Black Suppliers – the business of building emerging local contractors

Black Suppliers are at the forefront of training and equipping South Africa’s emerging contractors with the skills needed to build their own sustainable businesses

The South African construction industry is fickle and cyclical so contractors must keep up with trends for their businesses to be sustainable. This applies to big construction companies, but also to emerging and self-employed contractors.

Black Suppliers is a proudly South African company that assists emerging contractors gain skills. It was founded by Gerald Ndlovu to help emerging and self-employed contractors, mainly based in townships and semi-urban areas to gain skills, keep up with industry trends and build a network to grow their businesses at absolutely no cost to the contractors themselves.

“There are massive opportunities for emerging contractors since the inception of the Construction Industry Charter,” says Ndlovu. “This Charter states that any primary construction company appointed to a job has to put 30% of the budget aside to hire locally-based emerging contractors and skilled labour in the community where the job is taking place.” At the moment the biggest opportunities for these contractors are in the private property sector; and the maintenance and renovating of already completed buildings.

To ensure that emerging contractors are equipped with the right skills, Black Suppliers partners with large construction companies and suppliers within the industry to craft customised training programmes. In addition to completing accredited training programmes, these contractors are also put through an incubation process where they gain basic business skills, start to build networks and are exposed to the market. “We make sure that every contractor leaving our programmes has a job lined up and is introduced to appropriate established contractors needing skilled and vetted sub-contractors,” commented Ndlovu.

If you are an emerging contractor or an established construction company or supplier and would like to get involved with the training programmes or the Black Suppliers annual conference and exhibition, contact them on Tel: 011 534 8445 or [email protected].

Gerald Ndlovu has a postgraduate degree in Business Management and has worked for several blue-chip companies in operations and general management roles before venturing into entrepreneurship. He is passionate about people and development. His philosophy is “if the foundation is strong, the rest is easy.”