Inspiration:

SME success factors in literature varies a lot as each research team selected a different set of measures or granularity of measures. The good news is that there are a couple of factors that can be found across the board.

Access to Finance:

The interesting thing is that the reason for the need for finance is often aligned to the life cycle of the SME. Startups need money to start a business, SME’s that are starting to experience growth need finance to scale and SME’s that fail to grow aggressively need finance to pivot.

Human Capital:

SME’s struggle to find experienced affordable employees.

Environment:

This includes factors such as the state of the Economy, Political Stability and Regulatory frameworks.

Networks:

Good business networks, industry networks and personal networks greatly enhance the SME’s chance to be successful. Benefits can be as simple as being able to bounce ideas of knowledgable individuals in their network. A good feedback loop can make the difference between making a good or really bad discussion. Being able to tap into opportunities for their business is priceless, entrepreneurs are good at recognising and persuing opportunities once they have laid eyes on them.

There is not much we can do about influencing the Environment in the short term. What we do know is that the Environment factors are in for a big shake-up in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ignoring the factors we cannot influence and focussing on helping with the factors that we can, we can still enhance the chances of SME’s to hang-on and even be successful in the turmoil predicted over the coming years.

What it does and we would like to build it:

In our opinion we can influence Networks, Access to Finance and Human Capital in various degrees. Looking at the 3 factors we have chosen to influence a couple of things are clear.

Networking is important. Just doing a search for networking opportunities for the SME, there is a vast array of options, varying form local meetups to the likes of LinkedIn. All of these can be successfully used by the savvy SME owner to help them with Access to Finance, Access to Human Capital and support in their efforts like mentoring.

Those of us who have tried to emulate those success stories using the vast resources at hand can attest to how daunting the task is, especially since we have limited resources i.e. cash and time. Not to mention the list of supposedly successful strategies to utilize those resources.

A cursory glance shows us that effective networking will already enhance our success when it comes to Finance and Human Capital needs. This leads us to the belief that a networking tool that is specific to the SME needs for Finance and Human Capital would be a real asset to the SME.

It also does not take a genius to see that such a networking tool could be used for other purposes like collaboration between SME’s for example. Often these additional uses could be seen as related/or subject to the main purpose of the tool. For instance collaboration between SME’s could lead to the unlocking of Finances or the sharing of Human Resources etc. This gives us our secondary purpose, nl collaboration and in a networking tool it makes sense to enable.

We will be building a networking platform that facilitates Networking, Accesses to Finance and Human Capital, with the possibilities and the sharing of opportunies.

What we learned:

So far through our discussions and our bitter experience in the real world we know that a tool that needs human behaviour to change to be successful is a no no. So we have gone for the approach, give people the chance to learn new behaviours like collaboration while they are trying to get by their daily grind.

How we built it:

We came up with a rough idea and in our first team meeting absolutely butchered it to what the above states.

Then we jumped in and worked our proverbial asses of!

Challenges we ran into:

Accomplishments that we are proud of:

Whats next:

Once we have a successful networking tool going we want to see which of the following we can bring into play. (The order does not indicate priority)

Principals to sustainable SME’s:

1. Market, demand should drive what SME’s do and connecting SME’s to customers is essential.
2. Pivot opportunities, many SME’s are just a step or two away from pivoting to sustainable products/businesses.
3. Trusted business environment. A platform where big business and SME’s or groups of collaborating SME’s can do business together where the risk is managed by a 3rd party trustee. Be it an account and/or lawyer or business advisor or even the customer.
4. Transparent supply chains. Supply chains must be registered so that SME’s can see where there are gaps or possibilities to localize supply chain elements.
5. Existing SME organisations should be given the tools to push and possibly manage their SME’s
6. SME development, OEM’s and Big Business should be given the tools to recruit and manage SME’s to develop for their supply chains.
7. SME’s need advisors and mentors that give of their time. Messaging between parties should be enabled.

Build With:

Common Lisp, cl-naive-store, cl-wfx

Built With

• cl-naive-store
• cl-wfx
• lisp