Introducing Makomborero Mutezo, founder of TheHungryMute:
Makomborero Mutezo, founder of TheHungryMute and winner of the Capitec Rising Star award, is in the early stages of building a food design empire.
With a mix of culinary and design skills, plus a curious mind, he shares delicious insights in episode 1 of The Finance Ghost plugged in with Capitec.
Major points covered include:
- The backstory to the business – how travel to Germany inspired a love of food design and connecting cultures.
- The critical importance for entrepreneurs of being curious about the world around you.
- How a combination of skills can create a unique business, but makes it more difficult to scale.
- The long-term value of bootstrapping a business.
- The biggest (and most expensive) mistake made along the way.
- How family support makes such a difference to the process.
The Finance Ghost plugged in with Capitec is made possible by the support of Capitec Business. All the entrepreneurs featured on this podcast are clients of Capitec. Capitec is an authorised Financial Services Provider, FSP number 46669.
Listen to the podcast here:
Read the transcript:
Intro: From side hustles to success stories. This is The Finance Ghost Plugged in with Capitec, where we explore what it really takes to build a business in South Africa. This episode features Makomborero Mutezo, founder of TheHungryMute, purveyors of the finest gourmet brownies.
The Finance Ghost: Welcome to the first episode in this new series, my partnership with Capitec Business Banking. I’m very excited about it! And we are aiming in this podcast series to bring you just wonderful stories of South African entrepreneurs as well as some really useful resources – stuff you can learn from, stories to inspire you and lessons from the real world of these South African entrepreneurs and what they are out there building.
On this episode, we are very lucky, I think, to welcome Makomborero Mutezo. I really like the product that he’s building. These gourmet brownies, they are fantastic. I’ve had the opportunity to taste one myself and I must say, they are delicious.
Now, the business is called TheHungryMute and obviously in this case it’s a play on his surname as opposed to the traditional use of the word mute, which would make it very difficult to have him on a podcast with me of course!
Mako, welcome to this podcast. It’s lovely to do this with you.
Makomborero Mutezo: No, awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
The Finance Ghost: It’s a pleasure. And of course, powered by Capitec Business Banking here, they’re making this all possible and we’re very grateful to them for that.
So I think let’s get into it – and for me, I’ve always believed that if you just do the right things in business, people will notice. I guess you being on this podcast is proof of that. The Capitec team have seen what you’re up to and you got onto their radar and they suggested you as a great guest, and from the chat that we had before this podcast, it was very clear to me that they were 100% right. You’ve recently won a Capitec award as well. So I’m going to open the floor to you to firstly, just tell us what TheHungryMute is all about and then secondly, tell us about this Capitec award and how you got noticed.
Makomborero Mutezo: So, as you mentioned, my name is Mako, also known as Makomborero, and I am the founder of TheHungryMute, which is a food design studio. And what that entails is I’ve combined my background in culinary arts and just the ability to make and create high quality food products in a safe environment, and also things that we can cater to different dietary requirements or cultures. And we combine that with our skill set in design, which means art direction, product design – just so that it’s easier to translate some of the products that we’re creating and also experiences, because we don’t always want to focus on the food that we’re making, but maybe also assisting other people within the food industry or FMCG.
The Capitec award that we won was the Capitec Rise Award. And we won that at one of our biggest markets, which was at the Decorex design convention, which was held in Cape Town. What we basically won was the Rising Star award, meaning that we were a new SMME business that is youth-owned. And we came to become finalists through a selection of panelists that got to go around the Capitec Handmade Africa environment that was there at the Decorex Convention Centre.
The Finance Ghost: Did you feed them brownies? Was this part of their decision?
Makomborero Mutezo: Yeah, that’s the crazy part. As I’m getting there, we were the only brownie company or food stall that was situated in this convention centre that’s not associated with actual design, Decorex.
The Finance Ghost: Amazing.
