What SMEs Need Now

The Business Show Africa brought entrepreneurs, SME owners and decision makers into Sandton Convention Centre for two days of conversations around growth, finance, intellectual property, networking and the practical realities of building a business. There was plenty of advice about ambition and resilience, but one moment told me more about the audience than almost anything said on stage.

A slide about access to business funding appeared and, almost immediately, the phones went up. Mine too. QR codes were photographed, platforms were saved and the attention in the room visibly sharpened. It was probably the clearest piece of audience research anyone conducted all morning.

The reaction made me wonder whether what many SMEs need is not another lesson in ambition. There was plenty of ambition in that room. What people seemed hungry for was access to finance, clients, suppliers, networks, information, expertise and ultimately opportunity. But access alone is not enough.

Several speakers returned to the importance of readiness. Have the business plan. Understand the numbers. Know what funding would actually be used for. Put enough structure around the business that somebody can look under the bonnet without you breaking into a cold sweat.

But readiness is not only operational. An opportunity can arrive and still be lost if the business cannot explain itself clearly enough for somebody else to understand why it matters. A company may know exactly what it does internally, while its website, presentation, customer experience or public presence tells a much less coherent story.

That distinction stayed with me. There is the work required to build a good business, and then there is the work required to make that business legible to the outside world.

I recognised some of the first challenge in Monks Media. We have evolved quickly, and at times the creative side of the business has moved faster than the operational architecture behind it. Sitting in the audience, I found myself mentally adding to my own list.

But I also recognised something else. Much of the second challenge is precisely where businesses like ours can be useful.

We cannot make another company investment ready. We cannot fix its cash flow, write its legal agreements or decide whether its business model works. Nor should we pretend to. What we can do is help make a strong business easier to understand, experience and remember when the opportunity arrives.

That might mean sharpening how the business presents itself. It might mean creating an experience that brings the right people into the same room. It might mean finding the story within the work, building partnerships around it, creating content that travels beyond an event, or making sure that the way a brand appears publicly reflects the quality of what sits behind it.

Readiness, then, has an outward facing dimension too. The door opening matters. So does what somebody sees when it does.

Lee Naik put some of that responsibility rather neatly: “The only person who can be in charge of you is you.” Business depends enormously on customers, partners, funders, suppliers and networks, but none of them can organise the business for you. The door can open. Readiness determines what you can do once it does.

Lee also offered one of my favourite ideas from the show: stop trying to be interesting and become interested in other people. As someone who can quite happily disappear down a research rabbit hole about another person or business, this one was not particularly difficult to sell me.

He described a progression from visibility to trust to opportunity, and that stayed with me because there is an important space between being seen and being chosen. For SMEs, access to a room is valuable, but what happens once you are in it matters more. Can you explain what your business does? Can somebody understand its value quickly? Are you speaking to the right people? Does the way the business presents itself create confidence? Is there a reason for the conversation to continue?

The show itself made that visible. Around the stages were exhibitors, advisers, financial institutions, service providers and business owners, all trying in different ways to create the next useful connection.

Access can put two people in proximity. It cannot manufacture relevance between them.

That is an important distinction for Monks Media too. When we talk about an audience, we should not only be asking how many people we can put into a room or how many impressions something can generate. The better question is whether we have created the conditions for the right interaction to happen.

For a large brand, that might mean creating a more meaningful way to engage a particular community. For a smaller business, it might be far more fundamental: identifying the people it actually needs to reach, understanding what matters to them, and creating a credible reason for them to pay attention.

Scale changes. The principle does not.

Funding is not our game, nor should it be. Helping a business become more visible, understandable, relevant and memorable certainly can be.

The Business Show made me think about how much support around entrepreneurship understandably focuses on the mechanics of running a business: finance, compliance, intellectual property, systems, procurement and access to markets. Those things are fundamental.

But there is another layer that often sits between having something valuable and getting somebody else to recognise that value.

I think of it as the work around the work.

It is the positioning around the product. The story around the expertise. The experience around the service. The relationships around the opportunity. The content that allows an idea to travel beyond the room in which it was first presented.

None of those things can rescue a weak business. But for a good business, they can make the difference between existing and being understood.

Mavis Nyatlo’s CIPC session reinforced the importance of understanding and protecting what a business creates. Tiffany Markman’s creative session demonstrated something equally important from another direction: an idea only becomes useful to somebody else if you can communicate it in a way that lands.

Tiffany opened with a story about accidentally eating a ghost pepper at a gala dinner in India because she thought it was a green bean. I remembered it, which was exactly the point. Her Microfocus methodology, The Shrink, The Rabbit Hole and The Leap, made a larger creative process easy to carry away. After some fairly dense presentations, it was a reminder that expertise and communication are different skills.

That distinction matters enormously to smaller businesses. Founders often live so close to what they have built that the value feels self evident. It rarely is to somebody encountering it for the first time.

This is where I came away seeing Monks Media's role a little more clearly.

We have spent years doing this work for established brands: finding the idea, shaping the environment around it, creating the experience, bringing partners into it, deciding what the audience should encounter and finding ways for the story to continue afterwards.

There is no reason that thinking only belongs to large companies with large budgets.

The expression may be smaller. The intervention may be simpler. But a growing business still deserves clarity, imagination and a considered way of presenting itself to the world.

That does not mean trying to turn every SME into a glossy corporate brand. Quite the opposite. Often the interesting part is already there. The job is to recognise it, make it clearer and build enough around it for other people to see it too.

Another speaker made a point that followed me home: successful entrepreneurs ask the right questions. We spend a lot of time asking how to grow, how to market, how to attract customers and how to find opportunity, but perhaps the useful question sometimes sits one step earlier. Are we solving the right problem?

It is a useful question for the businesses seeking support, and perhaps an equally useful one for those of us offering it.

For now, what I took from The Business Show Africa was simpler. SMEs do not appear short of ambition. What they need are more ways to turn that ambition into something actionable: access to capital, certainly, but also access to people, knowledge, protection, visibility and the tools that help a good business communicate why it deserves attention.

The phones going up when funding appeared on screen remain my defining image of the show. But perhaps the more interesting question begins after the photograph has been taken.

Once the door opens, is the business ready to be seen?