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Noor Parker went from worthless to wirelessHe is five foot three, and runs on five hours’ sleep, eight cups of tea and one square meal a day. At age six he was homeless; at 26, he lost a business. These days, the 36-year-old electronics maestro is at the cutting edge of home automation and is handed multimillion-rand contracts to effect futuristic audiovisual domestic transformations for the top end of town. He owns three companies. Meet Noor Parker.
Some people are born to lead; others have leadership thrust upon them.
External circumstances demanded that Parker take control, but the founding director of Digital Expressions also took to leadership like a fish to water – and before he had even learnt to swim.
Here is a tale illuminated by inspiration, and a parable for the economic wisdom of following a calling – in this case, electronic genius.
For Parker, the connections between survival instinct and professional adaptability were obvious from early on. In 1972, he was born a second-generation South African of Indian descent, and raised in Cape Town.
As Parker recalls, life in the beginning was ideal: “Man, we had a happy childhood up till age six, very blissful. Everything you could possibly want was there.”
However, the Parker family’s domestic and material bliss bubble was burst dramatically in Parker’s seventh year. Without so much as a note, his father simply left, selling the property in which he, his mother and two younger siblings were living – right from under their noses.
“We really had no place to go, and we were literally put out on the street… my mum was dumbstruck,” he says.
In a heartbeat, Parker went from being chauffeur-driven to a private school, to effectively homeless.
“We were obviously in a panic and had nowhere to go. One of the shopkeepers who used to rent one of the properties from my dad, felt sorry for us and told us we were welcome to live in his back room, but there was nothing there, no kitchen – absolutely nothing,” he says.
“My sister was one year old at the time, my brother was four. All my mom knew how to do was cook.”
The day after being abandoned, the Parker family (less one) sat bewildered outside the Blue Owl Takeaway (ironically, one of the properties Parker’s father had owned until very recently).
Amazingly, for a six-year old, Parker offered to quit school in order to work and support the family. Although Mrs Parker deemed that her son’s education continue, neither mother nor son wasted time.
The Blue Owl, a roadhouse of sorts, was very busy until three in the morning and sat adjacent to a huge parking lot, where the passing customers would ‘stop and go’ throughout the night.
Having borrowed a broom from the proprietor, and while his mother cooked sandwiches inside for a pittance, Parker would sit up and wait until closing time to “sweep the entire parking lot clean”. His payment was helping himself to the coins dropped by careless patrons.
This scarcity was the catalyst for unleashing Parker’s inner entrepreneur. “When I realised I wasn’t picking up enough coins in the parking lot, I went to the shopkeeper’s door and offered to mop his floors in exchange for some fish oil and popcorn.
“I didn’t mind going to bed hungry, but I could not allow this to happen to my brother and sister,” he says.
Parker’s popcorn ‘business’ ran on a bag of popcorn, half a bottle of fish oil, an old pot and some brown paper bags. Hand in hand with his four-year-old brother, and with a cobbled together tray strung around his neck, Parker went door to door in the Strand. At 10 cents a packet, they usually would return with two or three rand for their mother.
But such survival was threadbare and Mrs Parker was compelled to take up an offer from Parker’s grandfather, which she had refused some weeks earlier.
Parker remembers this day vividly: “We loaded what little we had into the Mini and halfway to Cape Town, we ran out of petrol. No one wanted to stop, so I got out and stood in the middle of the N2.
“Coincidentally, my mother’s brother came driving past, pulled over, beat the crap out of me, and made arrangements to get us to my grandfather.”
Granddad put them up in Bo-Kaap and through this charity, Parker continued his schooling, eventually graduating with a diploma in Electrical Engineering from the former Cape Technikon.
But one would be correct in assuming that Parker’s adolescence was not consumed by formal study. At age 12, he was fixing televisions and car radios from functional components that he salvaged from faulty circuit boards, and putting bread on the table by installing car alarms for a fraction of the price of professionals.
By 16, Parker’s love for electronics had became an obsession that was earning him “flippin’ good money” – he was selling dummy car alarm systems of his own design at 75 bucks a pop to his teachers, and was booked a year in advance to film weddings and other social functions.
“I went to the same guy who was throwing the circuit boards away and said, ‘I need to purchase a camera from you and will pay you back over six months. I want to film weddings’; and he asked me: ‘Have you ever filmed weddings before?’.” Parker confessed that he had not.
Despite this, the camera was handed over, and though Parker paid back the R8 000 in three months, he maintains that the opportunity of this man’s trust was priceless. On the strength of it, Parker was able to perfect the art of editing and videography, and ran his first real business.
After attaining his diploma, Parker worked for an electronics repair company, which quickly developed a reputation for fixing the unfixable.
Around this time, the offers began coming in: “I was getting companies coming to my home, offering me 50% in their business for me to come and work for them,” he says.
