SMEs and small practices

Supporting businesses on a day to day. Giving them coaching, mentorship, and helping them structure their businesses is quite critical for the economy and for the future of our country's.

So McGerald's Entrepreneurship Center's vision is to develop and equip businesses so that they become profitable, impactful and inspirational.

So what we do at McGeralds is basically developing programs around SMEs in various sectors be it manufacturing, media, women in tourism, agriculture. And these programs are then developed to address the specific challenges that businesses are faced, be it market access or access to capital, or the real thing, which is supporting the actual entrepreneurs, developing their skills, so that they're able to cope and deal with growth over the years. Supported just over 3000 businesses in the SME space and are currently supporting just over 300 businesses in various programs.

So as a finance professional, I think the unique perspective that I bring in my role at McGeralds Entrepreneurship Center is being able to understand and interpret the numbers for the business, but not for the sake of completing a report, but for the sake of reading and understanding the story that the numbers are telling, and taking that story and narrating it to the business.

I'll give you an example of a business that we supported a few years ago. In three years, the business jumped from 2.1 million to 63 million, which was a 2900% growth. And that did not need an audited financial report, that did not need big terms. It was just basically explaining the numbers and the stories they are telling to the client and saying, how do you fix this problem? The real problem is not that you've got a poor product. It's not that you don't have a market, it's just your working capital cycle is a little bit strange — that we'll spend three months waiting for a shipment to get to South Africa, and then they'll sell the product within a month and place an order. They lose another three months.

So we then introduced that capital into that business that allowed them to propel growth. And I'm glad to say, even today, they are still continuously growing and smashing records in terms of their growth per year.

So the advice I'd give to finance professionals that wish to support SMEs is that avoid being under pressure to sell a service or product, like be it whether it's audit or financial reporting or producing a set of accounts, but rather meet the entrepreneur or the SME at their level and try and get them to understand what their real challenges are, what is relevant to them, and how the world applies to them as it is fast evolving. Be relevant, find relevance in SMEs and make them relevant to their clients too before selling a product as a first step.