FNB and partners provide a business toolkit for struggling businesses

Cape Town – First National Bank (FNB), with Edge Growth and Vumela Enterprise Development, has launched a business toolkit to assist the thousands of struggling businesses that are facing financial challenges during the lockdown. “Many businesses have been forced to shut their doors with no profit,” says Yolande Steyn, head of FNB SME Growth and Support. “The business toolkit is a package that includes videos, articles, tools and templates to help businesses get through the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Steyn said the toolkit would be updated frequently over the next few months to help businesses respond to the current crisis and provide them with advice. It covers four phases of crisis management to equip businesses with the skills to react, respond, re-strategise and relaunch post the COVID-19 outbreak. However, a recent Statistic SA survey reflected that 42% of small business respondents lacked the confidence to resume operations post the COVID-19 crisis, while 54% indicated they would possibly only survive between one to three months.

Steyn said that many SMEs were under-equipped to deal with the current reality and would face radical consequences if the necessary steps were not taken swiftly. She also emphasised the fact that many relief measures did not tackle the core problems businesses might face during and after the pandemic. The toolkit’s focal points were scenario planning, liquidity management, expense cutting and planning, which would help business owners to bounce back to the ‘new world’.

Edge Growth Director, Jason Goldberg, said that the pandemic had drastically affected businesses and livelihoods. A permanent loss of millions of jobs would occur if SMEs were forced to shut their doors permanently. He added that, as a vital contributor to the economy, small businesses were the backbone of employment in Africa. National Small Business Chamber Chief Executive, Mike Anderson, said that the announcement of a move from Level 4 to Level 3 at the end of May was good news for South Africa, but added that both Cape Town and Johannesburg were currently COVID-19 epicentres that were densely populated with small businesses. This made it difficult for some small businesses to operate, even under level 3.

Mazars Recovery and Restructuring Director, Justine Hoppe said that South Africa could expect a big wave of companies needing business rescue over the next few months, especially those that had other difficulties before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Originally written by Edward West, IOL

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