Makomborero Mutezo: So they selected us based on the hospitality we gave, our product design, our brownies, the quality of them, and also just the unique variation of flavours and dietary options for people to purchase from.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah, I think it’s really clever, right? Because you wouldn’t traditionally think, okay, I’m a food business, let me go to something like Decorex. And yet, because you see yourself in such a design flavour and with that lens as well, there you were. And look at what’s come from that!
It just shows if you can find innovative ways to put yourself out there, including in places where people might not expect to find you, you just broaden your reach and you broaden your appeal in the process, right? And a whole bunch of new people can find you. I think that’s a key learning there.
Makomborero Mutezo: 100%!
The Finance Ghost: You know, as you look at it today, you have the successful brand. It’s a very cool brand. I would certainly encourage listeners to go and check out the website, check out the socials, just look for TheHungryMute. And if you find a whole bunch of really cool looking brownies, you are firmly in the right place, I promise. But like so many businesses, it was humble beginnings here. And that’s always a very inspiring story, I think, when people build something up from just a little bit of an idea and a dream and a bit of experimentation, and then suddenly they wake up one day and they have this wonderful business, there’s so many like that.
What was the backstory here? What was the inspiration for getting you to start this business? How did it actually happen?
Makomborero Mutezo: To track back and just try get you as much information as I can, it was when I was in high school, I already had an idea. They already entertained the idea of what you have to study when you’re done here. And I was already doing screen printing on T-shirts with my friend. I just always wanted to be a part of something that makes high quality items because I saw sneaker brands like Nike. My mother would travel a lot with her work, so I’d always used to ask for sneakers I’d see on the Internet, because I lived on the Internet trying to find how to see the sneaker, the design of it, the quality of it and just the people who are buying it. It was just always related to quality. And I wanted to be associated with an industry that has quality. So that was going to be making something – design and food.
After I went to an exchange program in grade 11 for a German exchange program – I took German as a language and instead of Afrikaans, these opportunities came about – and I was able to see food design studios in Hamburg and Berlin that were operating with this logic of they can connect the designer to the food stylist, to the web developer, to the graphic designer, to the chef, to the packaging department and they’re all in one place. And I really wanted that because now we can look good in terms of the clothing that you dress, the quality of it, you can eat good in terms of the value supply chain, the care, the safety, the food quality. And then also you can present it in the best manner possible. Now we’re looking at retail, we’re looking at the way it’s presented. Graphic designers, the front-end. So just that combination of the back-end and the front-end is how I ended up studying Capsicum, the culinary arts program in Pretoria. And that is where I started my journey, given that I had to return from the exchange program.
The Finance Ghost: Such a lovely story actually. And there’s just so much in there to unpack. I think the one thing that jumped out at me is that you started out not with food, but with T-shirts and design. And I think again, when you talk about the business and you talk about it through this design lens, the food is almost the product – I think later on it had to become something where obviously you went and studied this and everything else, but you have a design lens.
Makomborero Mutezo: Yeah.
The Finance Ghost: So it’s very much about what will this end-product not just taste like, but also look like, which I think is quite interesting and we’ll talk more about that later in the show.
Another thing to just pick up on, or I actually wanted to ask you, is how good is your German? It must have been a pretty interesting experience to go and travel to Germany.
Makomborero Mutezo: Ich spreche Deutsch, ja, ich heiße Mako, und ich bin Food Designer. After that it just goes away because now it’s been, what, six years? I hope to be speaking many languages, because food – you don’t have to speak to someone to get the logic or the recipe or the flavour. But when you put a visual aide to it, now you have to almost acclimate yourself to someone’s culture, language, food biome, nuances.
The Finance Ghost: I think another point to maybe just raise there, which is interesting – we talked about the Decorex experience and how you did something unusual there and how that drove the business you have today. I mean, there’s another great example, right? It’s not the standard choice to say, okay, I’m going to study a European language, maybe in high school, and then go on the exchange program. Again, it’s just all these different things, these experiences come together to give you this unique skill set, this unique lens on the world.
