CEO Today Africa Awards

www.ceotodaymagazine.com 22 CEO Today Africa Awards 2019 SOUTH AFRICA ABOUT VIKASH NARSAI A leading specialist in the built environment The multi-disciplinary professional services consultancy VNA Consulting leads the charge for built environment transformation, realising the continental potential and connecting African communities, while enhancing the lives of the inhabitants. VNA Consulting’s CEO and founder, Vikash Narsai, extends a broad, debonair smile and an unassuming confidence as he strides into his office boardroom, in a converted colonial-style house, set high up on Durban’s Berea. Narsai, a Quantity Surveyor by profession, assumes an affable presence, a characteristic that has, no doubt, steered this energetic leader through the twists and turns of a challenging journey in the global built environment sector. Narsai, 47, built VNA Consulting, an award-winning firm, from humble beginnings with less than a handful of staff in 2000, into a large South African company employing 300 people and with established branches in KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Free State, Western Cape, Mauritius including strategic partners in Australia, USA, Asia and Europe. The firm focuses on connecting African communities, providing construction project management, construction management, civil engineering, specialised pavement engineering, infrastructure development as well as cost engineering services. VNA Consulting recently won the South African Construction Award (SACA) as the Best Health, Safety, Environment and Quality (SHEQ) Company of the Year in 2018 and a year earlier, the firm clinched the SACA Best Consultancy of the Year award for 2017. But it has been a long and arduous journey to arrive at these major milestones. Narsai recalls how, as a young graduate fresh out of ML Sultan Technikon (now the Durban University of Technology), just before the dawn of democracy in 1993, the dearth of jobs even then, led to a delay in fulfilling his professional dreams. “I was confronted by the realities of being a new job seeker due to the absence of available quantity surveying opportunities. To make ends meet, I was forced to sell children’s books door to door. It was a tenuous time. “But my continuous drive to embrace the built environment industry finally paid off when, in 1995, I was given an opportunity in Richards Bay as a Junior Quantity Surveyor for Coalfields Construction, one of the largest contracting firms at the time located in Northern KwaZulu-Natal,” he says. However, the opportunity presented challenges, especially the long “camping days” on the job. A new opportunity arose at a Durban-based construction company in 1998 and Narsai was deployed to its Johannesburg branch for a year. He returned to KwaZulu-Natal in 1999 and was appointed the Chief Quantity Surveyor on the Kokstad Supermax Prison housing project. VIKASH NARSAI CEO of VNA Consulting