Symmonds: New business owners need education as much as money

Minister of Energy and Business Development Kerrie Symmonds believes more should be done to aid entrepreneurs not only financially but in educating them.

His comments came during the launch of the Barbados Trust Fund Limited (BTFL) online discussion series, Let’s Talk Entrepreneurship, which aims to educate prospective entrepreneurs on branding, sale strategies, best practices, analysing markets, new tech and innovation, and other areas that affect their individual businesses.

Symmonds said that though the number of persons starting their own businesses has increased over the past two years, a worrying number of those establishments have not survived because of a lack of education and training.

“We have seen people go into entrepreneurship, especially in the COVID pandemic context,” he said, noting that in many cases people went that route because their previous place of employment closed down.

“I got laid off and I have to do something in order to make sure I am able to feed the family. So I decide I am going to start a business, but I never had any real training for starting that business. Long before COVID that has been a problem.”

Giving another example, Symmonds said: “Somebody gets injured on the job, they get $100, 000 [or] $250, 000 in compensation, they may be wrongfully dismissed and get $75, 000 in compensation, and they say ‘you know what, I am not going back to work for anyone again. I am going to do my own thing’, and that person plunges in heart and soul into being an entrepreneur…. We have thrown hundreds of people, thousands of people into the deep end and told them ‘swim’. Then we express surprise when many of them do not make the shore.”

He added that many establishments invested heavily in e-commerce and other online solutions during the height of the pandemic to continue to facilitate sales but as the pandemic slowed, those advancements were rolled back, thus slowing growth.

“We have seen people actually . . . make adjustments as a result of the COVID pandemic but then revert to old practices after the crisis has passed. You only have to think about this a little bit – a lot of people in Barbados started to deliver all sorts of food and beverage products to your door during the COVID pandemic; not so much of that going on anymore.

“Much of that which we must do is to continue to make the adjustments to make ourselves as flexible, as nimble, as customer-oriented, as compatible with what are really global expectations of best practice, and if we can get that right even as we do commerce among ourselves in Barbados, it makes it so much easier for our businesses to grow and get it right when we go across the borders,” the Business Development Minister said.

Symmonds stressed that though financial assistance was vital to entrepreneurs who are often trying to compete with bigger brands, it was the education around best business practices that was desperately needed by new business owners.

“It is not only about throwing dollars and cents at problems, it has to be about educating a public and helping a public to understand how to navigate themselves around some of the challenges that are going to confront them, and how to overcome those challenges,” he said.

“What the Trust Fund Ltd is doing here is invaluable work. Their sister organisation, Fund Access is going to be equally engaging itself in much-needed educational activities but specifically targeted at financial literacy in this country.”

The Let’s Talk Entrepreneurship initiative will take the form of a series of chaired panel discussions, starting Tuesday, on BTFL online platforms. The new online show will focus on how entrepreneurs should rebuild, reimagine, and recover in their businesses and investments. (SB)