Rewane, Dozie Urge Business Owners to Embrace Digital Mindset for Better Cash Flow Management
Leading digital bank, Sparkle, hosted a virtual session on Thursday featuring renowned economist Bismarck Rewane, CEO of Financial Derivatives; Omon Anenih, founder of The Dew Center; and Uzoma Dozie, CEO of Sparkle. The event focused on cash flow management strategies for small businesses.
In the 90-minute session titled, ‘Keeping Your Cash Flowing: Simple Tips for Small Business Owners,’ over 140 business owners from across Nigeria tuned in to gain insights on navigating their businesses through prevailing macroeconomic challenges.
Rewane kicked off the session with a 20-minute presentation, providing an overview of Nigeria’s evolving economic landscape. He discussed the impacts of currency devaluation, FX losses, minimum wage reviews, high inflation, interest rates, borrowing costs, squeezed margins, and declining consumption on businesses. “In 2014, Nigeria was Africa’s largest economy, accounting for about 23% of Africa’s GDP, and we were the sixth largest oil producer in the world. Ten years later, things have changed. By 2017, we had gone into recession, followed by COVID-19 and another recession in 2020… these factors all have a significant impact on small businesses today,” he noted.
Despite these challenges, Rewane emphasized that small businesses can still succeed by adopting a digital mindset, building efficient operating models, and tapping into high-growth sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, telecommunications, media, renewable energy, real estate, and tourism. He encouraged small business owners to persevere, citing Amazon’s journey from a garage-based online bookstore in 1994 to a $2 trillion enterprise.
Uzoma Dozie highlighted the benefits of adopting a digital mindset to enhance small business operations, reduce costs, and enable data-driven decision-making. He shared that Sparkle supports this transition by providing tools for expense tracking, invoicing, payments, performance monitoring, payroll, savings, and investments, all through a mobile app.
Omon Anenih shared her entrepreneurial journey, advising small business owners to manage cash flow effectively by planning, tracking expenses, cutting costs without sacrificing value, staying lean, making data-driven decisions, and diversifying revenue streams. She underscored the importance of digital tools in boosting productivity and profitability, saying, “Cash flow is the lifeblood… digital is your friend.”
Sparkle Business simplifies business management for small and medium enterprises, allowing them to monitor activities, manage products and customers, identify top-selling products and high-patronage customers, and track business metrics, all from a mobile device.
The webinar was moderated by Nneka Okekearu, Director of the Enterprise Development Centre at Pan-Atlantic University.
