guards after convincing a Witbank housing project to give him a small contract. Tshepo says starting his business was like “being a mother with a newborn”. The work never ceased as he scrambled to do everything from cleaning the office to Human Resources and admin himself. But his baby grew, and within a few years he had more than 1 000 security guards.
The growth of the construction and property development company that he started with an eye at the World Cup in 2010 followed the same steep curve, and by 2018 the land where Shaka Residence now stands was just one of several in his growing portfolio. He had bought it for a residential development, but changed the plan to student accommodation when he became aware of a massive shortfall of up to 15 000 beds for students just in Soshanguve.
Tshepo approached Business Partners Limited for top-up finance to finish the last stages of the Shaka development, and to furnish the complex. He says unlike the banks, Business Partners Ltd is “accessible, fast and easy to deal with, and the tailor the finance to suit the business”.
“Nowadays I am unemployed again,” jokes Tshepo. He has worked hard at building a management structure for his businesses “so that I can just come in and make a noise when there is a problem”. This gives him time to work on the vision for his next ventures, which includes many more student residences – and for doing some studying himself.
KEYWORDS: Shaka residence, Tshwane University of Technology Tshepo Letjane, student accommodation, property development, construction, how to start a student accommodation business, funding a student accommodation business, Soshanguve
About the Author: BPL Admin
