My career began while attending middle/high school. Working during vacations/holidays in my father’s businesses provided exposure to the manufacture and application of waterproofing membranes and coatings to roofs and walls of buildings. Following graduation in 1995, I worked in my brother’s company, Design Waterproofing Systems, at building sites learning the trade from the bottom up. While there I gained practical experience in the properties and types of waterproofing materials and their various applications.I then became a Contracts Site Manager which also embraced functions such as diagnosing problems and specifying the materials to cure them, measuring the sites and calculating quotations for material and labor on both existing and new buildings. In 2000 I started my own businesses in Cape Town, manufacturing and applying waterproofing materials.Over the past 20 years, I have acquired extensive expertise as to how water ingress occurs and migrates in building substrates, both roofs and walls, and how to combat various problems, including the occurrence of negative pressure in wine cellars and underground basements. I developed specialist knowhow in silicone injection and salt retardant plaster for rising damp, repairs to spalling render and wall cracks, coating of weather facing walls with waterproof emulsions and silicone masonry protection for face-brick and porous cement blocks. Painting of building interiors and exteriors was added as customer demand dictated.I am an inspired leader with initiative and expert technical knowledge, and an eye for detail and neatness. I have good entrepreneurial, customer relationship and work team leadership skills, and take pride in diagnosing and curing problems efficiently and permanently.