As is reported in today’s issue of the Stabroek Business, on Wednesday, thirty-five small business owners and aspirants, received grants of $200,000 each from the Small Business Bureau (SBB) that ought to go towards the building of their fledgling and in some instances, startup enterprises.
In today’s circumstances where $200,000 does not come close to being a ‘King’s ransom’ it is not the kind of money that will go very far in the way of building a business even though as the Bureau’s Chief Executive Officer Dr. Lowell Porter points out, it is the incremental effort that will get these small businesses over the line. Frankly, it was good to see a gathering of small business owners from communities across Region Four engaged with the Bureau and the image that Wednesday’s event at the SBB’s La Penitence offices conjured up, was that of individuals and families generating jobs and opportunities for themselves and their families.
Starting and sustaining a business requires, among other things, discipline and hard work and even as the Bureau has been both furnishing grants and providing collateral cover for bank loans, some businesses, regrettably, have been falling by the wayside. There is clearly a need for much greater numbers of businesses to ‘stay the course’ and to move on to bigger things.
While the Small Business Bureau continues to face challenges associated with securing funds for small business grants there is some evidence that the entity is learning from the shortcomings of the past. Based on this newspaper’s fairly frequent engagement with the agency’s CEO, it has altered its modus operandi in a few significant ways. First, it seems that business profiles submitted to the agency by small business owners seeking to qualify for grants are being scrutinized more rigorously than in the past so that those ‘slip through’ applications can be minimized. Secondly, the Bureau, it seems, is monitoring the growth and development of these emerging small businesses more scrupulously than in the past as a means of monitoring the wisdom or lack thereof with which grant funds are being spent. Training has also been a matter of enhanced concern for the Bureau in recent times. The CEO has explained to this newspaper on more than one occasion that given the limited nature of funding it is important that expenditure on training by the Bureau reflect itself in the respective performances of the businesses whose owners benefit from training.
As this newspaper understands it the role of the Small Business Bureau is to broaden the base of the small business sector, first, by supporting those that have already been established and secondly by creating an environment in which new ones can emerge and flourish. This newspaper has said in the past that we believe that some of the sub-sectors in the small business sector have done enough to justify the existence of the Small Business Bureau but that, on its own, and without significant state and private sector support is not going to be enough. We have reported in the recent past on the collaborative work of the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association and government to build the manufacturing sector including small businesses in that sector. Up until now, however, evidence of a concrete collaborative effort has not been as much in evidence as it ought to be. That has to change.
