Small businesses wish they could have the funding, the customer base and the established brand of a large business. Large businesses look on with envy at small businesses, who don’t have the same level of governance guardrails and are able to be nimbler, more agile and quicker in execution. Startups are small, so fewer silos exist. That makes it easier for everyone to centre around a common goal, which means that rewards, incentives and success metrics can be aligned.

Large organisations tend to forget that they can become more customer-centric and agile by thinking and operating like a small organisation. It just takes a few adjustments to the conventional way of doing things.

How did Old Mutual get into the right small-business mindset to help SMEs?

In a corporate, KPIs are there to ensure that functions run smoothly and targets are met. To think like an entrepreneur, you have to be okay with imperfection and comfortable with taking on more risk at times and even failing. It’s difficult, but it can be done.

When Old Mutual began working on SMEgo, we knew we had to move away from a big-business mindset and think like a small business instead. To adopt the necessary agile, entrepreneurial mindset and establish a cross-functional team with the right level of dedicated capacity, it was important to:

• Never become so married to one way of doing things that we’d miss out on the opportunities that could be created by doing things differently.
• Have the right members in our team to set ourselves up for success.
• Ask people whether they wanted to join so that we knew that our team members were there because they wanted to be there, not because they had to be.
• Look at the different personality types and skills in the team to ensure that everyone was playing to their strengths.
• Look internally and externally for people and skills to fill gaps.

Working with the people we wanted to help

Following this, we had to formulate the right problem to solve, and I cannot stress how important it was to get this right. Businesses often frame problems in terms of what it will solve for the business rather than what it will solve for clients and customers. We therefore were deliberate in keeping the problem statement broad to truly find out what SMEs’ biggest pain points were rather than focusing on what a research paper said or what our views were. Our problem statement therefore was to help SMEs get through Covid-19.

Even so, the problem we wanted to solve became extremely real for us as we spoke to entrepreneurs about their biggest challenges. The defining moment came while we were chatting to one small business owner who really opened up and laid all her challenges out there. At the time, she was faced with a choice: bring back her staff at the risk of exposing them to Covid-19 or remain closed at the risk of losing her business and leaving her staff without jobs.

Then she began crying. And in that moment, everything changed. The team fell in love with who they were building the solution for instead of the solution we were building. It allowed us to shed their own views and perspectives of what SMEs needed and listen to what they really need.

Their struggle was so real that they didn’t care if the product or platform was an established brand or not. All they wanted was a solution that worked, that helped them to get funding and that saved them time in the process.

This led us to create SMEgo, a funding platform that allows small businesses to reach several funders and investors with one application. 

It's all about closing the happiness loop

It took us less than three months to go from identifying the opportunity to launching SMEgo. We saw some early signs of success in the number of SMEs that had registered on the platform, the number that got funding and the amount of revenue generated.

One of the important aspects of the project was to track how much fun the team was having, which was measured by how much laughter there was along the way.

From our perspective – the business perspective – it all comes back to happiness. You need to have happy customers, happy employees and happy shareholders. If those three critical stakeholders are happy, you know you’re on the road to success to delivering at a quicker pace and to becoming more customer-centric.

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