Not having enough financial support when your business is still in its infancy stage can be a blessing in disguise because it teaches you to think out of the box, fine-tuning your business ideas, collaborate, bootstrap, and finance your growth until you get where you want to be.
These are words of an entrepreneur Tumi Matsebedi, who is the founder and Managing Director of Temo Process Technologies, a 100% black-owned South African small enterprise and a solutions provider to the minerals processing industry based in Ekurhuleni municipality in Gauteng.
Matsebedi studied Metallurgical Engineering at the Vaal University of Technology. After completing his studies, he worked in coal mines as part of his graduate work experience programme and went on to spend close to 10 years working in technical sales and the valuable experience he gained propelled him to venture into entrepreneurship.
“Some of the well accomplished business leaders in my industry started off working as metallurgists and went to on form some of the biggest technology companies in South Africa, so taking the leaf out of their book and making the transition from being a technical sales employee to starting my own business wasn’t difficult,” he said.
Established in 2010, Temo Process’ team consists of highly skilled metallurgists with extensive experience in fines beneficiation and speciality in key technologies. And the company’s offering is segmented into three: mineral processing technologies, mineral processing consumables and mineral processing services.
Their core focus is fines beneficiation in various commodities such as ferro-chrome, chromite, coal, and iron ore with the objective of helping clients increase efficiency and sustainability.
The journey hasn’t been smooth sailing for Temo Process. Matsebedi says they’ve had ups and downs along the way and like most small enterprises, they were severely impacted by the on-going Covid-19 pandemic and the hard lockdown restrictions that government imposed during the outbreak of the virus in the country.
“Before the Covid-19 outbreak we were a team of 25 employees and had to downsize due to the situation’s negative effects. We didn’t give in but instead chose to revise our business approach and strategies to mitigate challenges,” elaborates Matsebedi.
“We’ve leveraged technology and digital solutions to provide a distinctive value proposition; develop clearer market access strategies; drive efficiency as well as sales; develop team skills and capabilities; and empower leadership, and being part of Hatch supplier development programme assisted us greatly in this regard- as a result, we’re in the process of adding five new full-time employees to the team to support our growth initiatives,” he added.
Temo Process has been part of the Hatch supplier development program since 2018. The programme’s objective is to provide business support and development, skills development as well as building new capabilities and capacity in small businesses.
One of the recent notable projects that Temo Process delivered for one of their clients is a chrome recovery plant. They designed and built the plant on their own and were able to achieve more with very little resources.
“The plant was very small in footprint and the consumption of water and other utilities was very little compared to plant built by our competitors. We were running the plant using a very lean model. We only focused on minerals processing and outsourced the maintenance aspect of the project to the local companies and that doubled up as an empowerment for them. And we were able to defy the odds and achieve great success through creating a culture of pride, efficiency, and unity” explains Matsabedi.
