Cape Talk

Actually, and then things changed. Managing a company like yours when things are not going so well, property prices aren't moving. And say, you know, in Gauteng, for example, in Joburg, property prices haven't moved for a very long time. Managing a company like yours during that time must be quite tough. I think there have been, you know, I think, like any entrepreneurial business, there have been many times when the business has not done well and has had very tough times. We, in two

We had a sort of bottom-draw plan. If the market dropped by what we thought would be a significant drop of 10 or 15%, we had a record month in March of that year. And in May of that year, the market dropped by 50%. And we were completely unprepared for that. And that has led to what has been a number of cycles, three that I can think of, where one needs to confront the reality of a market that has almost disappeared.

Cleared overnight, and where one needs to take action and, unfortunately, take hard decisions around personnel and go through the very, very painful situation in a family environment, in a family business of retrenching people. So it's certainly been a tough time in a number of years where the market goes down and where one has to take the right remedial action to deal with it. I mean, some companies.