A week ago today the Small Business Bureau (SBB) held its first ever Awards Presentation ceremony to recognize those small businesses which, with its help have been able to grow their enterprises to a level that had won them pleasing levels of recognition and patronage. It was an event which, as the CEO of the Bureau Dr. Lowell Porter himself admitted had been long overdue, but which for a host of reasons took the better part of seven years after the launch of the institution to happen.
It was a pleasant, well-attended occasion with the organizers managing to create a measure of the pomp and splendour attached to similar events held by the more visible Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) which, incidentally, over the years, have not (and we have said this before) done anywhere near enough to further the interests of local small and micro enterprises.
In the course of the evening this newspaper was pleased to see among the recipients of the awards, small businesses that we have covered in pursuit of our objective of providing marketing support for the sector, their accolades suggesting that with the passage of time they had, in some instances, made impressive strides.
The real significance of the event reposed in the opportunity which it afforded to reflect on the work of the SBB in terms of both its achievements and its challenges and to use that assessment to determine to what extent the Bureau has made a contribution to taking the small business sector forward.
Some of its statistical accomplishments, reflected in our lead story in today’s issue of the Stabroek Business and which were articulated in his address by Dr. Porter may not be overly impressive but those have to be seen in the context of the challenges which the Bureau has encountered along the way, not least the resource deficit with which it has had to work since its establishment.
Reflecting on the experience of the SBB during the period of its existence has given rise to another important issue, that is, the quality of the relationship between our local commercial banks and the growth of the private sector. In essence, one of the points made by the Bureau’s CEO appeared to have to do with his disappointment that the vast majority of our commercial banks have opted not to serve as a support mechanism for the institution in pursuit of affording small business owners to enhance the viability of their businesses. The argument that has been made in some quarters is that ‘getting into bed,’ so to speak, with the SBB in pursuit of providing more financial support for small business growth is not consistent with protecting the interests of the banks’ shareholders. That is not an argument which, as far as we are aware, have ever been supported by any particularly cogent argument. On the other hand there is surely something wrong when, in a small economy such as ours, where a fair portion of the savings being held by commercial banks are deposited there by small businesses, the banks appear decidedly disinclined to invest a corresponding measure of faith in the small business sector. Whether or not that will change, going forward, given the anticipated transformational changes in the Guyana economy, is hard to say.
There were other more recent disappointments for the SBB too, by far the biggest one being the failure, due to no fault of the Bureau, to have the 20% set aside clause that affords small businesses access to a sizeable portion of some state contracts implemented. Building small business capacity and ironing out the knots that still deny small businesses access to those state contracts ought to be one of the higher priorities of government and of the SBB, going forward.
The role that the SBB has played in raising the profile of the small business sector and in helping to cause the sector to be seen as worthy of investor interest is to be commended. Here, it has to be said that where there is evidence of the effectiveness of the organization and of the fact that a higher level of efficiency and professionalism is being applied at its operational level, a case, it seems, has been made, for stepped up support for the institution as much by government itself as by the commercial banking institutions.
