LIFETIME INDUSTRY ACHIEVEMENT AWARD Llewllyn Pike

Llewellyn Pike

RECOGNITION

Llewellyn Pike, CEO of Merchelles Collective, hails from the Eastern Cape, and is a proud past-scholar of Muir College (one of the oldest schools in South Africa), with which he still maintains close ties. After school, he pursued engineering at Stellenbosch University.

Llewellyn’s choice of career was inspired by Ben Govoni, a professionally registered engineer who also financially assisted him by awarding him a bursary to study engineering – an act of kindness that Llewellyn both recognises as the catalyst to his rewarding career and has strived to emulate. After a brief stint with the City Engineers’ Department in Cape Town, Llewellyn’s relocation to Johannesburg heralded the start of his 40-year career in consulting engineering.

Llewellyn can best be described as a natural leader, a man of principles and ideals, who is driven by a long-term vision of development, transformation, growth and economic opportunities for all. He spent 35 years in the company that started off as Keeve Steyn & Partners, later becoming Goba, and finally Hatch Goba.

For his last 10 years at Keeve Steyn, Llewellyn enjoyed the role of executive director, being instrumental in reinventing the company into the iconic Goba. For a further period of 10 years, he occupied the role of COO, and deputy to CEO Trueman Goba, during which time the company grew from approximately 200 to over 500 employees, and was twice the recipient of Business Excellence awards (SAICE in 2007 and CESA in 2009).

Throughout these and later years, Llewellyn has remained a true and persistent force for change and legitimate transformation. These attributes can best be demonstrated and recognised by two

black women who approached him with a view to assisting them in founding a blackwoman-owned engineering consultancy. This resulted in the 2017 establishment of Merchelles Collective – a Level 1 BBBEE majority black-woman-owned business of which Llewellyn is currently CEO, a position he holds at the insistence of his fellow directors. Llewellyn is proud to be heading up a company that is committed to investing in the future of women in engineering and accelerating transformation within a maledominated industry.

Llewellyn’s core expertise lies in transportation engineering, having expert knowledge of both geometric, pavement and materials design, and contract management. He has spearheaded large and complex transport projects such as the N12: Gillooly’s to R21 I/C and N3: Geldenhuys to Buccleuch I/C (both of which were part of the Gauteng Freeway Infrastructure Programme), N1/ N2 Winelands DBOT Toll Road (Overberg Consortium), Gautrain Rapid Rail Link DBOT (Gauliwe Consortium), N3 Corridor DBOT (Mafube Consortium), N1N4 Platinum Toll Road, the Nelson Mandela Bridge and Carr Street I/C, N1 New Road I/C and the Concorde Road East (Harper Road) cable-stayed bridge, to mention just a few. In addition, Llewellyn is quite at home directing multidisciplinary projects.

Under the Merchelles’ umbrella, he is the project lead on several SANRAL road projects, where the company is the targeted enterprise in conjunction with larger generic consultancies. He is currently the independent engineer on the N1N4 Platinum Toll Road (a six-year contract won in joint venture with Nyeleti Consulting Engineers, covering some 384 km of national road). In addition, he is currently the principal agent on three multidisciplinary manufacturing infrastructure upgrade projects for Coca-Cola Beverages SA.

Llewellyn believes that every project is an opportunity to enhance the landscape and improve the lives of communities.