At the webinar hosted by First Bank Limited, tagged “Is Your Business ready?” speakers gave pure insights into scaling your business for growth in the pre-election 2022 year.
The webinar was aimed towards connecting SMEs to value offerings that will impact their businesses while enhancing customer acquisition and establishing the bank as an SME-focused brand.
It was also aimed at equipping the SMEs with relevant knowledge on how to strategize for success and growth in 2022.
What the speakers were saying
Speaking at the Webinar, Gospel Obele, the Chief Economist and CEO of Streetnomics emphasized the reasons SMEs have challenges navigating appropriately with regards to market growth.
He talked about finance, infrastructure, and insecurity as factors hindering the growth of small and medium enterprises from attaining market growth, business growth, and executing business models accordingly.
He further stated that SMEs need to remodel for growth in the pre-election year by creating a business model that solves a social problem while delivering profit, hence moving from a core-product centric solution to a core-brand centric solution to unlock resilient growth in a changing economic climate like Nigeria.
In his words, “Businesses need to position revenue stream to administer solution in the socio-problem market of funding and revenue support and also in the core-business consumer market.”
The second speaker, Jovita Madojemu the Founder of Pundit Bookkeeping Services said that business owners ought to start anticipating what the new year holds as business owners should regard their businesses as a “going concern.”
She spoke about survival budget irritation, profit cashflow correlation, and performance tracking adoption stating that budgeting should be adopted for businesses in 2022 to discourage unnecessary expenses.
“The expansion you’re looking for is in the planning, in working with a budget and ensuring only planned expenses are catered for,” she said.
Furthermore, she encouraged investments; investments in working capital, in people and things that will drive revenue to ultimately allow for significant returns to investors.
She talked about adopting a “Report Card” system to show what needs to be adjusted as this will help in understanding the cost components, ensuring that revenue can cover costs. Also speaking about setting performance reviews for the business, she said it is important to know if you’re at a profit or loss.
Speaking about building resilience in the business, Chike. F. Uzoma, Head, Strategy and Corporate Development FirstBank, said that it is important to anchor this on four major pillars. They are, the personality of the business, how you lead the business, i.e, leadership, how do you access change in the business and discipline.
He mentioned that business resilience has been analyzed across 6 areas, namely operational resilience, showing that a business can adapt to changes that will happen to continuously operate and serve customers, developing capabilities internally.
Commercial resilience is the heart of the business which is to attract new customers in the face of uncertainty or retain customers in a volatile environment.
Financial resilience means monitoring cashflows. He stated that FBN has partnered with SMEs to ensure that financial resilience responds to opportunities. It also means measuring the financial performance of a business.
Environmental and Social resilience which according to the speaker is very important as it relates to impacting the community positively.
Employee and workforce resilience which is considering the importance of a resilient employee and workforce to ensure the business can stand.
Future resilience means investing in product innovation, periodically reviewing trends and happenings in the business sector and area so as to change the approach, if need be. Also, strategic planning processes and strategic approaches and views must consider things that could disrupt the business.
