A BEE party with the desire to obtain a shareholding in a business must have entrepreneurial traits. He must be prepared to commit himself one hundred percent to the business, which he wants to join as shareholder. Read the rest of this entry »
A business dealing substantially with an institution such as Escom, will have to give due consideration to becoming a black owned company, which means that such business must have a BEE party holding more than fifty percent of the equity.
This then becomes a watershed decision to the SME owner, as he now has to relinquish control over the business, which has possibly taken him a lifetime to create. Should he elect to remain in the business as a minority shareholder, he would want to make sure that the BEE party taking over the business will indeed succeed in operating it successfully. Read the rest of this entry »
The question of where to find a suitable BEE party is directly linked to what is expected from such a BEE party.
The most sought after BEE party is without doubt, someone who has such powerful connections that he can provide the SME owner with any number of new sales contracts at profit margins, which are usually only dreamt of. Read the rest of this entry »
Or does it not perhaps highlight the harsh realities of small business as being an extremely competitive environment where only a few really achieve success and the majority only survive? Read the rest of this entry »
It is substantially more difficult to prove that a business, which is about to be started, will in fact be successful. Such a venture has no historical audited financial statements reflecting a good profit history. Funders of such ventures are by nature extremely suspicious, and always look for some form of concrete evidence that a start-up business venture will succeed. Read the rest of this entry »
Equal Opportunity was to be relegated to the history textbooks in 1990 when suddenly and without warning, the National Party government announced the unbanning of previously proscribed political parties and the release of its political opponents from the incarceration and exile. This bold statement by the government of the day sent a strong message that black political and economic aspirations were back firmly on the agenda. Then the even bolder term, affirmative action resurfaced. Read the rest of this entry »
Research after research in the early 1980s had proved that white middle management found the term to be ‘almost tantamount to reverse racism’ in that, according to these managers, it sought to advance blacks only, possibly to the exclusion of whites. Furthermore, it was perceived to be too politically loaded, having been introduced at the time when the black political movement was under the strong influence of Steve Biko and his Black Consciousness Movement, which had triggered off the 1976 unrest. Read the rest of this entry »
With this view of your value-based strategy, and an ‘as-is’ assessment of the seven key dimensions of transformation, you are now equipped to consider three core questions in order to bring transformation into your strategy. Read the rest of this entry »
From a business perspective, it is useful to focus the efforts of all employees around these value drivers. Every employee should know how their role contributes to the overall value of the business and how they can increase this value while containing or reducing costs. The resulting focus of the company’s resources around these simple (but not simplistic) issues allows the business to have a constant dialogue on how to achieve their goals, and strategy becomes a living reality rather than a dead document in the CEO’s filing cabinet. Read the rest of this entry »
Does international evidence suggest who the best empowerment partner might be? The answer is that the present employees of the company are in many cases the best bet. After all, from CEO down to the gatekeeper, they run the company every working day. Read the rest of this entry »
The issue of BEE ownership in a business is the dimension most often equated with empowerment because of the way empowerment was viewed in the late 1990s. We equated equality with equity, which, while it has a basis, cannot be the only aspect of transformation. The second reason ownership has such a high profile is that it is the criterion most explored from a preferential procurement perspective, meaning preferential procurement scoring is based solely on ownership for most charters and for the First Code (if you are outside a charter). Read the rest of this entry »
Most business people have a gut feel for what the client wants, which is built up over years of running the business and interacting with clients. However, it is more difficult to distil this sense into three simple, short descriptions of what your client values in your business. But, once done successfully, these descriptions can be immensely powerful in communicating the essence of the business to all stakeholders. Read the rest of this entry »
The current BEE Act, the First Code of Good Practice and the BEE strategy document, all released in 2003, are the cornerstones of government’s plan to give impetus to broad-based empowerment by 2014. This legislation has direct bearing on the current BEE requirements for your business, and as a consequence needs to be studied in some detail. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the biggest problems with BEE initiatives is that they become one person’s responsibility, and one person cannot change an organisation. Read the rest of this entry »
Becoming an empowered company is not good enough. Soon all your competitors will have achieved similar status. Your company will need to do better than that. Whoever has undertaken the transformation process in the best way will be the winners, not those who have merely transformed. The key lies in transforming your business to become black empowered while simultaneously creating a sustainable competitive advantage. Read the rest of this entry »
An economic BEE transformation is a business necessity as a consequence of the following imperatives:
A moral imperative: The National Party came to power in 198 implemented the policy of apartheid. Economic repression led 4 to the expropriation of black property not already expropriated under the Land Act. There was widespread exclusion from the economy on the basis of race. In addition, white capitalists exploited black labour. Read the rest of this entry »
Empowerment has been defined by the government as ‘an integrated and coherent socio-economic process that directly contributes to the economic transformation of South Africa and brings about significant increases in the number of black people that manage, own and control the country’s economy, as well as significant decreases in income inequalities:’ Read the rest of this entry »
In legal terms, the beneficiaries of BEE are ‘black people’, which, according to the Broad-Based BEE Act (the BBBEE Act, or BEE Act), is ‘a generic term which means Africans, Coloureds and Indians’. Read the rest of this entry »
