Some entrepreneurs are intensely focused on a single goal, others seem to have quite the opposite personality, scattering their attention across several businesses and even industries. It is not often that these two approaches are combined in one formidable entrepreneur, as it is in the case of Marcus Muleba.
Ever since reading a book on the South African property market while he was studying accounting, Marcus’s dream was to become a property mogul. It was an immense dream for Marcus, who was born in rural Limpopo in the mid-eighties. He was raised by his mother, a domestic servant, and his father, a manual worker, both of whom were often unemployed.
This month Marcus reached an important milestone on the road to his dream as the signage was put up at the entrance of his multi-million-rand residential development in Secunda which he named after his mom. Next to the graceful letters that spell “Lydia Estate” on the beautiful stainless-steel signage, her image is etched. Both his parents live in one of the estate’s units.
Even more interesting than this fairy tale chapter of his career is Marcus’s early struggles to make enough money to get into the property market – a wild series of projects that revealed Marcus’s remarkable chutzpah, taught him to overcome failure and honed his entrepreneurial skills.
As a child, Marcus was always hustling, selling his mom’s cookies in the village and sweets at school. He ended up taking accounting as a fallback subject after struggling with maths and science, says Marcus, but finance and accounting turned out to be a natural fit for him.
At the Tshwane University of Technology where he studied accounting, his goal of making it big in property solidified to such an extent that he left there with a clear plan – to work as an employee for five years only in order to gain experience and gather capital for his own future property business.
As it turned out, he got a job at the IT corporation EOH as a junior finance officer and worked there for exactly five years to the day. During that time he threw himself into a mind-boggling variety of ventures, many of which failed as income-generators, but taught invaluable business skills.
With steely determination, Marcus refused to be drawn into the comforts of a corporate career. He did buy a house based on his junior salary, but never stayed in it. He rented it out, and with the difference between the rental and the bond repayment he financed a car, but never drove it, deploying it rather as a taxi while he kept on using public transport.
He looked for business opportunities everywhere and went for them with his foot on the accelerator, never on the brakes. When he noticed that EOH often ordered metered taxis for their visitors (it was before ride-hailing apps) he positioned his taxis to provide the service.
When many expense claims for computer supplies for the company’s branch in Limpopo came past his desk he realised that there was no local supplier in Polokwane. With the help of a cousin, he promptly opened one – virtually – and marketed their services to EOH. When they got orders they sourced the supplies from Johannesburg but made sure that they were always delivered within 24 hours.
He supplied biltong to the EOH canteen, and he started his own hot-dog restaurant in a mall in Sunnyside, Pretoria.
Inevitably, most of these ventures came crashing down. Marcus says he was inexperienced and overstretched. The manager whom he had appointed at his mall hot-dog shop cooked the books, and Marcus simply did not have the time to manage him properly. He shut it down but ended up owing the mall R400 000 on the lease.
His taxis were not properly insured, and one was written off in an accident. His supplies to the EOH canteen ballooned to include vegetables, but the order was abruptly cancelled due to late delivery, and Marcus ended up with R7 000’s worth of vegetables. “I cried,” he says, but he also learned.
The one venture that did work was the computer supplies, which grew into a fully-fledged computer supply and installation company called Urban Technology. When Marcus completed his stint at EOH after exactly five years, he stepped full-time into the company that he had started as a sideline. Today, Urban Technology employs 68 people, including his manager at EOH at the time when he started.
Marcus never neglected his dream to become a property entrepreneur. In 2017 he finally had enough cash to try a small-scale development. He bought a property in Secunda, subdivided it, built six homes and sold them all. He repeated the success with a second small development project in Middelburg.
Scaling up, he bought a bigger piece of land in Secunda, but had to install services from scratch before he could start building. He ran out of cash, looked around for finance, but was rejected, including by Business Partners Limited who told him that he would have to develop the project a bit more before it fitted their risk profile. It took Marcus three years to build the first phase of twenty houses with his own cash. Business Partners Ltd was duly impressed by what he managed to achieve and agreed to finance phase two of the project for R16m.
Marcus says he soon realised that it was impossible to negotiate with the banks for finance. “It is like talking to a machine. You just can’t negotiate with the system.”
Business Partners Ltd on the other hand, try to understand the position of each entrepreneur. “You can negotiate with them. They are willing to look at what you are capable of, and they understand entrepreneurs,” he says.
Marcus has made several breakthroughs in the property business but is nowhere near done with building his portfolio. Apart from several property developments in the pipeline, he is working on a concept of building affordable hotels to South Africa’s townships. “Every weekend there are literally hundreds of events in any big township, with thousands of visitors, but nowhere for them to stay,” says Marcus.
It is a business opportunity waiting for an entrepreneur who knows how to work towards a long-term goal.
About the Author: BPL Admin
