Maxwell Nurse concedes that when he embarked on his first entrepreneurial venture, M&M Graphics in the late 1990s his knowledge of the essentials of running a business was limited to a decidedly deficient understanding of the concept of making a ‘mark up.’ Even now, as the head of S&S Multi Media, a creative arts enterprise operating at 436 Westminster, West Bank Demerara, he is still trying to find his entrepreneurial feet, so to speak. His company produces banners, posters and fliers and does advertising graphics for local companies. Nurse’s short-term ambition is to invest in hi-tech equipment that would enable him to further diversify into animation.
It was because of his decision to engage the Small Business Bureau to secure its blessings for a loan from a local commercial bank that Nurse was introduced to the local franchise of the international business coaching service, Action Coach. Although the experience is yet to secure a complete turnaround in his outlook, he concedes that he has now embarked on a more enlightened course.
“Essentially, I am beginning to understand the mechanics of running a business; the essence of management, goal-setting. I understand now that my business is about much more than understanding the software that I use as part of my trade,” he says.
Nurse says he has had the notion for some time now that something was wrong. It was not that his company had not been securing contracts. He was seeing little if any growth and his financial gains were marginal. A point had been reached where he began to question himself.
Nurse is not unique in his challenge. Over time, this newspaper has spoken to scores of small business owners whose options were more-or-less dictated by their circumstance, that is, difficulty in finding paid employment. Many of them had received relatively modest sums of start-up capital from relatives abroad to invest in one or another ill-conceived enterprise.
Their business plans had been limited to mimicking initiatives that had appeared to work for other people. Some of these enterprises persist in an environment of an absence of growth. Others have already gone under. Nurse has no real option. His goal is to build a business for his children.
After he approached the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry (GBTI) in pursuit of a $3 million loan to secure computer equipment for his animation project, he was referred to the Small Business Bureau.
The upshot of his engagement with the bank is that he has been ‘cleared’ for a loan of $1 million. That amount is not sufficient to meet the full extent of his investment needs. At least, however, through his association with Action Coach he is beginning to learn to manage a business sustainably.
His current entrepreneurial preoccupation is with the production of an illustrated comic and in the longer term, an animated DVD that targets in-school and out-of-school youths. In the period ahead he plans to engage the Ministry of Education and its Learning Channel, UNICEF and UNDP in the hope of creating partnerships to take his project forward. Meanwhile, he remains keenly attentive to what he says is the “critical learning experience” being provided by Action Coach which, he says, will set his feet on a new path.