Then you’ve layered on formal education, and I think that these concepts are underappreciated by far too many people. There’s kind of this belief in the market that anyone can start any business, and it’s very easy once it’s successful and you’re looking from the outside in and, oh, I could also have done that. A lot of people think that way. And generally speaking, people who think that way haven’t done it themselves. It’s that old story of it’s very easy to sit on the couch and have a strong view on the game, but it’s not you out there playing it on the field.
And that, I think is one of the key learnings from you, is for those who are interested in entrepreneurship, get out there, learn different things, learn a new language, travel, meet people from a different country. Is that something that you would say is in line with your belief system? It certainly seems that way. And where you do have aspiring entrepreneurs who think that maybe travel is a good thing to layer on, what would your advice be to really get the most from that travel experience, to really grow as much as you can as a person?
Makomborero Mutezo: So when I was a kid, my dad specifically, he loved travelling and he would always do these abrupt and spontaneous – on Sundays, Fridays, Saturdays, we just leave and we drive really far, unnecessarily far, and you’d really get to see the country! And my regards, I didn’t get bored, I would just look. And he spoke quite a few languages so that I’d see the way he’d interact with people. The fact that he can talk to someone from Mozambique and then talk to someone from Limpopo, then talk to someone from KwaZulu-Natal, I thought that was pretty crazy. And in those small conversations, I’m looking at where we’re travelling, I’m looking at where we’re going. I’m looking at the design. I’m looking at the posters. I’m looking at the art on the wall. I’m looking at the graffiti. I’m looking at the quality of the roads. I’m thinking about how businesses operate, because if it was difficult for us, how would it be for a bus that’s travelling there?
So you’ll see the small businesses, you’ll see the large businesses, you’ll see where development is happening, you’ll see where there is money, you’ll see where there’s no money, you’ll see where there’s art, but there’s no support. And all those things, I think, contributed to who I am now. Because when I travel, I’m always looking.
And I like being in a community, going to markets, talking to people, those small things. When people try, say they want to provide an experience, I think travel allows you to do that. And then in your background, you can kind of take all of those experiences and package it – whether it’s an experience, a taste, a nuance, a cultural reference, a colour, all those things. There’s something that always feeds back to the space you are in.
The Finance Ghost: It’s that sort of cultural immersion, but also looking at the world around you. And there’s this interesting chicken-and-egg debate, which is to say, if you are an entrepreneurial-type person, you’ll take whatever experiences are thrown at you and you’ll see them in a different way. Conversely, if you’re not an entrepreneurial-type person, you can go on exactly the same trip, travel to exactly the same places, and your overall observations won’t be anything close to the way you’ve just described it. So, I do believe that not everyone can be an entrepreneur. That’s honestly my view. It’s not always a popular opinion, but I think that is a reality. And I think the trick is if you are someone who is entrepreneurially minded, if you can then throw as many experiences as possible at your brain, you have the best possible chance of then getting to where you want to be.
So, an entrepreneurial person with a lower experience set will still find a way. But if you can get that combination right, where it’s someone who’s just so curious about the world around them – and I think an entrepreneurial mindset is just curiosity. I really do think so. It’s looking at the world around you and saying: wow, how does this work? Why doesn’t this work differently? Why hasn’t someone done this? You see stuff, but you imagine what it could be, right?
Makomborero Mutezo: That was literally me in Germany. The truth about entrepreneurship also is that companies have that global language. So you have to look at it in two ways. It’s either you run the business and you have to get to a point where you have to speak to everyone because there’s 7 billion people. But if you choose to nuance your business, niching out is the hardest thing. Unless you’re in finance, tech, data, or you offer a digital product, how do you speak to everyone when it’s not a digital product? You speak to a very specific target market and that’s not always good for financial growth. So you have to also look at it like that – do you want to make money? And if you do, you’re going to have to learn to talk to everyone. So, yeah. And travel.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah. So it’s an interesting point. I think there is an element that if you want to get really big, then definitely you need a total addressable market – that’s the technical term, or the TAM – needs to be as wide as possible. But I will also say when you are trying to disrupt, you’ve got to try and pick the weakness in the armour. You’ve got to find the little piece that you can go for where you can be different, because you definitely can’t wake up overnight and start fighting with the established players across an entire product range. So most of the disruptors that you see emerge, they start with one thing.
