page 4

Pat Dickens Anne Dickens Richard Rohman

The year was 1986. Democracy was still a good eight years in the future, but already the wheels of transformation had started to turn, and their steady grinding sent shockwaves throughout the country. To quote Dickens (Charles, not Pat), “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”.

In the suburbs, paranoia was swelling as crime started to infiltrate communities and crack the thin veneer of security that had lulled them for so long. And, to crown it all, the economy was in crisis.

The milieu at the time, revolutionary as it was, was not exactly conducive to starting a business. And yet, in a humble garden shed in the heart of Bryanston, a young electrical engineer from Kimberley by the name of Patrick John Dickens was about to start an incredible journey. Having recently left the electronics division of construction giant Murray and Roberts, Pat had a massive database of clients for whom he serviced and repaired uninterruptable power supplies, but his real fascination lay with the relatively new field of gate automation.

As crime started to cast a pall of fear over South Africa’s suburbs, so homes started to sprout walls, and with the walls came gates, and with the gates came opportunity. The once invitingly bohemian streets of Johannesburg

were putting up their guards and sending a very clear message: the age of insecurity had begun.

CENTURION marketing and sales director Richard Rohman, who joined the company in 1987, remembers this period of dramatic (and, to some extent, unsettling) change.

“When I was growing up in South Africa in the early 1970s, our home opened straight onto the street, there was no wall or fence. The only wall or fence was between neighbours, no different to many first-world countries at the time and even today”.

But this was soon to change, as Richard explains.

“As the fight against the then-apartheid government started to intensify, the security situation quickly worsened. It was no longer safe to have one’s street-facing boundary exposed. So up went the wall or steel palisade fence and literally in each and every home in the more affluent suburbs”.

This sudden loss of security and peace of mind was perhaps the main catalyst that led to Centurion Systems being formed. But what was life like in the pre-CENTURION days?

page 5

CENTURION: AN AUTHORISED HISTORY

Great expectationsThe Dickens’ spent 14 months in the United Kingdom around the time that Rob, the eldest son, was two years old, and it is from this time-period that some of the more colourful stories emerge.

“We lived in a little town called Haywards Heath in the beautiful English countryside,” recalls Anne. “And we felt very special with our different accent and our different point of view. We had these babysitters’ clubs where we would take turns looking after each other’s children for payment, but instead of money, we used curtain hooks as tender!”

It was also during their time in the UK that Anne became pregnant for a second time, and Nicholas Dickens greeted the world in February of 1980 in the town of Cuckfield, Sussex.

Anne fell pregnant with Tim, the youngest of the Dickens boys, the year that CENTURION was born. While a lesser person might have been deterred by the prospect of raising a family while growing a business, Anne clearly shares her brother’s (Richard’s) unwavering dedication to “getting things done”.

“We lived in a little town called Haywards Heath in the beautiful English countryside,” recalls Anne. “And we felt very special with our different accent and our different point of view.

By Charl Mijnhardt and Ruane Bester

page 6

The influence of being surrounded by his father’s tools of the trade clearly showed in the young Tim Dickens, as Anne fondly remembers.

“As a child, Timmy never wanted toys as presents; he wanted tools, paintbrushes and paint trays”.

While it may not always have been easy for the Dickens boys to have parents who owned their own business, by all accounts Robert, Nick and Tim had a normal childhood, engaging in typical activities such as building chlorine bombs (although Pat was always very serious with regards to the boys’ safety, Anne is quick to point out).

“It was a challenge balancing work and kids” says Anne. “Nick was always the only child left on the pavement after school. And, in those early days, we took calls related to the business at home, which meant that we often had to first get the kids to behave and be quiet before answering the phone!”. She also remembers a particularly non-festive Christmas day that Pat spent in the ZoZo hut soldering PC boards because the company had so many orders to fill.

But the Dickens’ also had their share of lighthearted moments.

Anne tells of one particularly whimsical incident where the family visited some friends in the United States, and hired a Cadillac (perhaps to make the trip more authentically American, or perhaps because that was the only available option). They were travelling down one of the country’s many interstate highways, when a particularly gung ho cop pulled them over and proceeded to order Pat from the car before frisking him. The crime? Speeding, apparently.

Yes, there were fun times (in retrospect, anyway) and difficult times, but the role of family is the golden thread that has always kept everything together.

“We have always been very close as a family,” confirms Anne. “And being family bonded us together. We always had each other’s backs and stood together”.