The thirst for technical knowledge was too powerful, and Parker refused such overtures, reasoning that his current employers still knew more than himself, whereas the people at his doorstep could teach him nothing.
Yet, at 23, Parker had been able to get a bond on his first property and was possessed by the spirit of adventure.
Then came an offer he could not refuse – a rare opportunity to reignite his love affair with videography and stretch his “serious technical skills”. An acquaintance came to him with the vision of merging corporate staging with video production, but lacked the technical people to make it happen.
So in 1993, with R50 000, Parker bought a 20% share in what was the first black economic empowered company of its kind: a television facility house and staging company.
Parker recalls a typical client brief: “We’d like to hire out a hotel; we’re hosting a conference there; we need 20 microphones on the floor, a panel of speakers with eight wireless microphones, and projectors set up with a couple of big screens for our computer presentations and live camera relays.”
His increasing technical risks and people skills saw the company’s clients and events grow in stature. At South Africa’s five-star hotels, the company staged such events as the World Economic Forum and the World Energy Council.
Even the great Madiba would not speak publicly without the thumbs-up from his favourite soundman.
Sadly, while Parker was out on the road, virtually manifesting big events, his partner was practising creative accounting. There came a gradual realisation that things were financially awry. Or as Parker put it: “My partner screwed me.”
Rather than enter into bitter and protracted litigation, he invoked the wisdom of his grandfather who had warned against the bad luck associated with fighting over money – and walked away. In doing so, Parker effectively handed over the company he had built almost single-handedly, for no remuneration.
Forbearance aside, the reality was a heavy mortgage, a family to support and his wedding in six months – there was a sudden and dire need for cash flow.
In 1996 Parker headed to the flea market with R150 and a mantra: “I need side cutters, I need pliers, a 13-inch spanner would be good – that’s my tool kit.”
From there, he stopped in at Ellie’s Electronics where his uncle was the general manager.
Parker announced that he was going into the satellite installation business. The only hitch was that he was wanting for a spectrum analyser, and that this essential component of satellite installation went for R15 000.
To his uncle’s astonishment, his nephew sidestepped the problem of lacking this fundamental tool by ‘jimmy rigging’ the dish to enable the decoder. This was as revolutionary as it was time-consuming, but his uncle – out of compassion as much as amusement – gave him the analyser, along with some other equipment on a verbal IOU, and the advice to “work smart, not hard”.
His uncle’s maxim hit home because 12 months of introspection while installing satellite dishes and TV antennas was sufficient. “I realised, I’m greater than this – staging to an international standard and I’m putting up people’s aerials for a living! It’s an insult to my intelligence,” he recalls.
This epiphany resulted in Digital Expressions. The anonymous tradesman, fiddling around on a stranger’s rooftop, saw the possibility of bringing a mastery of electronics into the high-end homes of Cape Town.
Parker’s confidence came from years spent interfacing with states people and executives, while under pressure honing his command over a range of audiovisual gadgetry.
Today, Digital Expressions specialises in home automation and high-end audiovisual systems, aiming for flawless integration of electronics controllable from touchscreen panels. “We design, install, control and manage the energy use of all aspects of the home, including the electronic automation of lighting, underfloor heating, curtains and blinds, perimeter lighting,” explains Parker.
A home automation system offers futuristically customised options such as disabling one’s child’s Internet access from a certain hour, and playing multiple movies simultaneously on different screens via one’s media centre. With no subcontracting, a client enjoys the security of having one company create and maintain the satellite installations, audio distribution, lighting and cable infrastructure.
Ten years on, Digital Expressions is a highly respected systems integration company. For Parker, the keys to its success are innovation, integrity and quality. “I keep raising the standards beyond my current limitations. Having mastered a technology, I ask myself what else has not been done in this country, and seek it out. If the technology is reliable, we introduce it – I then go out and I create the market for it.”
With no advertising budget, Digital Expressions thrives on its reputation, cultivating a policy of transparency with clients and allowing the work to speak for itself. “We’ve built this business on referral. We have clients who entertain their friends at their homes – my name has to come up when they see our solutions firsthand. This is how we build our client relationships,” explains Parker.
Loving what you do and doing what you love is a given for the Digital Expressions outfit.
And while passion is rated more highly than qualifications, Parker is proactive about retaining staff, and gets to the root of what drives people.
He makes a point of helping his staff identify and realise professional and financial goals.
This mentoring instinct is evident in his hands-on approach to parenting. “We must find the time to determine what our child’s natural abilities are, and then nurture these abilities.”
I ask Parker how, in the face of such adversity, he nurtured the belief in his own greatness.
From behind his desk, he seems to look back on his life with satisfaction, even gratitude.
“Always dream big and be passionate about what you do. If you can dream it, you can create it… Once you’ve planted the seed, you have to believe that you can achieve it.”
Behind the ever-alert eyes, there is also a spark.
Nicol Ritchie
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