Becoming BEE compliant is an opportunity to grow your business providing it with a real competitive edge and business advantage. When all factors of your service or product offering are equal to that of your competitor – such as price, quality and reliability – your BEE rating could be the major deciding factor in the deal.
Empowerment has been badly labelled and poorly understood. Even though there are no right or wrong approaches, organisations are often confused as to what they are trying to achieve. Call-Lab shares all you need to know about introducing BEE to your businesses.
The trick is to put a long-term plan in place that is in line with your business strategy and which will improve your BEE rating gradually, but consistently.
When considering your broad based empowerment profile, examine all the elements of the scorecard in detail to know where your strengths – and weaknesses – lie. The incentive to produce a scorecard is the need to compete and surpass competitors and not a government law which forces compliance. In this case, a better scorecard than a competitor can result in extra business.
Producing your scorecard is often an easy task that genuinely results in sustainable growth. You need to grab as many scorecard points as possible, so every BEE action must be clearly quantifiable.
For many SMEs, building up a good BEE profile starts with indirect empowerment and socio-economic development, so start at the bottom of the scorecard and work your way up.
Here are Call-Lab call centre’s tangible tips on how and where your business can scores points.
- Ensure you understand the composition of the broad-based BEE scorecard and the business impacts.
- Be more than 50% black owned.
- Be operational for at least three years, profitable, have an established client base/service and contribute towards overall transformation in all spheres of the company structure.
- Clearly demonstrate your contribution to the skills development of your employees. Apart from it being a good way through which one can earn BEE points. Training is vitally important for businesses if one wants to keep clients satisfied.
- Show active involvement of black participants in executive decision-making.
- Indicate how your company has contributed towards enterprise development. The underlying business approach here is not to give money away but rather to assist with business development and growth. This encourages business to invest in black-owned businesses. The eligible spend could be a low level business investment resulting in potential profits as a result of the small contribution. Common forms of investment can be found in discounts on existing products or even an exchange of services and infrastructure which result in a small share of the business.
- Have a focused preferential procurement strategy. Whilst utilising other BEE-related businesses can be a focus in initial years, you need to develop your own capabilities after time.
- Demonstrate your company’s involvement in socio-economic development initiatives, projects or programmes. Align corporate social investment with core company values to strategically reinforce your commitment. For it to work it must have an effect on community development and employees should truly invest – that is actively participate in the process and progress of the CSI project. So it is not just financial support but also time, commitment, passion and sustainability that make CSI work.
- Stand out from other businesses in its ability to implement a sound vision for the future.
- Utilise business practices that empower staff and communities.
- Adhere to good corporate governance and leadership.
- Demonstrate leadership in transformation.
As you tick off these steps you will be rewarded with points on your scorecard which further sweeten the deal with your customers who are able to claim additional points on their scorecard, ultimately assisting them earn more business.
By becoming BEE compliant your company can be part of a transforming, vibrant economy.