Like most business owners, Marie Jansen has had to jump in and help out with the operations of her business when a worker fails to pitch up or when something goes wrong. But there are few business owners who can boast at having sewn garments, manned the shop, packed and hauled fish or sorted waste for recycling side-by-side with their workers.
It is a mark of Marie’s long and varied business career that she can also fix a car if need be, and organise the rapid expansion of her recycling business in two towns on the Cape South Coast. But most of all it shows that Marie, the owner of Masiqhame Trading, a recycling company in Plettenberg Bay, is one of those entrepreneurs who is ready to take on any kind of opportunity, confident that she will master the industry by fully immersing herself in it.
Marie says that she has always preferred working outdoors, with her hands and is also dedicated to giving back to her community. She assists small businesses with technical assistance and supports local community initiatives. Together with her family, Marie organizes annual events to benefit the elderly and underprivileged children, providing them with meals, school supplies, and recreational outings.
This is how the hardworking and selfless entrepreneur built her Masiqhame recycling facility into an operation spanning two properties from where her 31 employees and a fleet of 4 vehicles and trailers handle the recycling for the Plettenberg Bay municipality. The company has just won the contract for the recycling of the much larger adjacent town Knysna, which is set to double its operation.
Ever since completing her schooling in Plettenberg Bay in the late eighties, Marie has run her own businesses, starting with sewing garments to support herself and her baby daughter. Then she hawked fish from Plett to Cape Town in her father’s bakkie, and later converted an old bakkie into a mobile shop to sell groceries in the streets of Kranshoek, a neighbourhood in Plett where she lived. It worked so well that others started copying her business, and she moved her business off the streets into a house-based shop.
As employment opportunities opened up for historically disadvantaged people in the late nineties, Marie worked in a few entry-level jobs and before long found herself running the local operations of a fish processing factory. Business opportunities were also opening up, and soon Marie had won her own fishing quota.
At the same time, she agreed to partner with a local emerging entrepreneur who started Masiqhame Trading to win municipal recycling contracts. For a while, it seemed as if Marie would build a fishing company as her main business and participate in recycling as a sideline. She bought her own boat and employed a skipper and crew, and for a while subsidised the recycling business with the income from the fishing quota.
But as fishing stocks collapsed, Marie realised that her small quota could not sustain a growing business, and she decided to sell her boat, outsource her quota, and get stuck into the recycling business. There, her loan account had grown so large that her partner decided to exit, and Marie found herself the sole owner of a small recycling business with about ten workers. The business operated on an open plot, making the sorting operation extremely difficult in the rain, sun and wind.
Marie identified a warehouse in the Plett industrial area and set about finding finance to buy it. She soon realised that the banks avoided recycling plants because of insurance issues, among other things, but Business Partners Limited was willing to back the venture based on the business opportunity and Marie’s entrepreneurial prowess. The business flourished in the warehouse, and soon Marie bought an adjacent warehouse, backed by a second loan from Business Partners Limited. Since taking it over, Marie has grown the business three-fold.
Today Marie’s business sends off up to 108 tons of waste per month for value-added recycling. The Knysna contract is set to double the size of her business, and Marie has started looking to buy a property there for a recycling warehouse. As ever, Marie is keen to take on new opportunities. Rather than selling sorted waste to recycling plants downstream in the industry, as Masiqhame currently does, Marie is exploring the possibilities of setting up her own plastic washing and chipping plant. And she is negotiating with investors to acquire a pyrolysis machine that can turn waste into energy for the municipality, thereby helping to reduce the municipality’s landfill waste to zero.
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