The marvellous meat merchants of Rawsonville
We all know at least one sad story of a once-successful family business that went belly-up, just like that. Afterwards it would be attributed to personality clashes or a generation gap – sometimes the old and the young oxen simply wouldn’t pull together or in the same direction; in other cases death came like a thief in the night while no succession plan or strategy had been in place.
In contrast, at 31 Van Riebeeck Street in Rawsonville, about 90km from Cape Town, the Smit family has been managing Chrisma Butchery successfully for 51 years, despite the deaths of three people who were key to the business, which sent gale-force winds of change
