Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of new small businesses have sprouted over the past several months, proving that “crisis breeds opportunity”, Principal of Sumner Strategic Partners and Vice Chair of the Bahamas Entrepreneurial Venture Fund (BEVF) Edison Sumner said yesterday.
The government has spent $47.3 million providing grants and loans to small businesses since the start of the pandemic.
More than 400 businesses have applied for the Access Accelerator Small Business Development Centre’s second round of grant disbursements alone.
Sumner said Bahamian entrepreneurs have stepped up to the plate to fill the void in a number of sectors, while employing more innovative approaches to how they conduct their businesses.
“In the first instance crisis breeds opportunities. So whenever you find yourself in a situation where there is a crisis or some kind of an issue, there has to be remedy, there has to be some solutions. So we’re finding that in this time of pandemic that there are a lot of opportunities that are being created and a lot of entrepreneurs are taking advantage of those opportunities,” he told Guardian Business.
“We saw a proliferation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) established to provide goods and services within new industries. Not only out of the response to the pandemic, we also found that there were quite a number of people who would have been displaced from their jobs, whether they were in the hotel sector or some other white collar jobs or in some of the industrial areas. Those people who were laid off also had skills, they had talents and they took those skills and talents and turned them into new opportunities to establish new businesses, because the community still needed to be serviced in a number of areas.”
This all bodes well for the economy, Sumner said, stressing that these new small and medium-sized businesses will be the ones that rent unoccupied buildings, hire new employees and support other business services that may have been negatively impacted by the pandemic.
“The proliferation of businesses that were established over the last several months was really in response to what was happening in the domestic economy, in the various local communities as well,” he said.
“We saw a tremendous response to the government’s grant program as well that was overwhelmed with applications looking for grant funding either to start a small business or to grow an already-established business. This is good for the economy, it’s good for local communities, because we know that the engine of any small economy is small and medium-sized enterprises. The more of them we see growing and being established is better for the communities and better for the economy.”
Sumner said within the BEVF alone, there is such high demand that the fund had to refer some applicants to other business support agencies.
“We have seen a number of new applications that came before the venture fund over the last several months. We had the opportunity to fund some of them, others are still under review. They were sent back to provide more information to support their applications,” he said.
“The situation though is many of the businesses that approached us were outside the scope of our mandate to support them, so many of them were referred to the Access Accelerator Small Business Development Centre, or other agencies for funding. Certainly those that fit into our profile would have been funded. Some would have been funded in principle, but we have seen a growth spurt in the number of companies that have been requesting financial assistance, technical support and business development support services also.”
Sumner said small businesses in the new economy, in the new COVID-19 environment in The Bahamas, will be the ones that will thrive.
“They are going to be the ones that will do well because they are small, they are agile, they can move quickly. Of course they will still have to have some level of reliance on the larger companies in the country, but I’m hoping that as we’ve seen the way the large companies have responded to COVID-19, Dorian and other challenges with the economy, to see some of the larger companies use the services of SMEs more and begin to outsource some of the services that they have internally in the areas where many of them had to release staff,” he said.
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source https://thenassauguardian.com/hundreds-of-new-small-businesses-established-despite-pandemic/
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