By Yoke Har Lee
Between the lines
Four facts stand out about the BIZ, the Government's successor to the Business Development Programme and designed to help small businesses grow.
One, the Government has cut funds for helping small business; two, plenty of service providers through the BIZ want to help small businesses upgrade; three, the programme has a strong emphasis on the Maori and Pacific Island communities; and four it is strongly slanted towards the smaller end of small business.
The overall impact is to make the BIZ - the Business Information Service Programme - much less of a multi-dimensional creature than was the BDP before Enterprise and Commerce Minister Max Bradford killed it off.
Yet, small businesses' problems are multi-faceted. The BDP programme, even with its short-comings, was of far greater use to those with a real chance to grow.
As its replacement, the BIZ should have been bolder in approach and more far-sighted in vision. It is neither. At best, the programme addresses only the lack of management skills some small businesses suffer.
The narrow focus is disappointing given the diversity of small businesses and the wide range of help they need to grow. There are more than 200,000 small to medium scale registered enterprises, contributing about 50 per cent of economic activity.
They range from a shop owner on Queen St or a software writer working at home but hoping to export, to the likes of Bill Buckley - the owner of Buckley Systems, a medium-sized company supplying high-tech machinery to 90 per cent of the world's makers of semiconductors.
For Mr Buckley, the biggest help will come not from the BIZ but if the Government decides to allow him to write off research and development spending against his tax bill.
For the small shop owner, there are plenty of agencies to address his skills shortfall. If he is based in Auckland, he could go to Enterprise Northshore or Auckland New Venture Trust, which both run skills upgrading courses for small businesses.
He could even go to Business in the Community, a trust which provides a free mentoring service.
Much harder to crack are export markets. This major revenue earner comes from less than 10 per cent of those 200,000 enterprises. Obviously, national effort should be aimed at grooming export-oriented industries because they have potential to create jobs and raise national income.
The BIZ programme, as it stands, does little to help exporters like Kemp-Roberts Creamery, which is trying to sell its boutique products abroad, or slightly bigger companies like Tristyle Industries which exports kitset homes to Japan and China.
So for all the time and effort spent getting rid of the BDP and designing a substitute, the lost opportunity is regrettable. To justify its existence, the BIZ programme had better show healthy results quickly.
BIZ is not as good as it could have been
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