The so­cio-eco­nom­ic cli­mate over the past few years has been a tricky one to nav­i­gate for lo­cal small busi­ness­es.

How­ev­er, a T&T-based tax and ac­count­ing ser­vices com­pa­ny has seen that many Small and Medi­um En­ter­pris­es (SMEs) do not know or don’t ex­er­cise all the op­tions avail­able to them to grow.

In past few years, Rob­ley Baynes Tax and Ac­count­ing Ser­vices has be­come a lo­cal col­lab­o­ra­tor with in­ter­na­tion­al tax, le­gal, and val­u­a­tion ser­vices com­pa­ny An­der­sen Glob­al. Un­der the An­der­sen um­brel­la, the lo­cal team is hop­ing to raise the stand­ing of lo­cal busi­ness via it’s Lev­el Up Pro­gramme.

The com­pa­ny is set to fea­ture two work­shops: one in Trinidad, one in To­ba­go; to dis­cuss those cru­cial strate­gies.

“We’d have re­alised that SMEs didn’t un­der­stand the im­por­tance of fi­nan­cial state­ments and tax­a­tion. So with that, we’d have start­ed do­ing work­shops to ed­u­cate SMEs on the fi­nan­cial state­ments and tax­a­tion, how they could use their fi­nan­cial state­ments to lever­age their busi­ness op­er­a­tions, to get over­draft fa­cil­i­ties, loans, cor­po­rate cred­it cards. It’s from that back­drop we would have done the Lev­el Up Pro­gramme,” said Mikhail Baynes, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of An­der­sen Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Baynes said while the team had been do­ing work­shops since 2018, since part­ner­ing with An­der­sen in 2020 the com­pa­ny has gained cru­cial in­ter­na­tion­al in­sights that can be ap­plied to lo­cal busi­ness­es.

“We are an in­ter­na­tion­al tax and ac­count­ing firm. We have over 130 clients, lo­cal­ly, re­gion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly. We get to see what are the best prac­tices from in­ter­na­tion­al clients and for any suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es, there are four pil­lars. Those four pil­lars are busi­ness strat­e­gy, fi­nan­cial state­ments and tax­a­tion, tal­ent ac­qui­si­tion and man­age­ment and sales and dis­tri­b­u­tion. So we’d be dri­ving in­to these four busi­ness pil­lars that are uni­ver­sal for any size of busi­ness, so that could help them nav­i­gate the cur­rent chal­lenges in the mar­ket­place,” Baynes told the Busi­ness Guardian.

This year’s work­shops would be the team’s first phys­i­cal­ly held work­shop since the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

“Most SMEs, they don’t have stan­dard op­er­at­ing pro­ce­dures for the busi­ness. They don’t have a sys­tem af­ter they have gained clients and so forth. So, there’s feast and famine You have busi­ness good for this quar­ter, and then for the next few months, there’s famine in the busi­ness. So we will be go­ing through a sev­en-lev­el step for busi­ness­es from var­i­ous lev­els in how to take their busi­ness from ze­ro to one,” he said.

Dur­ing his in­ter­view, Baynes ex­plained there were sev­er­al steps that they en­cour­aged clients to fol­low to achieve growth and sta­bil­i­ty in the de­vel­op­ment of their en­ter­prise.

“In any busi­ness, you want to en­sure you have the re­quired prod­uct mar­ket fit. So to en­sure that there’s val­i­da­tion of your busi­ness ideas, you want to have your first 10 cus­tomers or clients to show that this busi­ness idea has rel­e­vance to the mar­ket­place,” he said as he went over the first three steps of the pro­posed plan.

“Then the oth­er step is en­sur­ing you have a prop­er sales fly­wheel, en­sur­ing that you could sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly gain clients. There should be a sys­tem­at­ic ap­proach to gain­ing clients so it’s not spo­radic, so you have a func­tion­ing busi­ness, there’s rev­enue com­ing in, month in month out. And then the third lev­el, hav­ing sys­tem poli­cies, and stan­dard op­er­at­ing pro­ce­dures for your busi­ness. Those are the ba­sic foun­da­tions in which you start to have a busi­ness.”

