Jan was an opportunity focused person who was driven to provide excellence to customers. His focus on excellence, led him to start Autofitters in 1998. He did this because he saw a gap, one which centred around a lack of service follow through in the automotive industry. What made Jan tick, was that he always went the extra mile. This transitioned beyond being obsessed with providing top-end customer service. His quest for excellence, meant that he made it his business to understand absolutely everything about the products he was working with, and supplying. His long career at 3M had a specific focus on abrasives, and so the ever curious Jan became an abrasives expert who would spend hours researching and testing products in order to ensure that he knew exactly where they could be strategically applied for maximum impact.

“The people who really knew Jan, link him to one powerful word, passion. He lived his business through every fibre of his being, and he loved his people with every beat of his heart”.

Jan made it his business to have a deep understanding of every abrasive and the abrasive’s manufacturing process. This detail driven approach meant he knew exactly how each abrasive worked and this in turn made him a subject matter expert who could easily provide incredible insights into what product should be used where, when, how and why.

Jan only ever sought to deliver excellence into the lives and professions of those with whom we worked, and his word was his bond. If he said that he would get something done, he did, magnificently so; there were never any half measures. Because of this, Jan was much loved and the primary emotional drivers behind the foundational success which he created, are love, kindness, caring, family, nurturing, upliftment, ethics, and responsibility. A core internal driver of his was to help others and he set about doing this by creating an opportunistic framework through which other people could launch businesses and achieve their dreams. The upshot of this was job creation and that fulfilled against one of his core values, helping families to prosper.

Jan Serfontein’s enthusiastic approach to the world of abrasives, was such that it saw him transition beyond what to many would be the “boring world of abrasives.” It was this magic that caused his business to experience explosive growth. This is the magic which has been passed on to Derekh and this is what inspires us each and every day – to practically leverage our passion for excellence and in such a way that what we do and how we do it, makes a tangible difference in the lives of those who do business with us.