BEE – CPE 14 - One page summary
Building a BEE strategy that works and that is sustainable can help transform a business.
In South Africa, BEE is evolving and developing on an ongoing basis. One of the difficulties businesses, particularly smaller businesses, have faced has been as a result of their failure to understand what BEE is about, and to understand what the goals are of the governments BEE policies. Therefore they may not have built BEE into their business strategy. Businesses have been flooded with information and have battled to find their way around the ‘tangle’ of legislation. In addition, due to its evolving nature, what was relevant or important yesterday is not necessarily as important or applicable today. This has had a particularly damaging effect on businesses which have seen BEE as another form of government imposed legislation which simply needs to be complied with. They may have acted on information so as simply to ‘tick the box’ and have treated BEE as a compliance function, not embracing BEE and not integrating it into their business strategy. The result is that all too often decisions have been made, partnerships entered into, and costly agreements concluded, which, as BEE has progressed, and as targets and criteria have developed or moved, have proven simply not to make business sense.
There are, however, businesses that have embraced BEE, and have maximised the opportunities flowing from BEE. Amongst other things, they have recognised that the growing emergent black middle class has and is going to have money and will be a driving force in our economy – and they have ‘transformed’ so as to tap into that market. They have built BEE into their business strategy.
There is little doubt that BEE and empowerment have become one of the defining business issues of our time. Accordingly, there is a need to ensure an understanding of BEE and how it is being implemented and interpreted and how this will impact on a business.
The challenge is to move with the times and to recognise the opportunities that come with transformation, to build this into a business strategy, and to recognise why it is that transformation, in our current environment, makes good sense.