I mean, Capitec actually, who are making this podcast possible, that is a great example. It’s only really now that they’re starting to seriously push into business banking. Before that it was very much retail banking. And just piece by piece, they’re now going after the established names in the market. And I think that’s a really good example of the power of doing that. So as you say, it’s brownies today, it might be something down the line, but you have to start somewhere. You have to start with a product that people can taste at Decorex and that you get noticed with.
Makomborero Mutezo: 100%!
The Finance Ghost: And I don’t know that entrepreneurs do that enough, right? I don’t know that they say, okay, what can I win at upfront?
So this leads me into the next question I wanted to ask you, and then maybe you can comment on that as well, which is around this concept of the combination of skills that make you unique and interesting. And obviously, you take that combination of skills and then you use that to go and disrupt. You use that to go and find just that starting point, just that niche where you can actually get going. And when we were chatting before this podcast, I mentioned Scott Adams to you, the creator of Dilbert, who I came across through Tim Ferriss. And I can honestly say the existence of The Finance Ghost today is largely because of that.
I remember reading that interview, and I closed the book and I thought, okay, that was what I needed to get from this book. Now I need to go and do it. And all it says is: you don’t have to be particularly great at any one thing, but if you’re good at a few things and you can find the intersection of those skills and then build a business around that unique combination of skills, you can end up being great at that combined thing as opposed to great at one thing. And I think what’s interesting with you is it’s the combination of the design skillset and the food and this worldliness, curiosity, travel – if you add all three of those things together, you’re a very interesting and unique person, and you’re using that to then go and build a business. So I’m curious what your thoughts are on that and whether that feels like it’s been your experience.
Makomborero Mutezo: That’s a super great question. And I’d like to combine it with what you just said previously about how many entrepreneurs don’t always grab one thing and then focus on it.
So, yes, I think I noticed it maybe three years ago or four years ago. It wasn’t long. It was two years before I started the business. Just after Corona. I remember I was stuck and I couldn’t even start a product at that time. I really wanted to, but I couldn’t because everything was shut down. Just the idea of one of our flavours, Pitori Chipi, we use ube. And ube is not grown in Africa, so how would I even have gotten that ingredient in Africa, let alone worry about getting out of my own house?
So at that time, I was using my skill set in graphic design and website design, because prior to starting the business, we’re always doing website designs for people on WordPress, so it wasn’t difficult to sell those services to people.
And as time slowly increased and the lockdown parameters released and got a little bit calmed down, I started noticing something unique. So as the people I assisted in design got open and money started flowing again and they were in the economy, they wanted services in food and products and small things like birthdays, weddings, baby celebrations, or even a baby shower. And I was thinking to myself, I find it interesting how all these clients are all still being funnelled through me and I’m still doing the same creative services. But I went from design into now making muffins and then packaging them or making biscuits and I’m packaging and labelling them and I’m designing the boxes and the dielines or making a bridal shoot and we are now creative directing how the food should look and what the plating and catering should look like.
And then I was like, okay cool, now something special is happening here and I can’t ignore it because now I can literally help someone print a T-shirt, I can facilitate the actual process, project manage it, I can also do client management – it’s not just being kind, but it’s managing a client, making sure there’s business in the future – and I’ve also learned that I’m not an entrepreneur because I can do everything. I’m someone who’s trying to make sure that this business is financially, legally and just, just good. You know, when you get there, there’s a department for design and there are deliverables that we need to meet. There’s a department for food and the food safety is there. Occupational Health and Safety is there. Ingredient selection, value supply chain and preparation as a chef. And then there’s the food designer who’s thinking about all of these things and putting them together. Art direction, food styling, website, product development.
