At one point during the interview we had to interrupt Mpho Diale, the chief executive of Calulo Investments, to tell him that we were going to start counting how many times he said "we started a new company...".

He laughed and said: "We have a lot of fun building things."

The first incarnation of Calulo was in 1999 when Diale and Mkhuseli Faku, Calulo's executive chairman and Diale's business partner, launched the company with "money from our own pockets".

Diale and Faku got their break with the creation of the liquid fuels charter. Faku had connections in the petrochemicals sector as a former head of Africoil and a Total South Africa executive. He had also helped draft the charter.

Diale had come from a merchant banking background, having worked for Rand Merchant Bank and Real Africa Durolink.

The two started as wholesale fuel traders in a company called African Minerals and Energy, buying fuel from the majors and then selling it on to industry and farmers. Diale says that within three years they had built a business with a turnover of about R300 million.

From there they signed a deal with Total South Africa to establish Total Renaissance, of which Calulo held 51 percent. A few years later in a complex deal, Calulo was part of the Tosaco consortium, which took a 25 percent stake in Total South Africa.

Reports at the time said Calulo earned R500 million a year from the deal.

Diale says that when the liquid fuels charter gave them their "in" they wanted to build an oil company "from upstream to downstream - from refining, distribution and the retail side to exploration and crude oil trading".

They created transport ventures to handle distribution by road, rail and water.

In 2004 Calulo formed a joint venture with Imperial Transport, called FuelLogic. Calulo holds 20 percent.

FuelLogic has contracts with Shell, Caltex and Total to transport fuel. At the time of the deal, in 2002, the contract was worth R450 million over five years.

"We built our business on the back of the long-term contracts with the major oil companies where Calulo would get up to five-year contracts and then on the strength of these contracts buy the trucks," Diale says. The business has over 100 tankers now.

Calulo also owns 72 percent of a shipping firm, Calulo Shipping, that ships refined products. Its clients include Engen and BP. This company also handles charters for Engen.

Diale readily admits that the lack of investment in rail operator Spoornet has been to Calulo's advantage.

But when Spoornet gets itself back on track and, fingers crossed, it does opt to use a concessioning model, Calulo will be well placed to take advantage through its petrorail logistics business, which is largely focused on transporting goods to Zimbabwe and Zambia.

For an extra 5 percent to 10 percent, Calulo will make sure that whatever it is that you have ordered gets there on time, if necessary by taking the goods off the trains and putting them on trucks.

"There will come a time where there are rail concessions. It has happened in the US and Europe, for example," Diale says.

Calulo also created an oil trading company, Kepu Trading, which is based in Cape Town with a support office in Geneva that supplies crude to southern Africa. This joint venture is with the world's largest privately held oil company, Moscow-based Lukoil.

Last year Kepu won a one-year renewable contract, worth about $40 million (R242 million), to supply fuel to the government of Mauritius, which has about 80 percent of the Mauritian market.

Diale says Calulo has promising prospects in Africa in oil and gas exploration in Angola, Gabon and Niger.

The International Energy Agency estimates that $300 billion will be spent in Africa on oil and gas exploration over the next 25 years.

Calulo has three main divisions, or clusters as Diale calls them. The largest and most established is the oil and energy cluster.

The second is a services cluster, which also houses property. In the middle of last month Calulo took control of a property loan stock company, Annuity Property Fund, which is now trading on the JSE Securities Exchange as Calulo Property Fund .

Calulo Property started off with a single property but has recently bought new properties in Gauteng, the Eastern and Western Cape, and market capitalisation is expected to top R500 million in the next 18 months "or so".

The third cluster is Calulo's venture into mining. Calulo has two coal mining ventures: Mashala Coal and Umcebo Mining.

Last year it concluded an empowerment deal with Anglo American subsidiary Boart Longyear to create a drilling venture, Calulo Drilling, in partnership with Caldiam, which is a diamond mining and exploration company.

Diale says that a deal with a Northern Cape diamond company will most likely be finalised in April.

Once this is done, they will immediately commission a competent persons report and then jump through all the regulatory hoops to get the diamond company listed on London's Alternative Investment Market.

"There is already a lot of equity interest in London,"Diale says.

He also considered Toronto, where there is a strong junior mining and exploration sector. He says unlike Canada and the UK, institutions and investors in South Africa "have no appetite for exploration that is deemed high risk.

"They always want you to provide extra security."

Diale speaks easily, engaged with his subject. At no time does he create the impression that his job is ever a drag, and his understated enthusiasm is infectious.

Most recently Calulo reverse-listed its natural stone mining assets into what was the troubled property company Gilboa, a company renamed Absolute Holdings.

Calulo is working at moving Absolute's listing off the venture capital board of the JSE and across to AltX.

Initially this company will be used to drive the firm's mining interests through its mining and retailing of natural stone for the local and international tile market.

"Calulo will utilise Absolute as its vehicle in pursuing junior mining opportunities and so have become the drivers of the company. We will be increasing our stake in the company in the near future and are actively looking for other opportunities.

"There are a number of assets and resources owned by the majors that are lucrative, and yet too small for them to operate successfully," Diale says.

Of the group's ambitions for the mining sector, he says: "We set up a whole lot of companies in the energy sector that are doing well; now we are trying to move that experience into the mining sector.

We are very aggressive in this sector."

Changes to the Mineral Resources and Petroleum Development Act last year mean the clock is ticking for white-owned companies to either convert their unused mineral rights or have them taken back by the government on May 1.

On Calulo's investment philosophy, he says Calulo is first and foremost an entrepreneurial business. "We look at building blocks for our business. It is not our strategy to be all over the market.

"Our investments are geared towards allowing us to be operators so that we can develop clusters and then take those clusters to a listing."

Keeping all of these balls in the air is no mean feat, and as the group has grown, Diale says he and Faku have recognised their burgeoning business needs institutional support.

"We do need an institutional partner," Diale says. An asset manager would be the preferred route and Calulo would like to spin off a 25 percent stake.

Proceeds from any sale would go towards building bigger infrastructure.

Calulo has already been able to raise R1 billion over the past three years for transactions.

"We need to bring in more executives. But do you know what happens? These institutions want a discount. We are very proud of how far we have come and we're not in a hurry," he says, adding he is prepared to wait for the right deal and partner.

"It's the wrong way around; surely we should be asking for the discount?"