"I can’t help but smile when people ask me what I do for a living. You should see how their eyes widen when I start by saying that I break rocks and shovel sand,” Ioseb Tsotsolashvili says with a laugh.

Ioseb’s business is strictly above board: He recycles construction materials, and quite successfully so for close to fifteen years now. His business is located on a 70,000-sqm tract of land he owns just outside Rustavi. Together with his three employees, he takes care of sorting and crushing the construction materials that get delivered from construction sites throughout the Tbilisi area. "We supply sand and rocks for building projects in the area. The economy is gradually picking up again after a few tough years, and that’s good for business,” Ioseb adds.

For years, Ioseb’s strategy was to keep costs down, avoid investment where possible and squeeze out as much as possible from his machinery. That seemed to work for a while, but he soon realised that the huge repair bills were cutting deeper into his already low margins. Because of the downtime, he also had to turn away contracts. Not to mention the payroll he still had to meet. "It took me a while to see the sense in investing in newer machinery, and securing the loan with Bank Republic was exactly what my business needed.” The USD 3,000 loan Ioseb took out in the summer of 2014, went straight into a refurbished crusher, enabling him to process greater volumes in less time.<br/>Promoted by EU4Business