In April 2020, there was a night when my wife, my unborn child and I almost did not eat for twenty-four hours. That night, alone in the dark with a pregnant wife and nothing coming in, I prayed a prayer I have never told many people about. I asked God that if He did not have good plans for our lives, He should just take us all. That is where I was.
A few weeks later, my uncle called. He had office space. He wanted help with his spring suspension business. It sounded like a lifeline. It was. It just came with conditions I didn't fully see yet.
The Office
The office had not been used as an office in a very long time. There was dust on everything. Springs were piled everywhere. There were rats. I would not have been surprised to find a cobra in the corner. I cleaned the place from scratch. My uncle got the electricity reconnected on the first day. Oriental Springs Services did not exist online when I arrived. You could search the company name and find nothing.
Building From Zero
I registered the company on local directories, built a Google Business Profile — verified after four months of waiting for a PIN letter during COVID-19 — created social media accounts and built a website. I submitted the sitemap to Google Search Console. I studied every keyword in the spring suspension industry. Within months the calls were coming from mining companies, hotels, government entities, Chinese contractors, Indian-owned borehole drilling fleets.
I pushed my uncle to get tax clearance, PRAZ registration, a vendor number, corporate bank accounts. He resisted. I persisted. He got the documents. The contracts followed. I doubled the company's revenue within a year. During a pandemic.
The Cook
In the early days, the team took turns preparing lunch. Within a month, I was the only one still cooking. The digital marketer. The operations manager. The debt collector. And the cook. The twenty dollars a week arrived late, or not at all. I was always the last to be paid.
The night my wife went into labour my uncle gave me ten dollars toward hospital expenses. We were turned away from two clinics. A nurse mocked us. I called TJ. He came with a hundred dollars and a doctor's number. My daughter was born at 5am. We named her Makatendeka. I went back to work the next day. I kept cooking.
Then There Were Three
I built Superior Springs into the top three within two months of leaving Oriental. Two companies I had built, trading positions at the top of the same search results page. Then Africa Springs Zimbabwe — before I finished the website, they appeared in search results for the best spring suspension companies in Zimbabwe.
Search best spring suspension companies in Zimbabwe right now. Every result that comes up — I built those. All three of them. From a rat-infested office. On an empty stomach. As the last person to get paid. The work is still ranking. The business is struggling. And somewhere between those two facts is everything I have learned about the difference between visibility and sustainability.