Government should create, enforce policies to help SMEs thrive

Author and mentor, Olumide Emmanuel has said that the government alone cannot create jobs but can put good policies in place that would allow small businesses to thrive and employ others to reduce the current burden of unemployment in Nigeria.

Speaking at The Pertinence Group’s head office in Lagos recently, Emmanuel who also doubles as the group’s board chairman said the government must partner with private enterprises such as theirs and improve in many areas in order to give room for growth and sustainability.

Pertinence Group said its focus going into the next decade is on creating more jobs for Nigerians, promoting entrepreneurship and providing solutions to the nation’s housing deficit problem.

Speaking at a press conference held in Lagos as part of activities to mark a decade in business, one of the group’s co-founders, Dr. Sunday Olorunsheyi stressed that it has been a decade of impact, consistency, hard work, progress, productive partnerships and relevance for them and they intend to break more grounds moving forward.

Recounting their journey, Olorunsheyi said they started out with just one staff from a rented space but after a decade, now employ almost 200 direct staff, thousands of sales affiliates and have empowered over a thousand others in terms of earnings. He added that as they stayed true to their development mission, they have also seen many sales team members transition from becoming personally free financially, to providing similar opportunities to others by establishing their own businesses.

Olorunsheyi said a decade in business is no mean feat as statistics show that 96 percent of businesses fail before they are 10. He went on to add that they have established several business presence including Quanta Africa, Pertinence Properties, RealVest, Edificio, DataFirst, Hostnownow, Jetseed, Cloudnine and Automecho; in seven states in Nigeria, and in five countries, including the UAE, USA, Canada and the UK. With over 80 estate locations and 2.1 million square meters of land sold till date, he said their latest projects, Lavida Prime and Ire would surpass expectations.

Co-founder, Wisdom Ezekiel said they would be launching a smart mortgage system, a fractional investment solution to de-democratise real estate for the common man, promote entrepreneurship and create more jobs. He added that part of their vision is a smart land registry system that would ease the burden of registering lands and a smart and sustainable city to serve the fast-growing millennial market in Nigeria.