As someone who has always been passionate about farming ,more especially poultry ,Precious Lorato Menya-Nyajihna took a drastic decision to leave the newsroom in favour of a manufacturing enterprise.
With a diploma in Media Studies and Theology , Menya-Nyajihna had only known work as an english news reader, a field reporter and a radio script writer in South Africa at Radio Mafisa.
Her passion for farming coupled with the skill of manufacturing incubators which she learnt from a friend who used to be in the same business drove her to establish her own enterprise.
In 2020 she opened an incubator manufacturing business based in Pilane called Misis Incubators targeting poultry farmers both the youth and the elderly, especially the retired.
“We started the business because at that time there were not many in this business and it was promising in terms of profitability. We saw that the market was there since many people were now starting to have interest in poultry farming. Then Covid-19 came and it was during the lockdowns that our business boomed, since there was nowhere to get day old chicks and many people resorted to hatching their own chicks,” explained Menya-Nyajihna.
On average Misis Incubators manufacture three incubators in a week depending on the influx of orders.
“Sometimes we don’t produce anything at all if business is low. We haven’t been able to create employment because the business is not stable to allow us to be able to pay employees but I believe in a years time we will be able to employ a few people looking at the fact that we are slowly improving,” said the Masunga native who also worked for Metropolitan Botswana and Botswana Life as a financial advisor.
According to Menya-Nyajihna despite business booming during Covid-19 era due to supply chain challenge for day only chicks, the business is not spared from challenges.
“We are not perfect, we have had many conflicts with customers but we did not give up and worked on perfecting our product. When we started we were mainly focusing on making simple design for the elderly, but trying to make them as efficient as possible and we had to change our design four times until we got it perfectly right. We are now sure of our product though here and there we can have slight mistakes but we are doing well. As we speak I can say our machines are able to give 100 percent hatch depending on the way the owner is following our instructions. We do get complaints here and there from customers but we try as much as possible to help our customers and sort out any issues.. Incubation itself is not an easy process but most of the time we try to help our customers throughout the process if they allow us to,” said the 44- year old.
Menya-Nyajihna’s biggest dream is to be one of the major suppliers of day old chicks not only across the country but also to neighbouring countries which means in future she will like to diversify and add a poultry house.
“There is competition but we focus much on trying to give the best service of our own product which we believe is the best. If you check our incubators they are the easiest to use, and they don’t consume a lot of electricity as compared to other incubators mainly from abroad. We have tried by all means to make our incubators affordable so that even those who are still starting their businesses can be able to afford one,” said the Intect College, Ad Media Cast and Team Work Impact College graduate.
