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Meet the grime-busters

Deepika Davidar

It all began when Morne Kotze's father bought a bankrupt soap business. A South African businessman with a keen marketing instinct, the senior Kotze soon spotted the winner in the company's product portfolio. A cleaning formula tha t worked wonders on the grimy exteriors of buildings.

``Good paint should last for at least five years. But city grime and pollution cause buildings to look dirty and most people tend to repaint their buildings after two or three years. Actually, there's nothing wrong with the paint. Once we clean the building it looks like new again,'' explains the soft-spoken Morne Kotze.

The advantage is that you get a good-as-new building for a tenth of the cost of repainting.

Bangalore-based Capeclean Pvt. Ltd. is barely a year old in India but market interest is slowly perking up. ``The chemical we manufacture is unique, in that it reacts with dirt but not with paint. So the dirt comes off while the paint stays intact,'' explains Stephen Els. The product is also environment-friendly and completely bio-degradable.

Els and Kotze, co-directors of the company, have a confession to make. They actually intended to sell the formula in India as a multipurpose cleaning fluid. But a prospective client in Bangalore bluntly told them, ``I'm not interested in your liquid.'' Then he took them outside the building and asked, ``Can you clean the building?'' ``Yes,'' they replied and found themselves replicating the South African end of the business.

``It was a mad scramble to get hold of all the equipment that we needed,'' recalls Els. A local rock-climbing club came to the rescue with winches, ropes and hooks. Then came the brushes -- from long-handled, thick-bristled scouring ones to too thbrushes -- and buckets, hose pipes and motors.

Gathering a team was equally challenging. Through friends they contacted a few out-of-work painters and construction workers. ``We didn't realise that these guys were not comfortable with stepping outside their trade. Asking them to be cleaners had them puzzled. When they realised that we would be working alongside them, they thawed!''

The building they were to clean was Embassy Square located on one end of the busy Infantry Road. It would be an understatement to say they attracted attention. ``Well, it's not every day you see a white guy in shorts rappeling up and down a building with a scrubbing brush in hand,'' laughs Els. ``People would peer out of their cars and pedestrians would crane their necks to see what we were up to.''

Since then, Capeclean has tackled other buildings including a couple of projects in Chennai. ``The secret is in our chemical and technique,'' says Kotze. ``Using mountaineering methods, we manage to get to spots that other people cannot reach. P lus, over the years with different projects, we have got the know-how to deal with problem areas.'' Their technique also does away with the need for scaffolding. Els says, ``Scaffolding puts a building out of action. The way we work ensures that the life in and around the building is not inconvenienced.''

But while Kotze and Els are passionate about outdoor sports, neither is a mountaineer. ``I've climbed a building 40 metres high,'' says Kotze cheerfully, ``but never a mountain.'' Els, a professional deep-sea diver, calmly confesses to being ``scared of heights''.

``The first time I had to clean a building 10 storeys high was in South Africa,'' recalls Kotze laughing. ``I had been trained by my father and his team but when they took me to the top and asked me to hang from the ropes, I said `no' and went home!'' He adds, ``I came back a week later and did it though.''

``In our business, you really have to learn to trust your equipment,'' reveals Els. ``But every time I step over the edge of a building, my stomach lurches...'' ``In fact,'' interrupts Kotze, ``getting too used to it must be a warning sign . That's when you can make mistakes.''

Kotze and Els hope to set up teams that can be sent all over the country. ``We have trained them from scratch in the principles by which we want them to work. And now we are training them to use ropes and tie knots. But we are particular about safety measures and constantly check to see how they've rigged themselves up.''

For now, Kotze and Els are studying the different kinds of pollutants that affect buildings in India. They are also monitoring the weather patterns and, most of all, learning to understand the culture.

``Communication was a challenge,'' admits Kotze, ``and not just verbally. Even the body language here is so different. Just the gestures mean something that we will not understand.''

With nearly six buildings to their credit in Bangalore and Chennai, Els and Kotze are pleased at the market response. ``When we started in South Africa, the response was initially slow. But once people saw the results, news spread just by word- of-mouth. We expect things to be the same here. After all,'' concludes Kotze, ``it takes a different mindset to clean and not paint.''

Pic.: South African businessman Stephen Els gets a grip on grime using mountaineering skills.