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The advent of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry-staged Small Business Week provided a platform for local small businesses, across the sectors, to showcase both their creative skills and their entrepreneurial strengths in a country where state support for micro and small businesses remains well below what it ought to be. It did more than that. Put differently, we have been slow in getting ‘off the mark’ insofar as the expansion and strengthening of the small business sector never mind the fact that we are now in an infinitely better position to move in that direction just a few years ago. Even now, we are being provided with insights into potentially lucrative business opportunities which, while falling outside the direct ambit of the oil and gas sector, can benefit significantly from openings that are linked, both directly and indirectly to the pursuits of that sector.
Here, the accommodation and entertainment sectors come readily to mind. Beyond those, though to an extent that, at least for now, remains unclear, sectors like the craft and fashion industries in which, significantly, modest local investors have a considerable interest, have benefitted from some degree of external interest.
The past week and a bit saw the staging of two events – the first, the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce’s (GCCI) Small Business Week and the second, last Thursday’s Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) – annual dinner – both of which raised issues that have a bearing on the growth of the small business sector. Some of these issues are linked in ways that are deserving of public comment.
Whichever political party or clutch of parties has held the reins of office in Guyana, over the years, government has always been inclined to spread its political ‘wings’ in a manner that allows it to exert a measure of ‘control’ over the extent of the latitude that the private sector enjoys. Whether that ‘oversight’ has worked to the benefit of the private sector is, at the very least, questionable.
These days, the availability of petro dollars having removed the excuse of a lack of resources from the table, government continues to maintain a (somewhat relaxed) bureaucratic fence around the private sector. In the instance of the small business sector the most prominent of those control structures is the Small Business Bureau (SBB) which utilizes state-crafted mechanisms to ‘administer’ the sector. A great many of small business owners that ‘do business’ with the Small Business Bureau frown on the procedures associated with the support that it provides. Out of necessity, they have assumed a kind of grin-and-bear-it attitude.
Contextually, it is, not at all insignificant that in his presentation at the GMSA’s Gala Dinner last Thursday, the Association’s President, Ramsay Ali, made a point of calling for a “seat” at the ‘table’ occupied by the SBB. Mr. Ali’s call, one feels, was an oblique attempt to make the point that the GMSA, given its particular ‘portfolio’ within the business sector, can teach the SBB a thing or two about how it should be functioning in the contemporary business environment.
While the GMSA President Mr. Ali was mindful to say that he was in no way implying that the SBB was being “mismanaged,” it seemed as though he was seeking, in language that would give minimal offence, to make the point that the overarching state-driven modus operandi that informs the operating culture of the SBB could do with a generous measure of overhaul, through the infusion of some conventional private sector practices with which his organization is familiar.
This is a matter on which the government must decide and one must wait to see whether the GMSA’s idea is embraced by government.
One of the significant opportunities for the strengthening of the local micro and small business sector reposes in the exposure which the recently concluded Small Business Week afforded for bringing micro and small businesses into the limelight.
Ingenuity, creativity and the taking of initiative would appear to have become some of the hallmarks of the significant numbers of young men and, particularly, women, who continue to embrace various forms of entrepreneurship. During the various exchanges which the Stabroek News had with some of these youngsters during the course of the Small Business Week, they displayed an appetite not just for the creation and marketing of new products and services; they also demonstrated a proclivity for earnestly seeking out avenues for growth and expansion. They are preoccupied with finding their own spaces within a private sector-driven economy.
Their entrepreneurial postures suggest that while they need the material support which the state is positioned to provide they are impatient with what they regard as the ponderous procedures that obtain in seeking help from state agencies established precisely for the purpose of providing support.
The ‘message’ which this ‘brand’ of emerging small business owners would appear to be sending is that state agencies charged with supporting the growth of the small business sector need to read the tea leaves and adjust their operating postures to match the entrepreneurial exhalation that is occurring at this time.
This is not to say that the state has no substantive role to play in supporting the growth of the small business sector. What it certainly says, however, is that state institutions that are, in various ways, charged with supporting the growth of the small business sector, cannot function effectively unless they are possessed of a conceptual understanding of their particular role.
Setting aside access to funding through fair, structured and generally expeditious types of loan and grant arrangements other services that can be offered through state institutions should include the creation of convivial trading spaces for small businesses, the financing of high-cost facilities (like agro processing factories) that can serve as shared production facilities as well as logistical and other forms of marketing support. There is, as well, room for training in areas that include both substantive entrepreneurship and disciplines that are directly related to the respective production processes which government can contribute to through infrastructure support.
The problem here is that young small business owners/aspirants keen to get off the mark, have no appetite for the ‘red tape,’ ‘tra-la-la’ and, frequently, the crass ‘politicking’ that often attends efforts by small business owners seeking access to one or another form of support from the state.
To return to the GMSA President’s Small Business Bureau ‘seat at the table’ idea, it comes across as a perfectly worthwhile one. The GMSA can not only play a critical decision–making role in the SBB at an operational level, it can, also, provide the Bureau with the kind of ‘hard-nosed’ business-driven template that derives from its own experience in managing one of the country’s foremost Business Support Organizations over many years.
Given what is assumed to be a strong commitment on the part of the GMSA to the growth of the private sector, including the small business sector, there appears to be no good reason to deny the body a seat at the ‘SBB’ table.
Whether government, with its innate propensity for ‘control’ will see it that way, however, is an altogether different matter.
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