Making a move in March

By Kim Browne

I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude recently. Having come to the end our financial year, with just a month away from our official 3^rd birthday as an independent, proudly South African hybrid marketing agency, I have an overwhelming feeling of appreciation.

After two years of investment, our target for fiscal 2013/14 was a break-even. We’ve made it!  Thank you again to our wonderful clients, suppliers and friends, without whom we could never have come this far. It’s been quite a journey and we know that we’re still at the very beginning.

Our imminent move to our new office this week is a birthday present to ourselves. We made the decision to move in March, just a month ago. As things unfolded, we knew it was the very best decision we could possibly have taken. The support from our clients has been overwhelming. We are truly grateful for this.

Readying our new office has been an expedition all of its own. Again, the constant learnings along the way have been enlightening.

Firstly, let me tell you our Telkom story. Now you expect something negative, right, because everyone moans about “Hellkom”. But we’ve had a really positive experience with Telkom. Let’s contextualise this. We had invested in fibre access in our current office, as fast internet and connectivity is the oxygen at The Toast.

This cost us a fortune every month and life before it was like living in the dark ages. As fibre is not an option at Mulberry Hill, we made the decision to contact Telkom. Outcome? Not only did we have the connection completely sorted in two weeks, we have much faster, stable connectivity at more than double the speed and at a quarter of the price. Win!

A second (reminder) learning is that if something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. We had a contractor come in and quote to remove the old wallpaper that was on our office walls. He wanted to charge us an absolute fortune to do this and take two weeks to complete the job. We decided to get a few additional quotes and landed up paying 1/6^th of the original quote and had the job done in two days.

We have now established a relationship with another entrepreneur named Gibson Ncube, who also paints and does other handyman tasks really well, who we’ll happily refer. Which is basically our third learning. There are great small business suppliers to be found if you care to look around a bit.

We found a signage expert in Otto Lange from Hojo Digital (referred to us from our client John Burnett), who has manufactured excellent building signage for both ourselves and our new neighbour company. They did it all on time and within an acceptable budget.

We also had fantastic service from Angela Harrop at Finishing Touches, who were responsible for replacing the old window blinds. Again, the quote was reasonable and the work excellent and on time.

The point of my ramble is that the building/renovations industry gets one heck of a lot of bad press and people are always telling you their horror stories. (I admit to have a few of my own.) But, in this space there are also great entrepreneurs going out of their way to make a difference, delivering excellent service at affordable prices. Often we forget to thank them.

Without these people doing these vital things for us, we would not have been able to make our move in March. But now we have.

See you there!

The origination of the phrase March Madness

There are two instances which show the originality of March madness. The first instance is a description of excitement surrounding the Illinois state high school basketball tournaments which appeared in print almost sixty years ago. The second instance is based on the wild frantic behaviour of hares during their mating season. Ask.com