And when you start addressing and being accountable to yourself, you realise that it’s really not about entrepreneurship, but it’s more like this has to be done or else I’m not going to be having a conversation with The Finance Ghost. I’m not going to go to Decorex Cape Town. I’m not even going to do all the markets we did in Pretoria. I also have to make all these other people’s jobs easier by combining those skill sets and showing up, but also focusing on one thing so that I don’t do too many things.
And that’s what I realised – as the youth, that’s where we get stuck. You want to do one thing, but then you end up doing so many things around that one thing, you complicate it. Where you should do one simple thing and then make everything around that thing complicated, like I’ve gone through – cargo is complicated, getting brownies up and down. Dielines – complicated, expensive, but worth it. Flavour selection – complicated, but people love the flavours and the ingredients. It gets simplified through the vessel of a brownie.
The Finance Ghost: So I think that comment around just how many skills you need to actually get a business off the ground, it really resonates with anyone who has started a business because again, if you want to be a small business owner, you are going to have to learn how to do every single process in a business, at least to some extent. And then you’ll find that you’ll need to get specialists in, where you either just run out of talent or it’s something that is so fundamental to the business that you need to get someone in who knows how to actually do it. So, case in point, I can’t build a website in WordPress, but I run the back end of my website. I do all my own uploading of stuff, all the images, all the resizing – I’ve certainly learned my way around Canva and all those sort of tools, etc. It’ll never be 1% as good as your design work, because I don’t see it as design. I see it as just making the images, just the basic stuff, that’s it.
There’s another concept that comes through in what you’re saying, which is how people also want to work with people they like. So if you can go to them and you can build them a website and they like you, then if you can also sort out brownies for their next function, they’ll use you as well. They have no reason not to. And this is another point about entrepreneurship, is it’s about building that network of relationships. And you’ve got to do everything well enough that people then recommend you to their friends.
So my favourite quote of all time is: greatness is a lot of small things done well. And the point is that it’s not about doing one thing particularly great. It’s about a whole bunch of small things. And if you do each one really well, it adds up to greatness. And that really comes through, I think, in what you’re saying.
But the problem with this combination of skills, of course, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, as I’ve experienced, it’s very hard to scale yourself. It’s very hard to find someone who has the same combination of skills as you. What you have to end up doing then is figuring out, at least in my experience, is almost figuring out which part of your skills can maybe be outsourced, or how can you get some help that actually doesn’t detract from what you’re doing as a whole?
What’s your experience been with this, in terms of finding another person like you to help in the business? Has it been a struggle to find help? How have you approached this? Because it’s one of the biggest challenges for any entrepreneur.
Makomborero Mutezo: That’s a beautiful question. When I started the business – we’ll talk about it later, but my mother’s a professor, so I’ve seen the academic side of a thesis and the intention behind it. When I started my business, knowing that food design is not in the country, this is my thesis project. So by the time I get to Barcelona and go study, my goal was basically that all of these skill sets that I have, at least find one person within them in the industry who can always be assisting or helping you. Almost like freelancing, but you have them on like a payroll, but not really like a payroll – they only work on work when you give it to them.
So the idea when I was looking at food design, I wanted to feed the people that could possibly help me. So not only am I sharing my skill set, but I’m also sharing my community.
A close friend works in design and he works for an agency, but I can easily ask him to do the work and pay him agreed amount. And that work can be done very efficiently without me having to do everything in one day because I don’t have time. Or sometimes if I need my dielines, someone at the factory that we print at, we have a great relationship, so I’ll just leverage the person who’s already there in our value supply chain to assist us, instead of me always trying to find youth to help because skill and things that need to be done are always not on the same level.
So I just always – the people that I’m building relationship with now, I use them to help us when things get really tough. And I don’t have all the skill sets to do it at the same time.
The Finance Ghost: It’s not going to be an easy journey, but it’s something that will have to happen over the next few years because of course there’s only one of you. And that does make, that does make it difficult, right?
Makomborero Mutezo: Yeah.
The Finance Ghost: I think we need to move on to funding. And obviously this is such a tough thing for entrepreneurs. It comes up all the time and entrepreneurs always say there are low levels of access to capital and people need to lend to SMEs and invest more in SMEs.
