As an accountant and Business Link Pacific business service provider Iokopeta Williams is known to many small business owners in the Cook Islands. With her background in offshore businesses and the tourism sector, ‘Yogi’ (as she prefers to be known) is perfectly placed to advise on what SMEs need to do to improve their access to finance or to succeed in other funding opportunities.
Yogi registered her accountancy business, IMW Ltd, in 2019 after leaving full-time employment. When Covid struck in 2020, it opened a door for her to work with SMEs struggling to adapt their businesses to the new economic climate. For many, this meant bringing their financials up to date and preparing accurate and achievable business plans to enable them to access Covid grant and subsidy opportunities.
In 2021 Yogi joined the BLP business advisory programme, a move which had the dual benefits of helping her clients to achieve their goals but also helping her own business with the great influx of new clients. “It was particularly helpful for clients to know that I was also able to help with the documentation for funding applications, particularly business plans and completing forms which can be quite complex and daunting.” Today, Yogi has two assistants, and her business is operating at close to capacity.
Discussions with many businesses across the Cook Islands reveals a silver lining to the Covid cloud. While no one would wish to go back to 2020, there’s no doubt it was a wake-up call for many businesses. “I am constantly amazed at the resilience of business owners – the ones that adapted also learned the benefits of budgeting properly, and most of my clients have continued to use my service to maintain their financial records and keep on track. It’s exciting to see them persevering and finding new ways of doing business.
“After working with a range of SMEs, I’ve found a large number of small traders prefer to process their books manually, which can mean transferring this data to my online system is a long process. To address this, I came up with the idea of a business diary which will provide bookkeeping, business tips and due dates. Ideally it would also have the capacity to take photos of clients’ written data and automatically transfer it to Excel to shorten the data entry process.
“The plan is to not only help our clients with their current accounting and transfer of data to us, but IMW will have a new source of income from selling the diary and at the same time increase our capacity for accounting work.”
To bring this business diary idea to fruition, Yogi has successfully applied for a Business Support Grant from BLP. The grant is being used to develop the software required for the diary and the additional functionality to take photos of hand-written data and convert to spreadsheet format.
On the topic of BLP in general, Yogi states, “I believe the BLP programme has been very instrumental for SME progress here in the Cook Islands. Although Business Support Grants are very popular, in my opinion the most valuable support has been the subsidising of advisory services. It has allowed SMEs who need the support but could not afford the full costs to tap into these services at a reduced rate as BLP covers a portion of the fee. The support helps to shape their businesses in many ways including Financial Management, Business Planning, Marketing Planning and much more.”
BLP facilitates access to business advisory services and financial support. To start your journey with BLP, you can self-assess your needs by using the free online tools available to help small and medium-sized businesses diagnose areas in their businesses that an advisor could improve.
The first step can be the online Business Health Check. You can also check your business’s resilience to respond to crisis or climate change challenges on the Business Continuity Planner and the Climate Action Sensor. If you prefer to meet a local BLP representative in person to discuss your business, get in touch with our local partners to arrange a face-to-face Diagnostic.