If you are an entrepreneur in South Africa – you certainly know about BEE Rubbish Training. This is useless, waste of time training we constantly forced to attend with the promise of “enterprise development” – but in reality only designed to win big business BEE points.
The Culprits and Enablers
The Government
Every system has its enablers, it is very likely that government has all the right intentions when they designed the BEE laws. The idea was to help small business grow and train entrepreneurs in ways of business.
I would imagine large companies were seen as the perfect players to provide this training. After all, they are successful and are doing well – they should be able to teach some people some things to help them along, right?
Companies perspective
The companies on the other hand could care less, if you have been in corporate you would understand – it is all about the bottom line, double bottom line or tripple bottom line. A bottom line nonetheless, executives are held to account on their KPIs which usually involve, earnings, profits and similar metrics. In return, these executives push the same goals down the pyramid to each level accordingly.
One cannot blame them for this, as it is the reason why they are in business. Investors pick companies based on how profitable they can be, hire boards to ensure this result and the cycle continues. When when you tell a company to train and develop people for BEE, you are like telling lions to build shelters for zebras so their children can have easy access to watering holes.
The incentives
What does government then do? They “incentivise” companies with tax incentives, BEE scorecards and amongst them – “Training and Development of SMEs”.
This has led to small businesses and entrepreneurs having to endure hours of countless rubbish training amongst other things, so companies can earn BEE points. I could write an entire book about the pitfalls of BEE and how it almost always translates in a way that was not intended, because government and organisations have different agendas and everyone just passes the buck.
BEE Rubbish Training providers
The enablers are middle men, opportunistic so called training organisations that come in, pitch to the big businesses “enterprise development” programmes and management solutions. They will have some backing of well known people in the industry, boast experience dealing with SMEs and all that. Some of them even parade as business accelerator programmes eg. Some Dark Coloured Umbrella.
These organisations are the problem with the entire small business ecosystem in South Africa, here are just some top level issues:
- They are bottlenecks. They become the buffer between organisations and small business, they are blockers in essence. Big business get so lazy to do anything that they just rely on these organisations to bring them SMEs. So entrepreneurs learn that to achieve anything, they must go through these middle men.
- They only promote their own. These middle men do provide some opportunities, but usually to people they know, went to school with, have business interests with etc.
- Trash training begins, they become box tickers. They are given a list of boxes to tick and they do so, eg – do this training and that training, attend this course, fill in this form. After some time, they do not even know why certain training is done, then they start applying the “one size fits all” approach – where you find a spaza shop entrepreneur and construction industry entrepreneur both attending the same “Business Plan Training”. And why would anyone need to attend BUSINESS PLAN TRAINING in 2021?
If anyone has ever written a business plan taken it to the bank or any investor and got a loan or investment, I would be interested in meeting you.
The Victims
Every crime has a victim, the biggest victim is the South African economy that will likely never recover if we cannot improve the landscape of small business. The people who should be taking charge and responsibility just pass the buck.
Everyone passing the buck
Government passing the buck
Government passes the buck to companies. They say “You do the training, you develop SMEs, you spend this much percentage”. Instead of taking charge of small business development, they pay someone else to do it with incentives and tax returns, BEE points.
In addition, they then throw money at the problem and hope it will go away. Based on the last state of the nation address by the President of the country – His idea of developing businesses and what he was proud of was “How much money the NYDA paid out”. Challenge 2 – I would be interested to find out, out of all the youth they paid how many are still here in 2yrs from now. The NYDA needs its own article, which is coming soon.
Paying money to SMEs who are not well developed is like watering a rock, money is good for business development but it has to be well timed with planting the seed and nurturing the soil around the seed.
Companies passing the buck
We have already discussed how companies are very happy to just hire out third parties, middle men to spend their ESD budgets. All they want in return is an attendance register of the training and all the BEE certificates of the attendees and they are good to go.
The entrepreneurs
Unfortunately the entrepreneurs are left holding a bag of rubbish.
They go to organisations seeking opportunities, they are asked to complete this program and that program. In a lot of cases these are well educated entrepreneurs who risked everything to take a chance in business.
They are met with days upon days of “Business Plan Writing” or “HR” training. I must admit to have attended a handful of these trainings before I walked out the door and decided, this was a total waste of my time. My favourite was a “Social Media Training” session that took the entire day.
I was struck by the little girl delivering the training, she had her own company that was contracted to provide this “training” and she proceeded to educate us on how to grow our social media following and why social media was important for small business. All good stuff, but nothing worth my time sitting here instead of working on my business, I stood up and left after finding her own twitter account to have less than 100 followers.
These are the type of people entrepreneurs are forced to listen to with the promise of “we will add you to our supplier database” or “this is the only way to get in, we need to see your commitment”.
All rubbish, because as I learned at the end of the day we were not going to be added to any database and no one was really even interested in us, except for our BEE certificates of course. It was all just to earn the points.
This must stop, companies must be rewarded for giving opportunities not training. All we need is a contract, a job, a foot in the door. Tell me to deliver a product, build something.
Note: We have some FREE online training available in our publication and we will not even ask for your BEE certificate or an attendance register.
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