The Fiji SME Business Owners Network has helped shape the landscape of how businesses operated during the pandemic.
The group made of 544 members was a central online platform where SMEs could connect with each other, stay updated on support and assistance such as grants or loans and address the common issues they were facing while operating.
According to the founder Kim Beddoes the network was created on Facebook for the purpose of helping SMEs.
“During the second lockdown in 2021, what I started to notice was all my fellow SME business owners, we were all struggling mentally, like, what do we do? How do we survive? Do we close our business? Do we put our business into hibernation? Do we keep going?
“There was so many questions, and there really was no support for any SME business owner.
“So then what I did is I revived this Facebook page.”
She said only those who were able to provide or prove that they were an actual registered Fiji business could join the group.
“It is a private safe space for Fiji SME entrepreneurs online to create workable solutions for the COVID pandemic and to help each other.
“One of the big issues that SMEs face is often there’s a grant or some support out there that we never know about, we never find out about because there’s not one central location that you as a small business owner can go to find all the information you need that could potentially help your business.
“So I figured since everyone’s online and everyone’s in lockdown, this would be the perfect opportunity through it and also to share our problems especially being locked at home in a pandemic.
She said once the group really started to gain momentum, and more people were joining in, they started surveys by posting questionnaires to see what some of the critical problems they were facing. The top three problems that came to light were cashflow, e-commerce and compliance.
Ms Beddoes said they came up with the solutions to address these issues and took it up to relevant ministries.
“So that information correlated by all the members was then put into a budget submission. So on behalf of the group, I submitted the budget submission (2021) to Ministry of Commerce, Trade, Tourism and Transport.
“A fair amount of the suggestions that we made didn’t cost any money to the government because in our submission, we stated that we understand that this is an unprecedented pandemic.
“We understand that this is a health disaster and therefore resources need to be focused in health, but we the SMEs of this country, we employ 60 per cent of the working population.
“And I think what’s happened to date is SMEs have never had a united voice to be able to clearly communicate what our issues are.”
She said the people making decisions on behalf of SMEs were not SMEs and they did not consult with SMEs.
“So we’ve got decisions being made on our behalf, supposedly, in our name but then don’t ask us about what their problems are and where we need help.
“We did a budget submission and it had a positive outcome in the fact that a number of things listed in the submission were bought up and mentioned in the budget, this was 2021.”
Ms Beddoes also highlighted that the network had created an e-commerce task force based of members with direct expert experience in that field.
“As the task force we met several times, identified the key problem, one key problem that we were all experiencing, identified the solution, identified who holds that solution, then contacted that provider, which in this case was Westpac and we said, we would like to talk and you have the ability and the power, if you can work with us to help a lot of businesses and they were forthcoming.”
She said the Westpac Bank was able to custom create an e-commerce package for their members to trial.
“So we were able to deal directly with the commercial bank Westpac, they were able to give us a trial offer that our members were able to take up.”
She said this week they would be meeting with them again, to see what progress had been made within the six months from when that trial commenced, ecommerce package that they gave them, what worked, and what improvement was needed to help SMEs.
As the country was approaching the local border reopening on the October 4, issues started rising from their food and beverage members which included restaurants, bars, cafe and catering owners.
“They needed more clarity and guidance on what were the protocols that they needed to follow.
“They need to know before open day because they need time for training for signage or compliance to learn.
“So before you can reopen, you need to know what are the parameters and rules,” she said.
Ms Beddoes said they reached out to all the restaurants as well as food and beverage owners within their network.
“We had a meeting, from that online meeting a taskforce was created, that task force was made up of representative business owners from small, medium, and very large restaurants.”
She said they asked the MCTTT to share with them what the protocols were.
“We spent a fair bit of time reviewing it, researching, getting the best practice protocols happening all over the world, compiling and assisting, and we created that document and we shared it back to MCTTT and we were glad to see that a significant portion of the protocols that did come out for restaurants came from our members and our feedback and our task force that was created.”
The network in a short amount of time was able to get a lot done as according to Ms Beddoes they were made up of business owners.
“We realized that if we don’t identify the problem, find a solution and then find who’s going to help us get that solution.
“No one else is going to do it for us.
“So we’re determined to do it or ourselves.”
