Ingenuity has jumped to the front of the queue as a quality that best defines today’s entrepreneurs. Gone are the days when one could only start a business for which one had skills – as business gurus constantly remind us.

If we were to go by the same yardstick, then Nthabiseng Mlumbi, owner of Ubuhle Besizwe Services, would have no business milling around construction sites, in full workman’s clothes, safety boots and a hard hat and all.

As a former education specialist, it goes, therefore, that you would expect someone in those shoes to be running a service-orientated enterprise.

Well, that is the way she started off. After leaving teaching in 2005, she registered a facilitation company that specialised in human resources management. In between, however, Mlumbi dabbled in fashion and registered a construction company.

Then came a eurka moment that would change her entrepreneurial course forever.

After attending a construction seminar on the theme “Levelling the Playing Ground”, Mlumbi went away feeling like a winner and instinctively knew that this was what she wanted to do.

This is precisely the kind of thinking that Allon Raiz, founder of incubator Raizcorp, encourages in his book Lose the Business Plan – What they don’t teach you about being an entrepreneur, in which he calls on entrepreneurs to become unconventional in their approach.

In his view, business success has very little to do with technical know-how of your enterprise, but more with an attitude toward risk and a desire to excel.

These are merely some of the lessons Mlumbi applied unwittingly, or otherwise, when she ditched the relative comfort of a classroom for the dusty outdoors of a construction site.

In making such a transition, she ensured full compliance with industry regulations as a top priority. To this day, she repeatedly pats her back for having seen to this earlier on.

After complying with regulations governing construction ventures, Mlumbi sought to teach herself everything there was to know about this field. She spent three years on site, gaining inside knowledge about what goes into mixing cement and digging foundations, among many other things.

Everything she knows today, she learnt by getting her hands dirty – from laying bricks to plastering or wiring.

So much so that she now speaks the construction language with the conviction of a seasoned professional.

“I can quite easily read construction plans, detect a fault in the wall and point out the right way to hammer a nail into a panel,” she reveals.

Mlumbi’s expertise extends to building foundations, superstructures, roofing, plumbing, tubing and painting. This mother of two has adapted quickly from clutching chalk to pushing cement-laden wheelbarrows – come rain or shine.

Partnered by her brother at inception, her first project was on the N2 Gateway Complex in Delft, Cape Town, where her firm was sub-contracted by Trans-Gariep under the Ibuyile Consortium.

Today, Ubuhle Besizwe Services has morphed into a sizeable construction firm, one of the few women-owned and -managed in the Western Cape province.

It builds houses from foundation phase upward and boasts 34 staff members on its books, all employed on a contract-to-contract basis.

The company’s résumé includes construction of 22 factory units in Strand, 200 First National Bank houses and the Mandalay Community Hall in Khayelitsha. In addition, it was recently involved in building 110 houses in Cape Town, in partnership with Power Construction.

But the firm’s proudest moment ever was its involvement in Level Five of Cape Town Stadium construction in 2009. This culminated in Ubuhle Besizwe Services receiving the Construction Woman of the Year Award. It is an annual competition run by the Department of Public Works, which seeks to reward women making strides in this sector.

While very few people are prepared to leave the comfort of a salaried job, to gamble on a career in entrepreneurship, Mlumbi did just that.

“My passion for teaching had disappeared; in fact, I never intended to become a teacher in the first place, but an attorney,” she confides.

“Even then, after 14 years in the classroom, the passion had died; I found the job was no longer challenging and I wasn’t growing.

“It was a pleasure going into a completely unknown field; you simply have to believe in yourself,” adds Mlumbi, who was chairperson of Women in Construction for the period 2009–2010.

Despite her newly found passion for construction, she is reluctant to recommend other women to follow in her dusty footsteps.

“Occasionally, some women tend to pay scant attention to compliance with industry regulations. We as women do not seem to understand that compliance protects a contractor; when you comply, you sleep well at night,” Mlumbi explains.

“Most of us women do not focus on the nitty-gritty of the construction industry, opting to multitask aimlessly by juggling catering and construction pursuits.

“There are have been instances where a woman has left a construction site to devote time to a catering business. Such lack of focus creates chaos on site – a practice that sullies the reputation of women in the industry – and this then leads to our being labelled failures,” she adds.

