Following fleet upgrades, extensive talent acquisition and a commitment to quality products and service, Scribante Concrete has solidified its position as one of the largest privately owned ready-mix concrete suppliers in South Africa.
In 2015, South Africa’s construction industry was feeling the pressure from an ailing economy and a global commodity price crash. Investment, demand and confidence slowed and after rising to 59 index points in the fourth quarter of 2014, the FNB/BER civil construction confidence index fell to 39 points in the first quarter of 2015. Stock prices for major JSE-listed construction companies dropped between 42% and 72% in that time and even the strongest among them, WBHO, deteriorated by about 15%. In 2016, some confidence has returned to the market, following big SONA announcements, and activity has improved but as we approach the end of the year, there are many companies that have found the economic situation, with a weak currency and potential credit downgrade, extremely challenging.
But at Port Elizabeth-based Scribante Concrete, Sales Director Eric Fouche says that a culture of hard work, offering quality products and service and a nimble approach to the market has meant that the company, one of the largest privately owned ready-mix concrete suppliers in the country, continues to thrive.
“The environment has been a lot more challenging,” he says, “there’s fewer projects around. We have a system that we use to track jobs through all the stages and we know about them two or three years in advance. That, along with our name and the type of plants that we have, enables us to become hunter gathers instead of farmers. We don’t sit and wait for crops for grow, we go out and find new work. We’ve seen a downward economic trend through construction and civils in the Eastern Cape in the last four years and so we moved into renewable energy. When renewable energy slowed, we moved into RDP housing. As that slows, we’ve moved into Sandton. That mentality keeps us on top when business gets tough.”
To stay in touch with demand in different regions, the company has a large and diverse fleet of more than 140 trucks and commercial and mobile plant. One of the most recent and exciting additions to the portfolio is a plant in Wynberg, Gauteng. The Wynberg plant will supply the Sandton region and surrounding projects.
“We had four mega mobile plants that moved around South Africa and to that we’ve added an additional four more minor mobiles to accommodate the more remote and smaller projects that are popping up around South Africa. This combined with our ever increasing ready-mix fleet increases our abilities.
“Sandton has been a fast growing project based area for many years and we believe it will give us a steady flow of work for at least the next 10 years,” says Fouche.
STRONG PRODUCTS
Scribante Concrete has experience in commercial, industrial, renewable, civil, residential and agricultural projects and has worked all over the country. It’s product range includes ready-mix concrete, retarded mortars, plaster, self-levelling concrete, flowable concrete, colour concrete, waterproof concrete, freezer room mix, piling concreteand pump mixes. Over the years, the reputation of the company has blossomed and this has been a result of both quality products and quality service.
“We focus on striving to deliver a quality product better than anyone else,” says Fouche.
Scribante Concrete’s availability around the country, and across border, is also part of its unique service offering.
“We have a commercial side to our business and a mobile side and they work hand-in-hand,” explains Fouche. “In areas where we are commercially set-up, we have static plants that supply to the commercial markets. Around that, we have many projects like renewable energy wind farms, shopping malls all over the country, or government projects and these require a mobile supply that isn’t effected by the challenges that a commercial plant might have. Our ability to set up and breakdown these plants quicker than most is also an advantage.”
The skills required to perform these complex tasks emanate from the company’s more than 350 employees who are carefully selected to fit into the special Scribante culture.
SOLID HISTORY
One of the elements incorporated in Scribante Concrete’s vision is to ‘build a positive team and family spirit’. Following 16 years of growth, this has been achieved. The company has created a culture where all employees are selected not only because they are highly-skilled, but also because they can be adaptable and communicate well. This is a business making the jump from medium to large enterprise and along with this comes a number of new challenges. Recruitment of management-level people has been essential in this transition.
“We do try to keep our staff compliment low to be efficient and we try and keep everyone involved in all facets of the business. We always joke within the company that our receptionist becomes the bookkeeper becomes HR becomes the Manager. Everyone is always moving up and if you come into our company, it’s likely that you’re destined for greater things,” explains Fouche.
“We only have a few directors in Scribante Concrete and previously we were all involved with all aspects of the business and could fill in for each other easily.
“We have had the biggest growth in staff at management level in the last five years. We have bought in a great amount of sales managers, area managers, operations managers, workshop managers and the like, that has filled the gaps that we had. The directors remain very hands on but now they have a fantastic team to support.
“An example is our Safety Manager, Martin Gray who has transformed our approach to health and safety to a much more corporate style. We are completely educating the workforce in safety principles and that’s vital because of the size of the projects that we are now working on and tendering for. Now there is extensive literature and a strong educational focus and it’s great for the safety our people.”
Many companies fail when it comes to smoothly moving from a less formal set-up to one where structures and systems are more rigid but at Scribante Concrete, the Directors are keen to keep the family feel on which the business has been built.
“Our mindset now and our mindset when the company was founded is different. We definitely found things challenging in the early days, but at the time we were only thinking about a small area – Port Elizabeth. As we grew into different areas, we found more and more opportunities and with every day that passes, we are reaching new heights. We have remained a business with a family feel and now we are looking to blend the corporate elements of business with that family feel because of the new challenges that we face. We have grown so much, and our reach is so widespread, that we need to bring corporate elements as our projects are growing and our employee base in growing. We certainly want to maintain a team culture where everyone can be heard.
“Our managers are empowered and can make the decisions that they would not be able to in other companies because of red tape. We try to use a corporate structure but understand that everyone is accountable for what they do and that lets us make decisions and find solutions quicker than most,” he says.
“When we recruit new people into our family, we find they are normally use to a very segmented way of thinking and operating in business, as this was the method used in their previous employment. The challenge is not with their abilities or knowledge but trying to integrate them into our way of thinking. We always talk about our ‘company language’. You can bring on the right people but it takes them time to learn the language. People who can adapt to our teams and learn our language quicker will always be successful here.”
Scribante Concrete, as part of the wider Scribante Construction Group, has the people, knowledge, skill and quality to thrive as it continues to grow. “The Scribante family has been operating for a long time in the construction industry. Our ready-mix division has been operating for 16 years,” says Fouche. Over the next five years, if the governments ambitious infrastructure plans come to fruition, the landscape in the construction industry will change and businesses that have positioned themselves correctly, like Scribante, will become the go-to brands of choice for contractors all over Southern Africa.