Limpopo hatchery goes to the next level

Although Clive Tigere obtained a university degree in statistics, he turned his back on an office job and returned to Louis Trichardt in Limpopo to start a hatchery. He explained to Susan Marais how his success is helping his clients' businesses thrive.

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Anybody who believes in the motto ‘go big or go home’ has clearly never met 28-year-old Clive Tigere. He is going big in his own home town of Louis Trichardt, Limpopo.

Tigere and his mother, Dr Caroline Tigere, started a broiler operation back in 2011, when he was still in high school.

“Things have changed very much since then. At that time we bought our chicks directly from a hatchery, and our feed from a mill,” he remembers.

By the time he matriculated, business was booming and he and his mother were selling1 000 live birds a day. “That was good money. We sold birds at R40 each, which means we had a turnover of R40 000 a day.”

EDUCATION FIRST

Tigere was reluctant to leave the business after matric for further education, as he was simply not keen to go to university. But his mother, a gynaecologist, won this battle.

“She said I had to first study and then I could do whatever I wanted,” he recalls. “I come from a family that believes in a strong educational foundation.”

So he left the country’s northernmost province for the southernmost, the Western Cape, where he obtained a BSc at the University of Cape Town, majoring in statistics and analytics.

“After completing my studies I had various job offers,” he recalls, adding that some of these were from overseas. “But I returned home!”

His reason was simple: the chicken challenge was still nagging him, and he could now tackle it as a graduate, with newly gained knowledge that he could inject into the business.