Local small business owners and aspirants hoping to access state support for the setting up or expanding of existing entrepreneurial ventures are of the view that the recent official disclosure that the state-run Small Business Bureau has established a ‘window’ (a Resource Centre) through which small business owners and, presumably, prospective owners, can benefit from somewhere they can go to and get readily available information that can assist them with business growth issues, should not become the victim of yet another tier of bureaucratic clutter.
The new support window, the official disclosure says, is being established to facilitate the registration of businesses and issues on which small business owners and prospective owners will have to engage key state agencies including the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the National Insurance Scheme (NIS), among others, as well as entities responsible for addressing issues pertaining to insurance and brokerage, among other matters.
These all being issues that currently give rise to what, frequently, amounts to a ‘run around’ for inexperienced business owners, the disclosure regarding the setting up of a one-stop entity through which a range of critical information can be secured, is a disclosure that is more than worth bringing to public attention given what we know to be the marked increase in the numbers of younger Guyanese – mostly women – who are experiencing challenges in their journeys down the entrepreneurial road.
Here, the point can hardly be made too strongly that the new service which we understand will be located within the Small Business Bureau should take account of the fact that ‘start-ups’ that may be taking their first halting steps into entrepreneurship and may need all the initial guidance they can get, particularly in circumstances where they may be taking the entrepreneurial ‘plunge’ with loans and life’s savings so that if the guidance-related engagements with the SBB do not ‘come through’ for them they may well be heading for irretrievable losses.
It should be stated, as well, that, historically, state institutions are often inclined to issue add-ons to original directives, particularly in matters relating to clients’ criteria for state support. What this can mean is that, all too frequently, seekers of various types of state support for business ventures learn, belatedly, about qualification criteria that had not been previously communicated to them. In this respect and in others, it has not been uncommon for small business owners (or aspirants) to come to regard state support agencies as not being as helpful as they, presumably, are intended to be.
The problem here has been, mostly, that all too frequently state agencies set up to facilitate private business ventures (particularly small business ventures) slip into their Public Service Ivory Towers from which they administer what, frequently, are iron-clad, inflexible rules. A Resource Centre designed – as the official announcement states -“to help entrepreneurs advance their operations,” should function on a full-time basis and be staffed by adequate numbers of competent functionaries.
Seekers of the entity’s support should not be subjected to what, sometimes, are the torturous ‘push-arounds’ that are dished out by state agencies from the ‘sanctity’ of their inflexible Ivory Towers. The service providers should remain constantly aware of the fact that their ‘clients’ are operating to tight deadlines and that there could be a high cost to needless delays and that there could well be unaffordable additional costs to small business undertakings that are already running on shoestring budgets.
Further, one expects, of course, that the reported “consultations” between the Small Business Bureau’s Chief Executive Officer, Mohamed Ibrahim, and “numerous small businesses” would have exhaustively broached these issues – all of which have a critical bearing on the extent to which the new facility is suitably equipped to support the entrepreneurial goals of small business owners, exhaustively.
One makes this point conscious of the deep footprint of frustration that some state agencies charged with delivering public services sometimes leave behind as well as the abject failure of the relevant functionaries to intervene decisively even in circumstances where dysfunctional state systems lead to public outrage. Here the point should be that while it is largely the pursuits of the private sector that drive the economy the procedures that govern the running of the business sector are, in some critical respects, under the control of the state. The extant circumstance of a state agency providing material support to large numbers of privately run small businesses is an example of this.
Contextually, it would undoubtedly do a power of good if the procedures associated with creating, seemingly, yet another tier of bureaucracy to support the administering of state support for small businesses are designed in such a manner so as to realize maximum positive effect without creating further layers of frustrating/infuriating red tape.
