1 July 2022 marks 3 completed years in business for Glass & Aluminium Installations (GAI). What a special day!
The early days were marked with darkness (unrelated to Eskom) and uncertainty, but as we celebrate our 3rd anniversary, we feel grateful, content, and hopeful. We have our eyes trained on the future and believe that we will be able to continue serving our staff and clients well.
Just like welcoming a new human baby into a family, starting, and growing this business was not easy, but it was beautiful.
On 1 July 2019 Lourens van Niekerk and Jason Felton took a leap of faith and started Glass & Aluminium Installations (GAI). It was really a leap to survival, with a good helping of determination mixed in. GAI was born out of the ashes of another business. The new business was able to offer some of the existing staff and most of the client base a new home; and the team began their brave attempt to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. During the 2nd half of 2019, GAI steadily built a project portfolio with old and new clients trickling in. There was hope for this new business, but also plenty of doubts.
Just when it looked as if there was more hope than doubt, the devastating Covid-19 virus rolled around to keep us humble. March 2020 changed and challenged everything that we thought we knew or understood. The nationwide lockdown ground business to a halt, which instilled fear and trepidation. Like everybody (especially those with brand new small businesses) we and our staff were paralyzed with apprehension.
Many nights were spent fighting the daemons of worry, doubt, fear for the team, fear for the future, guilt towards the clients, etc. By faith and through grace we were just able to survive the hard lockdown, and the moment we were able to we regrouped and put in a collective effort to survive. And that is all it was – a fight for survival. Every day and with lots of sacrifice and support from everybody. We were and remain blessed beyond our expectations.
When we hit our second anniversary, we knew and started to believe that we needed to and could continue to grow the business and our project portfolio. We worked on a few big projects, which definitely gave us as many headaches as it gave us hope. We are always grateful for the work and proud of the quality that we deliver. Some of our bigger projects for the year included Workshop 17, Blueberry Square Shopping center and Norman Goodfellows. Those together with the many cashflow projects brought us to our 3rd anniversary.
Through our 3rd year of business, we faced a few hiccups but we like facing challenges head-on and every member of the team (family) worked through them with the same tenacious Phoenix-spirit that kept us fighting in the early days. We are grateful that the projects continue to come in and that there isn’t one day that our installation teams and factory isn’t busy.
We held an early anniversary celebration on Saturday, the 18th of June. Our staff was greeted with cupcakes for breakfast {not our definition of a healthy diet 😊, but rather a prophecy that we will be able to have our cake and eat it} which was served on our brand-new Hyundai truck. We are grateful to have been able to secure financing. The team was pleasantly and thoroughly surprised. Lourens gave a short speech honoring the 3 years of hard work, dedication, long nights, actual blood and sweat and even some tears, that the team has given to the business. As much as this was a celebration of the GAI family, it is also a nod to the extended families of our team. We are not blind to the sacrifices that each person had to make over the past 3 years.
Happy birthday GAI! We are so proud of the last 3 years of service delivery and so grateful to every team member and client who have kept us going. And to quote Lourens “Here’s to the next 3, and the next 10 and on and on!”