Coming from Anne, this is no exaggeration. Back in those early days, the Dickens’ matriarch did everything from making sandwiches for the staff to creating invoices and doing stocktaking.

A tale of two citiesCenturion Systems opened its first satellite branch in Pinetown, Durban in 1993. This significant development necessitated Richard moving down to the coast for a while to help with the setting up of the branch. CENTURION was growing, and with this growth came the extreme pressures and demands associated with a rapidly-expanding business. Unmarried at the time, Richard well

and truly threw himself into his work, so much so that it eventually began to affect his health and he had to force himself to slow down.

Of course, Richard has always been known for his superhuman work ethic.

He is the driving force behind CENTURION’s marketing and sales departments; a man so charismatic, so passionate that a palpable aura of energy seems to surround him wherever he goes. Not only is he a born orator – effortlessly commanding a room with his booming voice and razor sharp wit – but he is the undisputed master of the Excel spreadsheet.

Richard Rohman first joined the ranks of Centurion Systems as a young, hungry engineer fresh out of university (a Wits alumnus just like his brother-in-law and nephews Rob and Nick). After a stint with ESKOM, Richard joined Pat to help get Centurion Systems (a part-time endeavour at the time) off the ground by handling the mechanical design side. But before there was Richard the CENTURION whirling dervish and Excel wunderkind, there was Richard, the friendly but hard-working kid from Sandhurst.

“All the posh guys used to live in Empire Road,” remembers Richard, in his best posh accent “but we used to live right at the bottom of Sandhurst overlooking a veldt. In those days, much of Sandton and the surrounding areas had not yet been developed and there was still a lot of open space”.

Of course, massive urbanisation would soon hit Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, and today the entrances to many of the sprawling mansions and business parks that litter the lush North are automated with the very operators that young Richard would later help develop.

Richard recalls the very early days of CENTURION being a bit like the television show Dallas (which was on TV at the time), with various members of the Dickens and Rohman clans living together in one house.

page 6

page 7

“It was a big double-story house and we had everybody in there. We had Anne and Pat living there, as well as Robert [Rohman, Richard’s older brother] and his girlfriend or wife at the time, and then myself living in this massive house”.

This communal setup would soon prove a bit much for the Dickens pair, however, and Pat and Anne moved out; a move that, as it turns out, would be pivotal to the birth of Centurion Systems as we know it today.

“Pat and Anne, at the time, were building their second house and they eventually moved into their new house, which had a big single swing gate. Pat had gotten his hands on this small little Warner actuator that had only a six inch stroke, 12 volts, and I remember we put it onto his [Pat’s] swing gate. As you can imagine, when we put this motor straight onto the battery, this gate just went vhoom and I said ‘We need to ramp this thing, you know, we need to control this thing a bit better’. So then we developed this controller and it was just major, major, major transistors on it, big heat sinks, fancy ramp-up and ramp-down, stuff like that”.

Smooth ramp-up and ramp-down would, of course, go on to become staples of CENTURION gate automation; and so began the odyssey that would culminate in one of South Africa’s greater business success stories.

But is this the vision Richard always had for his life?

Richard quotes entrepreneur Jan Venter in his reply:

“Venter said that, if you haven’t made it by the age of 27, chances are you’re not going to make it, and I took it seriously [laughs]! Because my old man was involved on the sales side of business, even though he was a manager, every night we were exposed to business and selling. I was always conscious of this whole trading thing. I knew that I wanted to use my degree to manufacture a product and then sell it. With Pat involved on the electronics side, we saw the opportunity with gate motors and I said, hey, let’s see if we can do something”.

All kinds of Dickens; or, How a boy from Kimberley built an empireSpend a few moments chatting to CENTURION MD and patriarch Pat Dickens, and it often becomes difficult to believe that this is the man at the helm of a massive organisation (though he prefers the term “family”) that has just been bought out by a multinational firm, the biggest manufacturer of access automation equipment in the world.

Soft-spoken, friendly, even a little shy, there doesn’t seem to be a pompous or aloof bone in Pat’s body.

“The Dickens family is originally from Kimberley,” he begins. “The school I went to was CBC, and I remember

when I was in grade 1 or so, we had a photograph of all the boys who went to the school at that stage who had parents and grandparents who went to the same school. I was one of those boys. My father went to CBC, and my grandfather went to CBC. That gives you an idea of how far back we go”.

Despite the unmistakably English last name, the Dickens’ are as much a part of this country as Kimberley’s red dust.

