Enterprise & Supplier Development
ESD that outlives the compliance cycle
Compliance is where most Enterprise and Supplier Development programmes begin. It is rarely where their value should end. Yet that is where a great many of them quietly stop, having moved the money and produced a certificate.
We design programmes around a firmer test. Do the suppliers survive beyond the funding cycle. That question changes how beneficiaries are selected, how much working capital they genuinely need and how long somebody stays close enough to notice when a business is about to run into trouble. The corporate gets a programme that stands up to scrutiny from its own board and from the verification agency. The supplier gets a business that can still trade in year three.
Our ESD services
Four disciplines
ESD Strategy
Working out where the spend can genuinely create impact, then building the strategy around it.
ESD Strategy
Working out where the spend can genuinely create impact, then building the strategy around it.
We start with a proper review of the business and a detailed analysis of where the spend currently goes. We then map the ESD support landscape sitting around it, because that is usually where the pain points and the real opportunities for impact reveal themselves.
From that foundation we design a strategy that is cost effective and that draws on what you already have. Ecosystem collaboration does a good deal of the work here, as do capabilities sitting inside your business that are presently going unused.
ESD Programme Design
A support programme built around your business goals as much as your scorecard.
ESD Programme Design
A support programme built around your business goals as much as your scorecard.
We work directly with your leadership team to develop an SME support programme that strengthens the competitiveness of those businesses while remaining aligned to what your own business is trying to achieve.
The design draws on what your business can already do and on what we bring to it, together with whatever the wider SME support landscape makes available.
ESD Programme Management
We run the programme and we account for what it delivers.
ESD Programme Management
We run the programme and we account for what it delivers.
Partnering with us connects you to our network of in-house implementation specialists and a curated panel of service providers for technical support.
We draw on our partnerships across the SME support landscape to get the programme implemented properly. Compliance, monitoring and impact reporting are managed throughout, with KPIs measured against what was actually promised at the outset.
ESD Fund Management
For corporates that would rather commit the capital than administer it.
ESD Fund Management
For corporates that would rather commit the capital than administer it.
Where a corporate would prefer to commit capital rather than run the machinery around it, we manage the ESD fund itself.
That means setting the mandate and the investment policy, standing up a credit and investment committee with genuine independence, deploying loans and grants against agreed criteria, handling collections and maintaining the control environment a fund of this kind requires.
The independence matters more than it might appear. A committee that cannot decline a proposal is not a committee. A fund that never declines anything will not produce suppliers worth having.
Our ESD philosophy
Value Chain Integration
ESD should strengthen the value chain it sits inside. When it works, both sides benefit. When it is run as an isolated impact activity, it benefits nobody for very long.
Sustainable Impact Measurement
ESD investment has to produce a measurable return. Financial and operational, certainly, but social and environmental as well. All of it evidenced rather than merely asserted.
Ecosystem Development
Real transformation is never achieved one enterprise at a time. It requires interconnected ecosystems that carry growth beyond any single business and it requires partnership with organisations that want the same outcome.
Strategic Alignment
ESD delivers most when it is aligned to the core business strategy rather than bolted onto the side of it. Your organisation has particular strengths. The programme ought to be built on those.
Market Development
A well designed ESD programme does more than support individual businesses. It creates markets that did not previously exist and it deepens both the talent pool and the industrial capacity of the sector it operates within.