Become A Surco Distributor In South Africa
Surco and The South African Portable Restroom Distributorship
According to the Real State of Entrepreneurship Survey of 2017, more than 50% of South African entrepreneurs are young (30 years old or less). The number of female entrepreneurs in this last year has risen significantly and the survey indicated that female representation shifted from 35% to 31% to 47% in the years 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively. In 2018, a change of guard in the nation’s ruling party represents new hope for stable economic growth and improved confidence.
An effective Surco distributorship can specifically meet and surpass the top five challenges facing South African entrepreneurs today, which are in order of importance: finding clients or customers; the inability to raise funds; lack of guidance; wearing too many hats and slow or lost sales. Surco’s primary goal of building lasting relationships with all their distributors guarantees guidance and a helping hand when difficulties arise. They have been dealing with what to do when problems occur since 1946, and even though times have changed, the basic issues associated with successful distributorships have not.
In addition, the advantages to a Surco distributorship include: low maintenance and start-up costs, high profit margins and no special licensing requirement. Finding clients initially will require some research time, but once a customer base is established, Surco’s odor control products are a soft sell, as they are the best and most effective found anywhere in the portable sanitation industry.
The Portable Toilet Industry in South Africa
It was 1982 when the very first portable toilet and sanitation company opened in South Africa, but today there are other companies. Despite their growth and evolution, proper sanitation remains one of the most pressing challenges facing many South Africans.
One of the biggest problems is the frequent unavailability of waste disposal sites especially in the small rural towns. These chemical toilets are not connected to a sewage system but instead store waste in small tanks that use sub-standard chemicals to control the odor until they can be emptied. Originally designed for short-term solutions such as construction sites or festival grounds, they are permanent fixtures, accounting for more than 75 percent of the bathroom facilities available in some parts of crowded South African cities like Capetown. The need for more quality portable toilets and better eco-conscious odor controlling products to keep them clean and healthy is urgent and ongoing.
It is estimated that five to 20 households, many of them large and multi-generational, share each toilet. The odor is horrendous, and basic human dignity impossible to maintain when using these facilities, which are also often haphazardly and dangerously situated in dimly lit, high crime areas. If placed too close to living spaces, there is a risk of contamination and infection; if too far away, their remoteness make residents fearful of muggings, rape and even murder in some instances.
According to the public interest lobby group, Section 27, as many as 80% of schools in Limpopo (a province bordering Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique) use basic pit-latrine toilets. This fact alone represents serious threats to human health, proper education, privacy and personal dignity. In this region, a recent, much publicized incident occurred involving a grade school pupil who jumped to his death into a school pit-latrine.
Although the need for more portable toilet manufacturers in South Africa is much greater than in other areas of the world, things are slowly beginning to change and a well-informed entrepreneur offering the best odor and disease-fighting products for portable restrooms in the world can still gain a profitable foothold and secure reputation among portable toilet companies who always need reliable products that work well for the facilities they maintain.
A Short History of South Africa By Way Of Privies
The name, South Africa, derives from the nation’s geographic location at the southern tip of the African continent. Home to the oldest known indications of human life on earth, it is considered to be possibly the birthplace of all civilization, dating back some 200,000 years. This places it long before the evolution of Egypt and Mesopotamia, whose cultures are about 6,000 years old.
The recent discovery of the complex ruins of an ancient walled city in southern Africa by researchers/explorers, Michael Tellinger and Johann Heine, may well rewrite ancient history. The symbol or Anka of an Egyptian god found on one of the city’s walls strongly suggests that ancient Egyptians inherited their beliefs from this mysterious southern African culture. According to Tellinger: “The photographs, artifacts and evidence we accumulated, point towards a lost civilization that has never before been and precedes all others- not for a few hundred years, or a few thousand years … but many thousands of years.”
These very early nomadic San or Basarwa people that European colonizers called Bushmen, were skilled hunters and gatherers who had great respect for the land. Their lifestyles left little traces of their culture except for a string of prominent rock paintings. As a primitive population, they found shelter in natural rock formations, cooked food over fire in pits they dug into the ground. They also built other pits that served as makeshift privies.
South Africa became the Union of South Africa upon formation of the country in 1961. The name reflects its origin from the unification of four formerly separate British colonies. These included: the Cape of Good Hope Province (Cape Province; previously Cape Colony), Natal Province (Natal Colony), the Orange Free State Province (Oranje Vrij Staat/Orange River Colony) and the Transvaal Province (Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek/Transvaal Colony). After adopting a new constitution, the name was changed once again to the Republic of South Africa.
South Africa is considered to be the cradle of the mining industry, but in some ways it remains a diamond in the rough. Polishing may take time, energy and hard work but in the end, business opportunities, such as distributorships like those offered by Surco, can not only be lucrative, but can also greatly improve the lives and health of many South Africans in certain areas of the country. Even though cities like Johannesburg are modern and highly developed, rural areas have lagged behind and still have far to go.
Still, the stars are shining brightly for South African distributorships in general and even brighter for the distributors of Surco and our superior odor-control products. Send us an inquiry and get started today!