“My grandmother came from Scotland,” confirms Pat. “She met my grandfather in Kimberley, my father was born in Kimberley, and he went to school in Kimberley”.

It was perhaps inevitable that Pat would grow up to have his own business, as his own father was charged to do after Pat’s grandfather died. However, unlike Pat, his father somewhat begrudgingly took over the reins of the family business.

“My father hated his job. He wanted to continue doing what he was doing, but he was dragged into this business. But he did what he had to do”.

How differently might things not have turned out for all of us had Pat decided to remain in the Northern Cape and go into the family business of distributing to local outlets? Fortunately, the promise of a good education brought him to Johannesburg, where he went on to obtain a degree in electrical engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).

It was perhaps inevitable that Pat would grow up to have his own business, as his own father was charged to do after Pat’s grandfather died. However, unlike Pat, his father somewhat begrudgingly took over the reins of the family business.

page 8

The summer of ‘69It’s hard not to notice the amorous twinkle in Pat’s eye when he talks about his wife, Anne.

Pat was nearing the end of his first year of university when he met Anne Lenore Rohman (who was writing matric at the time), the friendly and inquisitive older sister of Pat’s future business partner. They were from two completely different and seemingly incompatible worlds – he the introverted and reserved engineer from the mining town, she was the outspoken and artistic schoolgirl from the suburbs – and yet there’s no mistaking the lilt of tenderness in his voice as Pat describes their first encounters.

“I do remember we were at this particular party – I can still visualise it – we were sitting on the grass, and she was there, and then she started to…she’s very good at interrogating you if she wants to [laughs]. But I remember that was my first time, sort of, really noticing her”.

Pat remembers the months of their courtship being anything but smooth sailing.

“We had decided to go out, but soon after that problems ensued, because in that first year I didn’t have a car. Anne would have to pick me up and take me places in her mom’s car, which was a little Ford Cortina”.

However, Pat soon won his independence (and young Anne’s heart) when he bought his first car – a Volkswagen Beetle he lovingly named Chloe – for the mind-blowing price of R200. He had also exercised his trademark charm on Anne’s parents, who convinced her to give the tall, polite boy from Kimberley a chance.

“Her [Anne’s] folks called her Panse, and they said ‘Panse, why don’t you go out with that nice engineer, Pat?”

Several years later, after an eight-year stint general managing the UPS arm of construction firm Murray and Roberts, the “nice engineer, Pat” would look dreamily into the distance as he and his bride lay on the beach during one of their holidays, and say: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could start our own company?”

“Murray and Roberts had decided that they didn’t want anything more to do with the electronics side of things, so when this opportunity came, I went straight to my boss and I asked him whether I would be permitted to buy their old equipment and take over their service contracts. To my surprise, he agreed to this. So I said, ‘Look, I have five grand. I’m prepared to pay you five grand’. And I bought a tonne of equipment!”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The road aheadFrom the humblest of beginnings, CENTURION has grown into a mighty access automation empire, weathering economic storms that would have felled lesser companies and consistently making a profit despite the slew of recessions that the country has faced in recent years.

One of the questions Ruane and I asked in our interviews was whether the interviewees (Richard, Pat and Anne) had ever felt that they wanted to throw in the towel and, in each case, the answer was an emphatic “no”.

“Giving up never crossed my mind,” says Pat. “Then again, I’m the eternal optimist! I work best when my back’s up against the wall”. Although he does admit that he was at times worried about whether they’d be able to pay the bills.

Richard proffered a similar response: “I’ve always had a philosophy that you’ve got to make things happen. And there are so many examples of where you’ve got to get this thing done and you just make it happen. For instance, that situation where we had that order for the UPSs, we couldn’t just throw up our arms and say ‘that’s it’. No, we’ll work all night and we’ll come up with a design and we did it, and within one month, we’d gone from having drawings to having a product, and we actually supplied fifty of these things!”

So, what does the future hold for our founding fathers (and certainly not forgetting the all-important founding mother)?

Both Pat and Anne indicated that they would like to spend more time with their grandchildren, and have also hinted at the possibility of dedicating their free time to travel.

“I’d like to see more of our products getting into FAAC catalogues” says Richard, showing no signs of slowing down. “That would be a feather in our cap. Yes, we’d like to make a go of Africa. It’s a tough market, but it is our home ground, so let’s see if we can carry on with that footprint in Africa. I’d also love to see the CENTSYS brand growing in Australia. The CENTURION brand must continue to grow and prosper”.

page 8