“Women contractors need to note that flour and cement do not mix. This industry is primarily not for women – better still, not for faint-hearted women due to its male dominance.

“For us to be taken seriously as women, we need to focus in order to be successful; remember: construction is a profession,” Mlumbi admonishes.

With the construction industry experiencing a downturn, which has gripped even bigger players such as Murray & Roberts, Mlumbi’s frustrations are compounded by the fact she is still considered an emerging contractor, not a fully fledged developer yet. It means important jobs fly past her door to land in the lap of established firms.

It is a scenario that compels her to rely on the goodwill of firms such as Power Construction, which has engaged her company as a sub-contractor on the Kuils River social housing project in Cape Town.

“Fewer women-owned construction firms get government tenders in the Western Cape, in comparison with, say, KwaZulu-Natal or Limpopo. It has nothing to do with regional politics, but rather hardened attitudes by male officials who doubt the ability of women contractors to deliver mass volumes and highest standards of workmanship,” Mlumbi laments.

She remains baffled that despite Ubuhle Besizwe Services’ full compliance to industry norms and standards, she has to survive on sub-contracting, yet there are entities that are not compliant, but continue to get tenders.

Another sore point is what Mlumbi refers to as “blocking”, in reference to a practice by which established firms ‘ring-fence’ opportunities for themselves, thus keeping emerging developers out of the loop.

When BBQ pointed out that clients would naturally not want to award a large tender to an inexperienced small, medium or micro enterprise (SMME), she deflected that with typical irony: “But what about the provision for such firms to allocate 30% of their resources to enterprise development, from which people like myself could benefit in the form of training opportunities for staff and management courses, et cetera?”

Buhle Besizwe Services is registered with different construction bodies including the Construction Industry Development Board (cidb), National Home Builders Registration Council, Building Industry Bargaining Council and the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act, in addition to complying with Health and Safety regulations.

Mlumbi is adamant that entrenched male chauvinism on construction sites is a major concern. “The treatment of women on site is horrible,” she exclaims. “Often times, employees don’t exert themselves fully when a woman is wearing the foreman’s hat.”

This means she has to think on her feet, delegating more and empowering employees while providing leadership.

The Department of Public Works does not escape censure for not doing enough to help women contractors. There is no flow of business from the department, either. All it excels at is hosting workshops all-year round, but extends no contracts to women developers, according to Mlumbi.

There are limited opportunities for SMMEs in construction; and were it not for sub-contracting from Power Construction and benefiting from cidb programmes, her business would be starved of work.

This competitive environment means that Mlumbi’s company has sub-contracted since inception, picking on cheaper quotes all along.

The norm in the industry is for the Department of Public Works and the City of Cape Town to consider lower quotes in the bidding process.

Her focus now rests on the National Women’s Build pilot project that was earmarked for launch in 2010.

“It’s inconceivable that the much-publicised People’s Housing Process (PHP) hasn’t taken off yet; this is extremely frustrating for women-owned companies involved,” Mlumbi says.

“The Department of Public Works has a good recipe for emerging contractors to fail,” she adds sarcastically. “It doesn’t make the playing ground level for women.”

However, Mlumbi reckons her company is starting out on the right footing, in spite of the fact that most construction projects in the Western Cape go to big or established construction companies.

While many people are hindered by a lack of seed capital, she funded her enterprise.

“But it’s different, now that a Department of Human Settlements contract for the PHP pilot scheme entitles one to easier access to finance,” Mlumbi confides.

Formation of WIBEN

To counter perennial problems that women entrepreneurs face daily, she has founded the Women In Business Empowerment Network (WIBEN), the objectives of which are to:

• assist, uplift and empower the underprivileged and previously disadvantaged women community;
• provide networking opportunities for businesswomen;
• provide motivational support structures and activities for women to support their families;
• provide support services for Aids victims, elderly and homeless or needy people;
• adopt orphanage homes or schools;
• raise the profile and awareness of the needy in the Western Cape in particular and South Africa in general;
• support and represent the membership;
• promote and provide personal development courses; and
• be an umbrella body of other organisations in the Western Cape.

WIBEN launches on 30 July at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

David Mwanambuyu