Why small business owners need to manage stress levels
All business is stressful, but running a small business and taking personal responsibility for its success — or not — is even more so
It is widely understood that small-, medium- and micro-sized enterprises (SMMEs) are key to a country’s economic and employment growth, but something is amiss in SA. Our SMMEs are just not doing what they should, and understanding why — and fixing it — is critical to the future success and sustainability of the economy. The common conversations around SMME failure rates point at six main culprits: access to funding; access to markets; infrastructure challenges; scalability; tough regulations; and skills/education. The problem is that we have known about these for years, and despite all the efforts to address them, we are unfortunately not seeing the needed growth in the sector. A recent survey by the Small Business Institute (SBI) and the Small Business Project (SBP) put the number of formal SMMEs in SA currently at just 250,000. These numbers are alarmingly low — especially when compared with international benchmarks. SMMEs in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developm...
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