MENTHER MAGAZINE DECEMBER EDITION 2021

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MENTHER GROWTH

Making the Circle Bigger www.growthwheel.com/joinourecosystem

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t takes a collaborative village of entrepreneurship support organizations to build and sustain a business ecosystem. For Growthwheel South Africa those Village Pioneers started with Sasol Incubation Enterprise and Supplier Development (ESD) Program in 2012 which was cofunded by the Department of Trade and Industry. Sasol inspired other incubation early adopters that included Furntec Bandwidth Barn, The Innovation Hub, Kulea Consulting, NGMindset and others to use the same Framework to support Business Owners. The experiences of this Group of Purveyors led Seda to investigate and adopt the Growthwheel Framework for the national incubation program in 2015 when GrowthwheelSA was formally incorporated into the South African economy. Six years down this journey, Growthwheel SA and the local Entrepreneurship Support Organisation (ESO) Partners are a growing Ecosystem of 300+ ESO’s, Corporate Supplychain enterprise development accelerators, Business Advisors, Mentors. This community of best practice through the integration of a common language, common framework, common tools and

common transparent data, is one of South Africa’s most collaborative coop petition networks focused on building innovative and disruptive ideas to the commercialization and transformation of corporate supply chains. Making the circle bigger goes beyond just the Entrepreneurship Support Organisation’s own sustainability. Growthwheel SA constantly engages policymakers and professional bodies as well as participate in Ecosystem dialogues,

research and quality standards development task-teams to

enhance the professionalism of the Sector. “ Joining ecosystem leaders in the development of the DSBD’s BDS policy framework and incubation standards have been some of the highlights of our intentional contribution to enabling a robust MSME Ecosystem,” says Hilton Theunissen, co-founder of Growthwheel SA. GrowthWheelSA trained over 1,000 Ecosystem Builders who worked with some 30,000+ business owners by integrating GrowthWheel’s Toolbox and actively collaborating with entrepreneurs on the growthwheel cloud platform. Data doesn’t lie and it is why real data together with transparency are so critical to enabling all Stakeholders to make targeted decisions and plan specific interventions to support an SMME’s based on their specific needs. Other than revenue growth, and jobs which serve as key performance indicators, helping entrepreneurs get focused on their ambitions, helping them make decisions

Inspire | Connect | Empower

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