Small business owners can stop fretting over the costs of compliance with complex codes of black economic empowerment (BEE) thanks to an innovative Web-based scorecard solution.
Dijon de Jager, a qualified chartered accountant, launched Mpower Ratings (www.mpowerratings.co.za) in 2004 in an attempt to cater for small, medium and micro-enterprises (SMMEs) that do not have the capability or understanding of the empowerment codes to get themselves BEE accredited.
For a monthly subscription of R100, a small business can enter its empowerment credentials online and generate its latest scorecard rating.
De Jager says the costs of getting a BEE rating are quite substantial and can range anywhere between R5 000 and R15 000, depending on the size of the business.
‘I wanted to develop a website that would make it less difficult to become empowered,” says De Jager.
De Jager says small businesses generally have very little understanding of the BEE codes and this is the reason his website is such a valuable tool.
‘I think the number one-problem is a lack of understanding. It is a handbrake in the transformation process, given that SMMEs are going to play such a huge role in South Africa,” says De Jager. ‘The website puts businesses in a position to understand what it is all about and to give access to a measurement process.”
Businesses supply Mpower Ratings with the details of their auditor and then, as they make changes to their BEE credentials on the website, an e-mail is immediately sent to the auditor, requesting him to verify the changes.
The website also contains a search facility where businesses can search for suppliers while viewing their BEE credentials at the same time.
‘We have developed a procurement calculator because it is the most difficult area of the codes to understand. Business owners need to know the level of compliance for all their suppliers,” says De Jager.
In addition, the website also offers advertising space for SMMEs. For a cost of between R40 and R95, businesses can place text, photographs and logos on the website.
De Jager is very happy with the response so far. He has signed up hundreds of customers and says the business is growing at a rapid rate.
Busy bee
A spin-off project that has resulted from the Mpower Ratings website is the Worker Bee project (www.workerbee.co.za), a micro-enterprise mentorship programme.
Dijon de Jager says a qualifying small business can get as many as 20 of its scorecard points through enterprise development. He says that by employing one-person micro-enterprises, small businesses could score these points.
This led him to create a free database of one-person micro-enterprises on his website. ‘You see these people’s little signs everywhere on fences, on trees, a painter here and a builder there,” he says, explaining that the site has collected these details. The website contains information such as contact numbers, curriculum vitae, references and a photograph.
Simon Majoro, a painter in Gauteng, says he has been registered on the Worker Bee website for two years now and he had received numerous jobs. ‘I think it is a very good idea because it has helped me a lot.”
De Jager has also been promoting the Worker Bee project to large enterprises and says he has had a lot of positive response, recently convincing Barloworld, which owns Plascon, to agree to provide training for the painters as part of its corporate social investment.