Big Isn’t Always Beautiful — The Power of Small Businesses

When we started Sparkle, there were three main areas that we focussed on and that were central to all decision making; build trust, keep costs low by leveraging the power of technology and good governance.

Whilst I’ve spoken previously about the fact that even with 30+ years of experience in banking, I’ve had to be intentional about unlearning some ways of doing things, my time in traditional banking and corporate life taught me [and has stuck with me] these three critical principles, when it came to building a new banking service.

Building trust sits at the top of the list, not only because the other two principles feed into it, but all business owners must learn how to build and maintain trust with their customers; and likely more so in the banking space. Dealing with peoples’ hard earned money is no joke. Building trust must permeate every crevice of a company. From dealing with your customers, to your investors, to your team and also the wider communities you operate in. Having experience and network capital has really helped in delivering the three core principles of Sparkle.

Sparkle’s journey was a little different from other startups’, due to three decades of working in Nigeria’s finance and business space. I was fortunate to have a tested network of professional relationships with financial leaders and operators — from commercial banking to infrastructure players and regulators. Knowing the rules allowed me to embed good governance into Sparkle from the ground up. Knowing the operators allowed me to know who to speak and confer with when I wasn’t certain on something technical or legal. We’ve never taken the wing-it approach, and we’ve never embraced the much-loved VC mantra of build fast and break things. Not with Sparkle. For us, we’re very much the nail-before-scale types. And it’s worked for us, as we’ve scaled and built our tribe.

With this in mind, I chose to bring on board a big-five auditing partner from very early on; I felt their expertise and their trusted brand name would be a significant boost to us building trust with our numerous stakeholders. Now — big firms are very VERY good at talking about scale-as-you-go. They talk compellingly about digital transformation, innovation through digital and how they embed new digital ways of working into global companies, to drive efficiencies and increase productivity. We are digital first too, and thought; who better to take direction from than global leaders in digital innovation and transformation? They’re so good at talking about it, they almost actually believe it. The reality, however, is quite different.

From our most recent experience, the main realisation is that the big 5 companies are very limited in their execution and delivery, and continue to use old, traditional ways of working. Certainly for a digital-first [and second, and third] company like Sparkle, they do not have anywhere near the skills or insight into how to deliver a proper audit in this here 2023. We had to spend a lot of time educating the consultants about our business and the work we do; providing a consultancy service for our consultants, so they could do the job we were paying them to do.

They are unsure of [or unwilling to learn] how digital businesses operate — not just ours, but also our customers’. They don’t know the dynamics of an Instagram marketplace, and they aren’t learning fast enough. We do. They are being outpaced by the ecommerce and digital markets. We are growing with these commercial spaces. For an SME-sized company like Sparkle, a big 5 company, especially one that seems not to want to walk the talk, cannot keep up because they don’t have the same mindset or business reality as us. And that’s a problem.

Our purpose at Sparkle is to help small businesses grow. We have the same digital mindset as our customers, and this means we are all essentially signing from the same hymn sheet. The big 5 can’t do this. Not because they don’t have good people with professional skills working within them, they actually do — there’s a lot of useful information and value locked up in these organisations that sits with people. But as a collective, these big 5 companies can’t anticipate the needs of micro and small businesses, many of whom do not have the budgets for big consultancies and if they do find the money, they need that money to work for them. Beyond the human side of business engagement such as networking and building relationships, from what I see, much of the big 5 consultancy work could now be handled by AI — because technology is usurping the day-to-day knowledge skills of those who are working in these consultancies. This will be the true democratisation of professional services.

This entire auditing episode with a big 5 consultant made me think about this YouTube video by Good Work and their case study on What does a consultancy actually do? Funny, punchy, poignant; asking the big questions in an open forum, that maybe some of us have not been brazen enough to ask out loud. Until today.

What does a consultant actually do?

There’s a small difference here between asking what they do compared to asking what they can do competently… but you get the picture. We are now able to question hard what level of professional service we are getting for our money and, subsequently, where we can go for the best service.

Sparkle is building and rolling out professional services for our digital tribe — invoicing, employee managing, payroll, tax remittance, store keeping, business accounting [and more] all in one place. We are busy digital entrepreneurs working for busy entrepreneurs. The big 5 aren’t entrepreneurial or digital — and I’ll hold my hands up and say I made a mistake by thinking they could deliver what we needed. Whilst I still stand by my own mantra of working with trusted partners to scale a business and build trust, my partners in future will be smaller, more nimble, more dynamic small businesses that understand our space, and our needs and who are also hungry to not only work with us, but scale with us. Sparkle already has a track record of this — we’ve worked with DDNA, Wimbart, GIGM, Odoo, Fiter and Freshworks; leading companies who scale with us and whose interests are aligned with ours. I am now even more wedded to building side by side with smaller consultancies, who can not only chat, but can deliver.

Subscribe to DDIntel Here.

Visit our website here: https://www.datadriveninvestor.com

Join our network here: https://datadriveninvestor.com/collaborate