Closet Gangster Cabinets – CG for short – has successfully completed hundreds of jobs since being established a little over a year ago.

The family company is based in Darwin but isn’t afraid to cross the Berrimah Line.

Recent work includes the refurbishment of KFC in Casuarina working alongside M&J Builders and fitting out the Maningrida community store.

The business is owned by Territoryborn Allirra Jennings, the first Indigenous woman to run the world’s six major marathons, and her husband Frank, who has been a qualified cabinet maker for 20 years.

All the cabinets are custom made at the company’s Berrimah workshop and fitted by skilled tradies.

Frank proudly says that no job is too big or small.

“The bloke who asks you to do a $50 job today may be the bloke who walks through your door with a $250,000 job next year. He’ll remember that you did a good job for him even though it was only small.”

And as he said that a customer walked in off the street to ask for a small strip of metal to be fitted across the bottom of his front door. Frank happily acknowledges that Allirra is the “big boss” of CG Cabinets – she does the administration and promotion, including telephoning builders and developers to pitch for business. And she makes videos, some of them eccentric and funny, and posts them on the company’s Facebook page.

Allirra, who has run the New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Berlin and Tokyo marathons, particularly enjoys making beforeand- after videos, which strikingly demonstrate the high quality of CG’s work.

She is the granddaughter of former St Marys football club president Vic Ludwig.

Frank, whose younger brother Nigel owns Katherine-based house building company NJ Homes, says he wasn’t worried about quitting his well-paid, steady job to go into business.

“I was confident I could do the trade side of the work. But Allirra had to learn the business skills – and that was the hard part. There’s a lot to learn in business.”

CG Cabinets, which has eight staff, has already moved from one workshop to premises three times larger – and is now so busy that it may have to move again very soon.

“We’re crazy busy,” says Frank. “We get a lot of contracts. People are happy with what we do and keep coming back to us.

“Nothing worth having comes easy – sacrifice and hard work pay off.” So how did Closet Gangster Cabinets get its name?

“A friend of mine was a DJ on a Darwin radio station and I used to ring up all the time to request rap songs,” says Frank. “She said I was a closet gangster. That made me laugh and I used it for the business name.”

CONTACT

CG Cabinets

23 Berrimah Road, Darwin 0828

0412 838 732