Married to Susan, Ant has a 31 year old son who works in a bike company in England (a good fit given that he’s already got his Bok colours for mountain biking), and a 29 year old daughter in who’s in shoe designs and lives in Umdloti.
Ant’s working history started at Telkom where he spent thirty years as a project manager. But balancing budget, time and quality was not enough for him and for twenty of those years he was a regular at flea markets selling his hand-made woodwork. Oregon cottage furniture was very popular at the time and he made a lot of furniture using recycled timber bought from demolished buildings. The work at markets went well and in time he was eventually able to pay off his bond with the revenue that came in from it. And so, when given retrenchment from Telkom, he simply stepped into his new business the next day. That was eleven years ago and hasn’t looked back since. He now employs four staff and despite local competition is as busy as he could hope to be.
What Ant likes most about his work is the design element – he knows a number of pc-based programmes and is currently involved with a 3D drawing one that will help his clients get an accurate picture of what the end product will look like.
Dislikes? Not pleasing the customer 100%. Ant realises that the challenge is trying to capture the exact image that a client has in his mind, and then transfer that to a physical object – no easy task for anyone. And yet, so far he’s done it, with every customer thus far 100% satisfied.
And entertainment-wise – Ant is a mountain biker who makes the most of our superb forests.
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