My background is in investment banking. I understand the risk weightings that get put on these things. And unfortunately, many SMEs are just not investable. There’s a reason why they can’t raise funding, is because they’re not investable at that early stage, sadly. And then over time they become more investable and that’s where obviously the likes of a business bank like Capitec will step in etc. But I think what’s really interesting with you and what I think is always a very good approach for any entrepreneur, if they can get it right, is to bootstrap their business. So instead of going and raising equity and getting other shareholders and all the complexities that brings down the line, you bootstrapped this business, much like I did with mine.
And I think what’s particularly cool is that you shared with me…
Makomborero Mutezo: I’m in the club!
The Finance Ghost: Yeah. Look, it’s not always an easy thing. I had a lot of luck along the way, I’m not going to lie, I really did – in terms of consulting opportunities that could pay the bills in the meantime. Very inspired by the Phil Knight and Nike story in Shoe Dog. I always recommend to people, if you’re going to read one of the books along those lines, make sure you read Shoe Dog because it shows you that the hustle is real. It’s the cliché, but it’s so true.
And I think there was a lot of hustle for you. There was a lot of using your skills to pay for services. That’s part of how you bootstrapped. I’m just curious what your thoughts are, looking back on that process. Would you go back and do it again? Would you recommend it to other entrepreneurs as well?
Makomborero Mutezo: Great question. This is even a short answer, hey – 100% recommend bootstrapping! Just need to make sure that you’re emotionally stable person and you know how to regulate yourself. And that’s a serious thing. No jokes, man. Like really regulate yourself.
Two, I appreciate bootstrapping because it teaches you how to pay back people. Because of that community that I leverage, if you don’t pay someone, they won’t do the work that you ask them to do. Even if you haven’t – like, they won’t do it. Just pay people.
Number three, more work gets done and you become a more reliable person when you bootstrap. Because as you make the money, you have promises and you need to pay things back. And the only way to bootstrap, from what I’ve noticed is, as you’re making the money, there’s not really profit. It’s all about making sure that you have an opportunity to continue bootstrapping for time immemorial until things are a little bit better. And it’s super great. It’s super amazing, and it’s taught me so many lessons that I don’t think being invested in would have showed me. Because it’s different when you have to pay for cargo and you know that the money you made two weeks ago has to stay. Or, it’s different when you have to ask that one person – one thing I’m proud of, I don’t ask a lot of people for money, which is great because I’m not here to become a credit facility’s best customer.
Bootstrapping is great. I fully recommend it. It’s a great lesson to learn. And if you’re young, that’s the best way to just figure out how money flows up and down, especially when it’s not on someone else’s pocket. It’s your pocket.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah. And without getting into any of the technical financial stuff, which I think is well outside the scope of what we’re trying to do in this podcast series. But equity capital is the most expensive capital you can raise. It feels like the cheapest because it doesn’t come with an interest cost, but long term, it’s the most expensive source of finance. And the beauty of bootstrapping early on, is if a day comes where you do want to raise equity capital, you’re now speaking to a potential investor from a position of immense strength. It’s like, hey, I have a track record, I have a business – and then you suddenly are holding the cards. Actually, I’m the asset here. You are just money, and so is everyone else. So why should I be with you? As opposed to when you’re raising without that track record, you’re kind of on your knees saying, please, just give me a chance.
And of course, down the line, as that business is more established, you also can then actually raise debt, which is the cheapest source of finance. It just comes with interest cost. Once the debt’s repaid, you still own the whole business.
So it is an important lesson, I think, for entrepreneurs to learn over time. As I say, beyond the scope of this, but something that I think is always worth mentioning. And, yeah, much respect for bootstrapping. I think it is the way to go, if you can.
Makomborero Mutezo: Game recognises game.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah, yeah, exactly. One of the questions I wanted to ask you as well, which is quite a cliché question for a podcast like this, but I think it’s a good one nonetheless, which is just around mistakes. And every business owner has made them! Do you have one that you remember as your most painful, most hurtful?
