ORIGINS:

Contractors Club was started in April 2006 by Jen Skordis and Henry Harkcom as a cooperative marketing & advertising initiative for self-employed building contractors and tradesmen.

There was no joining fee, and Contractors would subscribe to the service by monthly subscriptions. The modus operandi was for consumers to respond to adverts via a call centre and their enquires channelled to the appropriately skilled members.

It became apparent that more was needed to help these contractors so Contractors Club converted into an NPO (March 2008) specialising as a Third Party Facilitator in Enterprise Development for small building contractors and tradesmen. We soon established that our focus was too narrow and widened it to include other micro/small businesses and self employed entrepreneurs.

A name-change became necessary as Contractors Club did not portray the correct description of our offering/s and the trading name REDS (Real Enterprise Development Solutions) was introduced.

Our activities qualified us to become a Public Benefit Organisation (PBO), and in June 2008 SARS TEU (Tax Exemption Unit) in Pretoria approved us as a PBO.

As such we then qualified to also undertake Socio Economic Development initiatives. However it was only in late 2010 that we felt we were ready with a meaningful SED initiative, namely education in the form of the MILO Learning Programme.

Also in late 2010 we redirected our efforts into specific projects/programmes as they are easier to run in terms of the control of beneficiaries activities and the measurement of the degree of success.