Baynes ex­plained that his team had seen sev­er­al busi­ness­es make sig­nif­i­cant strides af­ter adopt­ing these strate­gies. He not­ed the An­der­sen TT team it­self had adopt­ed some of the mea­sures in the face of the lo­cal for­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty con­straints.

He said, “We tell clients, you want to be able to not just be lim­it­ed to one mar­ket­place. You may have to prob­a­bly piv­ot any mo­ment to see how you could get as­sis­tance, es­pe­cial­ly to see how you could gain for­eign ex­change. I could give you an ex­am­ple, even for us, the rea­son for us to take on the in­ter­na­tion­al brand of An­der­sen TT is so that we could have more in­ter­na­tion­al clients, so that we could earn for­eign ex­change for a busi­ness so that we don’t have to de­pend on the bank.”

While he ac­knowl­edged the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment had re­cent­ly an­nounced a fa­cil­i­ty to pro­vide for­eign ex­change for SMEs and ac­knowl­edged the EX­IM­bank’s ef­forts to help cer­tain busi­ness­es to buy forex, he stressed that it was im­por­tant for en­tre­pre­neurs to con­sid­er oth­er op­tions.

“Be­ing able to take ad­van­tage of such pro­grammes, but al­so, as well, be­ing able to man­age your cash flows prop­er­ly, and al­so, as well be­ing able to ex­port your prod­ucts and ser­vices or move it in­to not just one lo­ca­tion, but an­oth­er lo­ca­tion. Source dif­fer­ent sup­ply chains, not just be de­pen­dent on one sup­pli­er. You could have sev­er­al sup­pli­ers for your busi­ness, so that if one ship­ping port is down your busi­ness is not un­der­wa­ter,” he said.

Baynes not­ed that the strate­gies sug­gest­ed to busi­ness­es al­so helped with the work-life bal­ance is­sues faced by many small busi­ness own­ers. He said that the team’s guid­ance had al­lowed a pre­vi­ous client, a phar­ma­cist, to plan fam­i­ly va­ca­tions con­fi­dent in the knowl­edge that the busi­ness would con­tin­ue to func­tion ef­fi­cient­ly.

The An­der­sen team will al­so ad­dress geo-po­lit­i­cal pres­sures which have ad­verse­ly im­pact­ed busi­ness in gen­er­al. Last week, An­der­sen T&T’s man­ag­ing di­rec­tor and lead tax con­sul­tant, Kendell Rob­ley post­ed an analy­sis of the US tar­iff im­po­si­tion en­ti­tled, “Mak­ing Sense of US Tar­iffs: What Trinidad and To­ba­go Needs to Know in 2025—and How to Save”

Rob­ley ad­vised that the new rec­i­p­ro­cal tar­iff struc­ture could mean that some US im­ports may be­come less com­pet­i­tive, which may prompt lo­cal busi­ness­es to seek re­gion­al sourc­ing through Cari­com and ex­plore Asia and Latin Amer­i­ca for al­ter­na­tive sup­ply. He al­so urged lo­cal com­pa­nies to close­ly re­view Cus­toms Tar­iff Clas­si­fi­ca­tions to avoid penal­ties.

How­ev­er Rob­ley not­ed the Caribbean was spared a ma­jor in­crease in costs when the Unit­ed States Trade Rep­re­sen­ta­tive (US­TR) opt­ed to ex­empt Caribbean ship­ping from pro­posed high port fees on Chi­na-built ves­sels on April 17.

He said, “Orig­i­nal­ly, these port fees—es­ti­mat­ed at over US$1 mil­lion per US port call—would have dras­ti­cal­ly in­creased the cost of ship­ping be­tween the US and the Caribbean. “

This de­vel­op­ment came af­ter the Cari­com Pri­vate Sec­tor Or­ga­ni­za­tion (CP­SO), lob­bied for the re­gion to be ex­clud­ed from these charges. Rob­ley is ex­pect­ed to share more in­sights on such geo-po­lit­i­cal de­vel­op­ments at the work­shops, which will be held on May 18 at the Cha­co­nia Ho­tel in Mar­aval and May 25 at the To­ba­go In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy Lim­it­ed Train­ing Cen­tre in Sig­nal Hill.