Ganief and Kariema Price know that ‘business as usual’ can get you left behind by the competition. The co-founders of Pyramid Electrical Contractors exploited a gap in the market to diversify their offering and, in doing so, secured a unique differentiator for their company.
“Our core business was electrical maintenance and we serviced national departments and government buildings. Typically, we’d do repairs to underground cable faults or where there had been cable theft, but we’d need to wait for someone else to locate the fault first, and then afterwards we’d need to wait for a different service provider to do a diagnostic to determine that the fault had been fixed,” explains Kariema.
Market research revealed that there were no companies in the Western Cape offering a fully integrated holistic service that covered all aspects of the job. “We realised that if we did it all ourselves, we could take end-to-end responsibility for the full job, and set ourselves apart from our competitors,” she says. In 2009, the company invested in technology which enabled it to add cable detection, fault location and diagnostic services to its offering.
Kariema outlines the benefits: “For a small company, it was a considerable investment of R500 000 and although it took some time to pay dividends, in the long-run it has given us the edge in what was becoming an extremely competitive market space.”