When you drink her yogurt, it kinda feels smooth as it gently navigates your tongue and throat. No wonder she calls it Boreleli Yogurt (boreli=smooth). That is none other than Nts’iua Makoae, the National University of Lesotho (NUL) trained dairy enthusiast.
“When people buy my yogurt, I can tell they don’t do me a favour,” she said. “I know, not because they say they like my yogurt. I know because they show they like my yogurt. They show it by coming back to buy more.”
She tries to make it a bit different from your average yogurt out there, “we try as much as possible to run away from the use of artificial colorants and flavours, so the taste is natural and real. We use real fruit as our flavourant.”
It is no wonder that when people buy her yogurt, they throw patriotism outta the window, “when people buy our product, they should buy it because it satisfies them, not because they just want to be patriotic. It’s their money, they have to get the best out of it. That is what we strive to provide .”
When she looks back, she feels deeply satisfied that she took a challenge some years ago and settled for a business of yogurt making. “It has been quite an amazingly educational journey.”
By the time she finished her schooling at the NUL, she was immediately hit by the brown-enveloped-reality as she moved around seeking employment. She was hit by a reality that the jobs had become scarce as gold these days. But, as they say, when one door closes, another one opens.
That door “came in the form of an opportunity called STEP, Students Entrepreneurship Program by UNESCO,” she said. The program sought to impart entrepreneurship skills among tertiary students and graduates. She would find herself among the more than 200 who were admitted to this program.
Needless to say, she liked what she learned, from day one.
If there was anything the program organisers understood, it was that while theory was important, there was nothing quite like mixing theory with practice (oh boy! Don’t we carry a heavy load of theory already)! That combination alone, is what separates success from failure.
“In those STEP workshops, we were introduced to the idea of starting a business…by starting a business!”
They were divided into groups of five and each group was loaned M1000 to start a business. The idea was that they had to use the loan, make profits and bring back the money. Then, they would learn a thing or two about business. “We literally laughed our lungs out at the prospect of using a meagre M1000 to start a business. It was just too small.”
But there was a condition. The ability to start a business and make a profit would decide whether they got certificates from their participation in the program or not. Afraid that they might not be certificated, the laughing stopped. Now they had to make something out of “nothing.”
“My team drew a plan and we started selling whatever we could buy and sell.” To their surprise, they were not only able to repay the loan, “we had made a profit!”
That experience had a lasting impact on her view of business as she puts it, “from that time on, I knew that business was possible after all—even out of nothing!”
But, as Thomas Edison once said, “everything comes to him who hustles when he waits,” more chances were coming her way, “towards the end of our program, we were told that Lesotho National Development Cooperation (LNDC) liked the program.” So LNDC injected some money to support four businesses after a competition among the participants.
That was when the idea of yogurt popped into her mind, “I wanted to make yogurt, I did not want strange business, I wanted something Basotho were already used to, which was just not being locally made.”
She drafted a business and she outpaced hundreds of competitors to win.
That was a legendary springboard, “the money was not much, but it gave me a kick-start, just what I needed. With the additional financial and emotional support of my husband and my mom, I was set to go.”
She bought the equipment and the ingredients and started working right away. But as anyone with an inch of business experience will tell you, “I was not making any profit in the first months and that was demoralising.”
That is, “until I met someone who told me that businesses rarely make any profit in their initial stages, and that my business was just undergoing a natural cycle of business experience.” Infused with renewed strength from the revelation, she soldiered on until she learned from the experiences of others.
For instance, she learned in one knowledge-sharing platform that in business, going with others, not alone, is key, “buy in bulk and share transport costs, that lowers costs dramatically.”
Now she struggles to meet the demand. “I produce 75 litters a week and it is far from enough. One customer asked for 1500 litters a week,” she could only shrug her shoulders.