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When Bidvest announced it had appointed Mpumi Madisa as its next chief executive, it not only raised eyebrows, but flooded the company with compliments for finally breaking the glass ceiling.
Replacing Lindsay Ralphs, who has been with Bidvest since 1992, was never going to be an easy decision for the 30-year-old company but it seems that, with the baton set to be passed to Madisa, the company has finally found the woman for the job.
City Press met up with the Sebokeng-born corporate gladiator at the company’s head offices in Melrose Arch, in northern Johannesburg, and got a clear idea of the woman now tasked with steering one of the biggest conglomerates in the country, with over 200 subsidiaries.
Born into a family of four siblings as the only girl, to a mother who was a teacher and father who worked in insurance, Madisa started schooling at Santa Maria convent school and matriculated from Mondeor High School.
“A month before I wrote my matric exams, my parents split, so when I started university my mother made it clear there was no money for beyond registration. It was clear that I had to pass whatever I was studying and needed to apply to the Tertiary Education Fund of SA (now the National Student Financial Aid Scheme) for funding,” she says.
At Wits University, though she missed the deadline to apply for medicine, she managed to enrol for a Bachelor of Science degree, with the hope of transferring to medicine in her second year ... but an encounter with a rat changed the course of her career.
“Midway through my first year we were required to operate on a rat and that’s when I realised that could not be my life. I am very terrified of rats, even now, and I was required to operate on it and with all the blood and mess, my lecturer just asked me if I realised that I had killed my ‘patient’. That is when I knew that I had chosen the wrong career and there was no way I was going to reach year seven,” she says.
Like the problem solver she is, Madisa found a way to change majors and took up mathematics, statistics and economics, and ended up graduating without changing course streams.
After graduating, she was recruited by Hollard Insurance as a trainee marketing assistant, a position she was initially reluctant to take because she was not keen on joining a marketing team, not having studied for it. At the time she also had an option of joining a Cape Town-based maritime company or a local private bank.
“At the time they were doing something called cross-pollination and they would place people with different skills in teams that were generally homogenous and I was convinced to join that team,” she says of her first job.
Eighteen months after joining Hollard, she left to join Prestige, a Bidvest subsidiary specialising in cleaning, as client relations manager, a position that was created for her and the beginning of a career trend.
“I didn’t know at the time it was a Bidvest subsidiary. The CEO told me my job was to tell them why they were losing clients despite getting a lot of new business,” Madisa says.
Tasked with finding the answers, she probed and presented her analytics report which indicated the challenge was in fact “something called BEE” and the next task was finding out what exactly black economic empowerment was and how it was the solution to the company in operation in such an environment.
Three years later, she had moved up the corporate ladder, but realised she had missed out on a lot of valued experience so went out looking for exactly that.
This led her to public service where she was chief director of transformation at the Gauteng department of agriculture and rural development.
“Again that directorate did not exist and I was the first there. My time in government was probably my richest experience. I got exactly what I wanted,” she says of the experience she credits for making her expertise multifaceted.
She adds it was also the most difficult, as she experienced some of the horrors the public service is known for.
“The only reason I left was the elections were around the corner and the political nuances were heightened and there was not much work being done and I am not a political person. While pondering leaving I bumped into my old boss at Prestige and he asked me to return, but we agreed that I would not be doing transformation as I already knew it like the back of my hand,” Madisa says.
On returning to Prestige, a new portfolio was created as corporate affairs director in charge of four departments. She later moved to sales director where her impressive turnaround of the underperforming sales earned her a request to do the same job at group level and a few months later she was appointed to the board.
Madisa said that, when the group announced she would be the next in line to head the company, she was not really surprised as she had had the conversation on succession with Bidvest founder Brian Joffe as early as six years ago.
“There was a conversation that said, if you do this right, the leadership role is within reach,” said the graduate of a master’s degree in corporate finance, which she completed within a year.
Read: Bidvest flushes bid from SAA
Speaking about what the move meant, Madisa says she was delighted.
“I am excited that for the last 30 years, Bidvest has had a particular style of leadership that is quite similar and, as a black woman, my style would be different and exciting for the 130 000 people who work for the company, who are predominantly South African. When Bidvest was started, I was nine years old and it was a dream.
“When Brian started, he had no idea that a young girl from Sebokeng would lead it one day,” Madisa says, adding that she has learnt invaluable lessons from outgoing chief executive Ralphs and Joffe.
She says she was also excited at leading the conglomerate into the fourth industrial revolution.
The wife and mother of one loves nothing more than watching television soapies and being with family whenever she has time to spare.
She is passionate about travelling and mentoring, and it’s the latter that lights up her face when she elaborates on how she loves mentoring businesses.
Having broken a few glass ceilings of her own through her career, it seems Bidvest might be planning to break a few more boundaries with her appointment.
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