While it will always be of utmost importance to improve your business via means of performance, client relations, quality of output, and far more, there is one thing that most South African businesses need to improve that businesses from no other country even need to think about. This would have to be your B-BBEE scorecard.

As many of us must surely have heard by now, about the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment movement and how it was first established in 2003, with the sole aim of economic transformation across South Africa. This aim involves ensuring that previously excluded South Africans are now able to gain a stable income, and thus become meaningful participants in the local economy. A part of this objective is the creation of additional space at all levels of the economy, which can be felt through employment equity, preferential procurement, socio-economic development, as well as skills and enterprise development.

However, to do so on a tangible level through your very own business, you need to have a sound BEE strategy in place that can help the previously excluded on a personal level. We have created this article to help your business choose a sustainable BEE strategy via a number of different avenues, all of which can also help your business add to its BEE scorecard, and thus, make your business more compliant with BEE regulations.

To get started on your BEE strategy, it should be known on all levels that skills development is all about building your scorecard along with leveraged training. By spending as little as 15% of your entire skills budget on short courses, you can only expect to gain 1 point on your BEE scorecard. However, by having an effective and well-planned strategy that works alongside Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) funding and leveraged programmes, which will also only require roughly 15% of your skills budget, your company can instead expect to gain up to 90% of the points that can be earned on your scorecard, if not all of the points that can be earned.

An effective BEE strategy that your business can implement would be to place a focus on those with disabilities, as well as to start programmes that maximise tax breaks as well as salary inclusions, subsidies along with SETA funding. Unfortunately, many companies fail to do so with the addition of not optimising their training programmes in the slightest. With these failed strategies, companies that are able to afford to spend as much as 6% of their skills development budget on black staff, which may still include optimisations, there may not be enough of their budget left to train and support the rest of their staff.

There are still other steps that a business can take to make the most of its BEE strategy, however, we have found that the above-mentioned BEE strategy is one of the most effective, allowing your business to complete its scorecard in a short amount of time while still being able to make great a tangible difference to all those involved.