Qld Business Basics Grant - One small door closes, another big door is ready to open!
“I put so much time into my grant application and I didn’t even get past the login screen!”.
“All that effort gone to waste!”.
“The whole system is a rort. What a joke!”.
These were just some of the hundreds of comments (and these are examples of the more polite ones) I read online following the Queensland Government’s Business Basics Grant opening and closing last Wednesday – my birthday, by the way.
The vitriol was loud, abusive, and often had to be deleted by exhausted online admins.
Sure, the funding pool was exhausted within a couple of hours. But did anyone expect differently from a very small grant pool made available to over 400,000 small businesses?
Sure, productivity was lost as business owners had to take probably a day (maximum) to prepare their application, gather the evidence, and wait for their turn in the queue. But did anyone realise how simple this grant application was compared to others?
Sure, the Smarty Grants portal could’ve been better prepared with a Plan B as thousands of people hit the portal at the same time and caused it to crash. But can you recall similar website crashes from other very big businesses with a wealth of resources at their disposal? Think Facebook, Commonwealth Bank, Instagram, Amazon, Coles…maybe even your own?
Yet the viciousness of the commentary from our small business community took me a little by surprise. I expected disappointment, frustration, and some anger – and I get that. Though the bitter venom vented by many made me feel a bit crook. Afterall, this was a grant for $5,000. I realise this isn’t an insignificant sum, but compared to the much bigger Government procurement pool, $5k is a drop in the ocean.
So what we had last week was tens of thousands of Qld small businesses all allocating time and resources and competing against each other for a virtual grants lottery with just a tiny chance of success.
And here’s my conundrum: of all those businesses prepared to spend the time to try and win $5,000 in the Business Basics grant lottery, how many of these businesses are also trying to secure real Government contracts and secure ongoing revenue streams – not just a one-off grant. From my conversations and experience, not many at all.
And here’s the big elephant in the room. We have thousands of businesses prepared to put in the time and effort to secure a small $5k hand-out grant, with a very low chance of success. Yet most of the same small businesses fail to realise the huge revenue potential of partnering with Government and fulfilling Government contracts.
Winning a Government contracts isn’t easy. But compared to last week’s Business Basics Lottery (or most business grants for that matter), the chances of supplying Government via tenders, contracts, RFQ’s, EOI’s, and BaU is a much less risky path to follow, with a much bigger financial return.
Consider this:
I don’t want to oversimplify things, here. Winning and fulfilling Government contracts is hard work; sometimes frustrating; often time-consuming.
However, securing even a small contract from the biggest sector available is life-changing for successful businesses. Further, fulfilling a Government contract often leads to more opportunities with other departments at a local, state, and Federal level.
With Queensland Governments 30% procurement allocation to SMEs, there exists a $5 to $6 billion market targeted for our smaller business sector. Read that again and think about the opportunity for your business.
Government needs almost every product and service at some point in time. We just need more SMEs putting their hand up to fulfil these opportunities.