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“Standard operating procedures, credibility critical to SMEs growth” – Oguntoyinbo

By on September 13, 2013

The Group Chief Executive Officer of Philly & Mools Group, (a company involved in providing advisory services to corporate bodies), Mr. Niyi Oguntoyinbo, has called on owners of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises, SMEs, in the country to imbibe the culture of implementing standard operating procedures in their businesses, saying that that it is a critical success factor for any business.

Besides, he said that integrity and credibility also hold the key to sustainability of any business endeavour.

He spoke while presenting a paper, “Structuring Your Business for Growth” at the 36th Diamond Bank’s BusinessXpress Enterprise Series in Lagos.

According to Oguntoyinbo, standard operating procedures, which represent a constitution that spells out step by step process of running a particular business, could save an entrepreneur millions of naira by averting costly errors common to businesses, adding that employees should be thoroughly enlightened on this to forestall disaster.

He said, “In building structures for your business, you need to understand the market, who are the people that have being in the business before. How did they fair, did they succeed or fail. If they failed, was a cultural issue, did the idea come ahead of its time and people basically lack understanding of it?”

Speaking earlier, Cheta Agbo, Segment Manager, SME for MSME Proposition, Diamond Bank, said that the bank has spent about N70 billion in funding SMEs in the country, adding that about 8,000 Nigeria entrepreneurs have so far benefited from the Diamond Bank’s  BusinessXpress Enterprise Series.

He explained that the seminar is part of the bank’s capacity building programme to its customers and the Nigerian public at large, saying “the objective is built around the fact that it is not just offering people financial services alone is the way to grow SMEs, we need to offer them non-financial services as well. In as much as they need money to grow their businesses, they also need knowledge to drive the business.

“So we are trying to provide a platform in such a way that as we grow a business, we offer multiple things; this means going beyond the normal traditional financial service that we offer service businesses in other to support SMEs development in Nigeria.”

Also speaking, Betty Clark, one of the facilitators, advised participants to ‘start small and think big’, saying that starting with huge sum of money does not guarantee the success of a business.

 

 

 

[Vanguard]