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SMALL BUSINESS HUB
from Annual Review 2018
by Wow Concepts
Three years on since its establishment, the SEIFSA Small Business Hub (SBH) continues to seek to play a significant role in supporting small businesses through partnerships with both the private and public sectors. An integrated approach which aims to ensure that small business interests are represented in various platforms where SEIFSA Divisions lobby will enhance the hub’s efforts in influencing policy in favour of small businesses in our metals and engineering sector.
ENTERPRISE AND SUPPLIER DEVELOPMENT
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The SBH continues to explore prospects in the Supplier and Enterprise Development space. The hub offers turn-key solutions to large enterprises seeking to enhance their Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment score through supplier and enterprise development. Over the past three years, SEIFSA has accumulated a good track record for supporting small business growth.
The SBH finalized the implementation of a relatively large-scale Supplier Development Project for an affiliated member company. This was the third consecutive year of managing the project for the same organization.
PARTNESHIPS
On 24 June 2018 SEIFSA formally partnered with Aurik Enterprise Development (Aurik) to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the metals and engineering sector to grow and thrive. Aurik is headed by Pavlo Phitidis and specializes in developing and implementing supplier and enterprise development programmes. SEIFSA is confident that Aurik has the necessary expertise and capacity to provide business support services to SMEs, working within the metals and engineering industries through SEIFSA’s Small Business Hub.
Small businesses have traditionally struggled to sustain their operations in a challenging economic environment and bigger businesses have also encountered challenges in finding the right business partners to become part of their supply chain systems. The partnership with Aurik will enable SEIFSA to address these issues.
Interestingly, in the last 14 years Aurik has assessed over 18 000 entrepreneurs and assisted over 1500 SMEs across all economic sectors. During 2015/16, when the South African GDP growth rate fell from 1.4% to 0.3%, the average annual turnover rate for the SMEs supported by Aurik grew by 59.8%. Making this happen requires, amongst other things, close collaboration between big and small business. With this objective in mind, SEIFSA has entered into a strategic partnership with Aurik with the aim of impacting positively on the metals and engineering sector.