Makomborero Mutezo: Yes!
The Finance Ghost: There we go. Straight away, the man says yes. Okay, let’s hear it. What was that ugly situation?
Makomborero Mutezo: So, four weeks before DStv Food Festival, I was super excited, super keen. In terms of the business, as I said, we’re very global. It’s an African – biggest African food festival. And food and beverage. Food and drink. I’ve been seeing this since DStv was in my house, yoh 10 years back.
So, like, now we’re there, I’m super excited. And this was the first time we actually got into, as you saw with the bootstrapping and equity leverage, manufacturing, you know, now we’re pushing brownies. I’m baking more than 40 batches at once.
So, cool. It’s the first time I do it. And 40 batches is equivalent to, let’s just say – I’ll tell you how much it’s worth. But 40 batches were put in. I did immense planning, immense value sourcing for the ingredients and the value supply chain. I did everything to the T. All the mistakes I made to get to this point, I thought I was ready. Budgeting is great. Everything is beautiful. And it was a afternoon, 3 o’clock, I was at my incubation in Silverton and they were about to knock off, two hours before 5 o’clock. And I messed up 40 batches of brownies because of one little mistake!
And the reason I remember this mistake was because there was a domino effect. The reason I forgot the recipe and that bulk sizing was because I was stressed and worried that as an entrepreneur, that all these risks I took actually culminated to something efficient. So when I noticed that I forgot a particular amount of flour, all those 40 were already bad. And you think to yourself, I hope you didn’t waste them. No, I didn’t waste them. We found a way to resuscitate them, but they just want that quality that got me to DStv, if you can get what I’m saying. So now I was stuck with all of these things and like, oh, I was dead. I was two days before the show. I didn’t want to do it anymore. We had designed a new bar table, it wasn’t done. There’s so many things going wrong. And that batch was worth R16,000.
And I’m looking at this, I’m just like, yoh, that could have been profit, plus markup. And it had a real knock on effect. But I had to get over myself. I did the show. We didn’t sell out. People bought, great. SA Tourism saw us and they loved one of our flavours and there were more positive than there were negatives. But I’d never lost so much money like that on my own accord under a business structure. So, yeah, that was the biggest mistake, I guess.
The Finance Ghost: Ja, no, it hurts. I mean, I can imagine. And this is the problem with the food business, right? You’re only as good as your last product, the last thing that someone tasted, you’ve got this one shot, they’re probably going to buy something from you, possibly only ever once, maybe. Or you’ll get repeat customers and they’ll come through. It’s got to be good every single time. That really is difficult and especially when you’re doing a show that size or whatever. So, yeah, it’s not a joke.
Again, if entrepreneurship was easy, absolutely everyone would be doing it. But they are not. And this is just one of the hundred reasons why not.
May that be your biggest ever mistake. I will tell you, in the greater scheme of where you’re heading in your life, R16k, I think you said, is thankfully not a lot versus where you’re going to take this thing. So may it stay that way.
I think looking to the future as we start to finish the podcast off, just in terms of the next few years for you, strategically, where is your ambition with this business? What would move the dial to get you there? And let’s face it, people might be listening to this podcast and I’m sure they’ll be thinking, wow, this is an impressive young entrepreneur. We need to chat to this guy. What kind of conversations do you want to be having? What moves you forward?
Makomborero Mutezo: Oh, that’s great. So the first five, I’d say now conversations I’d have, would be financial investment in terms of not just money, but like someone who comes through and says, listen, I know you want a distribution centre, I know you want to set up a shop, I know it’s not an outlet – it needs to be able to bake, produce, package and ship. Let’s have a conversation and get maybe 150 square metres and see where we can start from there.
Second conversation I’d love to have is maybe speak to people in the packaging industry who have access to creating dielines and just making it easier for us to make more products that aren’t always associated to paperboard. Maybe they can assist us with making sealable plastics that are eco-friendly or they can help us get pouches that we can design and just make it a little bit more efficient in terms of how we package our products.
