Meanwhile, the company that George Halamandres built was facing setback upon setback.
“My brother’s death had really set my father back and he had lost all interest in everything. It fell to me to decide the next phase of the business,” says John.
There was a plan. As the sauces were doing very well and were the heart of the enterprise, they came up with the idea to package them for use at home. John says their accountant at the time, Leon Katz, who also supplied their rolls and bread, actually suggested it.
“To enter the retail market is quite complicated, and as we understood little of supermarkets and how they operated, we needed some help,” says John. He asked Joe Hamilton, the representative of the spice company Robertsons who dealt with the group, for advice. Joe immediately suggested that Robertsons could bottle the Steers commissary sauces for them.
But the next day Joe phoned and suggested an alternative: “Let’s do it ourselves.” He had trained as a chef in the United Kingdom and knew the required formulations. He also proposed that they should rather go for direct selling the Avon or Tupperware way, as Riviera Foods had made a lot of money with that model.
Up until then the central kitchen made its own mayonnaise, barbeque sauces and the like using Robertsons ingredients.
“As our products had needed no ‘shelf life’ up until then, Aubrey Parsons, a food technologist, helped us to meet the necessary preservation requirements,” says John. “We gave Joe a little stake in the wholesale manufacturing side of the business, bought a bottling machine and were ready to fly.”
As their kitchen was tied up with manufacturing sauces for Steers during the day, they had to pay the day staff extra to make the sauces for bottling at night. “I bottled, someone put the caps on and yet another person labelled the bottles. It was actually great fun,” remembers John.
He says the concept took off like a rocket.
“We had placed a little advertisement in local newspapers and had a huge response. Soon the turnover of the direct selling equalled that of the sauces for the franchises. Joe even left Robertsons to join us,” he says.
But the rapid growth came at a cost. “Everything was going like a Boeing . . . except that we weren’t getting paid,” remembers John. Their debtor’s book soon became uncontrollable and it was really difficult to reduce it.
“At one stage we had many lawyers working for us, and it was very unpleasant,” says Joe. The problem was that they supplied to approximately 500 individuals, who in turn sold the products to their friends and colleagues, and they weren’t getting paid by their clients, as they were selling on credit too. “We were owed a ton of money.”
In those early days it was a battle to get the sauces right, and sometimes the bottles would explode, says John. “Fanis used to call them bombs. We had huge problems with consistency.” Even though the recipes and Aubrey’s formulations were followed, Joe says that “to a large extent we muddled on ourselves”. He says it was a continual problem: “You could have sorted it out if you had vast resources and a laboratory at your disposal. You have to test everything from the raw material to the packaging to find out what is wrong, something Unilever can maybe do.”
The success of the sauces proved that they were onto something, but they were short of a new distribution plan. And for that they badly needed something to really put the Steers brand on the map. The sauce men didn’t have to wait for that phenomenon for long.
CHAPTER 9
A rebirth and two funerals
His brother was getting married, he hadn’t seen him for a long time, and a little bureaucratic hurdle such as a visa wasn’t going to get in his way. That, everyone will tell you, is just how Peter and Fanis’s brother, Periklis (Perry) Halamandaris, is. It was 1980, Fanis was getting married to Anita and he needed a best man in Johannesburg.
Perry had first applied for a South African visa a couple of years previously. Immediately after school he helped his father in his business, like Peter before him, but in 1972, at the age of 17, he wanted to join his eldest brother in Johannesburg, to avoid serving in the army. So when he didn’t get that visa, he went to Australia.
He got married, worked in a clothing factory for a while, then in a sweet factory, and after that he and a friend started to import arcade games from Taiwan. They had a deal with Colombia Films to set up in the forecourts of all their cinemas. “We were in all the movie houses,” Perry remembers.
But now Perry needed to fly to South Africa for his brother’s wedding and he hadn’t applied for a visa. At the airport he tried his luck with a long, sad story of not having seen his brother in a decade. With the intervention of the pilot, who didn’t want to hold up the plane any longer, the South African ambassador in Canberra eventually granted Perry a “telex visa”. Once on South African soil, the special visa caused confusion: The customs official had never seen such a thing. Her supervisor gave it one look and decided such a strange visa could only mean Perry was a member of the secret police, and granted the unwitting and enterprising traveller a multiple-entry diplomatic visa valid for 10 years.
While at Fanis’s wedding, Nicolaos Halamandaris urged his sons to join forces in business, and the three brothers decided that out of respect for him they would do just that. Perry was not happily married in Australia, got divorced and decided to immigrate to South Africa.
His plan was to sell arcade games again, but in the meantime Fanis wanted to visit Greece for three months and convinced Perry to take care of the takeaway outlet in Bellevue while he was away. The R4 000 in profits he was allowed to keep convinced Perry that this was the kind of business he liked.
He then decided to open a “Jamaica Foods” opposite the swimming pool in Raleigh Street in Yeoville. His uncle George wasn’t too happy about the idea, as he feared the Black Steer opposite King Edward VII was too close. The name and tropical trees had already been put on the walls when he and Fanis nevertheless decided: “Let’s call it Steers.” So they opened a diner with that name on 1 December, 1981.
At this time Fanis started feeling he wanted to spread his wings a little. With his new wife at the counter the turnover had already doubled “because she talked to the customers so much” and now he wanted to do more. He felt confined by his franchise agreement and told his uncle that he wanted to be in business for himself. Of course his uncle had to cut him down to size, he laughs. “He was right – it would have been unethical to do my own thing.”
But in June 1982 Fanis got the opportunity for growth he was looking for. He was approached to buy the troubled Burger Bonanza in the newly expanded Sandton City. The seller, who had bought the restaurant for his girlfriend, found that the larger outlet was too big for her to run.
Fanis and Perry decided to contact Peter in Greece, who wasn’t too happy with the political dispensation there anyway. Peter had been working in construction in Athens, first with a partner and then on his own. He says he didn’t make money and didn’t lose money either, but “Greece was dead”. He battled to get loan capital from the banks. Peter was glad to come back to South Africa, and had even brought his parents to see the country during his stay in Greece.
Together, Peter, Fanis and Perry forked out R102 000 for the Sandton outlet, which was “big money” at the time, Fanis recalls.
Once again their uncle had his doubts. He was worried that the nearby liquor store might attract unruly types and deter more affluent customers. “But we told him we don’t play cards or horses; we play business,” says Fanis.
“I lost 8kg from stressing during that first week of opening up,” he remembers. All the customers were going to the eight shops next to theirs, and not to that Steers takeaway. But slowly shoppers saw what was on offer. They started trickling in, and coming back. Within two months the eateries around them had closed down, and Steers was a roaring success, says Fanis. People were waiting outside as they opened the outlet, and at night it