Thirdly, it would be helping us begin our community engagement or NPO. The idea there is I usually give out brownies to orphanages because I know that they don’t have parents and they have birthdays. So it’s a nice way to celebrate someone’s birthday, without buying a cake. I’d love to do a lot more, giving back because that’s super important, just to me at least – the business started in a church, so the community element is super important to me. And having an NPO, a strong one would be great, because brownie points – the point is it gives itself away!
Then the fourth one would be educational. Staunch – I believe in education because as we feed designers, we’re feeding into the idea that these are the people that build our world. Whether it’s financial, digital, design, industrial, these are the people that feed and make our world. So I think it’s always good to feed back into education so that we can have more food designers in South Africa. And having more food designers is only going to increase the quality of the food product and also just any food experience relating to our country’s food ecosystem.
And then the last one would probably just be scaling on a real measure – IDC chats, how do you get a factory? Something like Krispy Kreme in Midrand, where not just the distribution centre, but now you’ve got trucks going to markets. We’re helping youth with jobs for the first two years of when they go into varsity. How can we really get people jobs? One thing I’ve solved for myself, when I started this, I worked and now I’m not working, but I’m working for myself.
The Finance Ghost: You know, you talked about community there. You clearly are someone who thinks about how what you’re building can actually have a positive impact on others. And you’ve mentioned your family a few times, which is interesting. And I know that you’ve mentioned to me that your mom is a professor in risk management. You talked about how, I think you said your dad would pack you guys in as a family and go on these long drives. But the hilarious thing about this and the universe definitely has a sense of humour is if I understood correctly, you and your siblings are basically all entrepreneurs who got sent to this mom who is a professor in risk management. I mean, I can imagine the sleepless nights this poor woman has suffered, thinking about your businesses! But of course it’s risk management, right? Not risk avoidance. And maybe that’s where the skill comes from. So, I just want to finish off there. Just talk to us about the extent to which this family setup has really played a role in what you think you’ve built.
Makomborero Mutezo: It’s played a super important role because one thing I will say unapologetically is sometimes it’s not always about the person’s role as what they do and what they did, but just being able to grow up and the life I’ve had and being around my mother, who was also in risk management, and then my sister, who has a business that’s over 10 years old now, Madam Waste – just being around them has affected me. Not only the discussions we had or blatantly talking about entrepreneurship and looking at the examples around them, looking at the thesis papers, looking at how many people don’t succeed, looking at how many people actually fail. There’s a lot of youth that don’t make it to where I am. And I can appreciate that because that’s a fact. It’s not my emotion and it’s like I see that through what my mother does and what my sister does and what my brother shares with me. So, they have been super supportive. And I’m not only talking financially, but just the idea that they were willing to hear these risks I took because I told them five years ago what I’m going to do. And it’s such a blessing to live through those words that we see that what I actually did is what I said.
The Finance Ghost: Thank you so much. I mean, this has been such a great conversation. It’s actually been quite a lot longer than we initially planned, but there’s been so much to unpack and it’s absolutely been worth it. I would encourage anyone listening to this, if you have found this to be an impressive conversation as I have, then go and check out thehungrymute.co.za. Go and have a look at the delicious brownies. I strongly recommend you don’t go on an empty stomach because you will start to convince yourself that you should be hitting the order button. Although of course, maybe that’s what you should be doing!
So go and look at it when you’re hungry. Go and buy some brownies.
My thanks to Capitec Business Banking for making this podcast possible and for just putting the spotlight on such a great, feel-good South African story. We really are such an innovative, creative country and I think we have an amazing food culture, and it’s so good to see this kind of thing coming through.
So, Mako, I really wish you all the very best, and I do hope you won’t be a stranger. And I look forward to seeing this brand go from strength to strength, which I’m very sure it’s going to.
Makomborero Mutezo: I am super lus for the future, and I appreciate the time and the platform.
The Finance Ghost: Brilliant. Ciao.
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