Helping SMEs And SMEs Digitalise Their Businesses; SMEGO

Many people are quitting their 9-to-5 jobs to be their own bosses during the pandemic. A survey shows that 49% of Malaysian employees intend to quit their jobs to start their own enterprises. Being an entrepreneur, on the other hand, may seem to be easy, but behind the glamorous exterior lies a great deal of extremely hard work, dedication, discipline, and sacrifice. Regardless of what your business idea is, you may find that the transition from full-time employee to entrepreneur poses challenges in areas that you did not anticipate.

BusinessToday sat down with Dato’ Westin Chew, CEO, and founder of SMEGO talk about the story behind SMEGO and the challenges and issues of MSMEs and SMEs in Malaysia.

What’s the story behind SMEGO? 

There is a huge market gap between companies and micro-businesses, and many companies manage to run their business properly or well equip rather than those micro-businesses. Micro businesses comprise more than 80% of market trading numbers. Many as they have yet to digitalise their business. Therefore, SMEGO was established to provide both offline and online single entry platform for micro-businesses. 

Where did Dato’ Westin get his funding? 

Initially, it was self-funded and SMEGO just made its first step into crowdfunding and manage to raise some funds. SMEGO now is targeting to collaborate with a listed company as one of the funding support for our SMEGO future growth.

What were the challenges faced by SMEGO at the beginning?

We found it hard to get people to understand what is SMEGO and get them to really use the application in their business life. We are built with a simple yet effective solution in our apps and we believe our current and upcoming strategy would enhance this better. 

What’s the story behind the founder of SMEGO?

The founder had a background of brand and advertising experience, during those time, he had been assisting local and international companies to grow and develop strategies for their businesses, hence the founder saw this as a potential to help them digitalise and at the same time enhance their business market through SMEGO app.

How does SMEGO help entrepreneurs still maintain the growth of the business while maintaining a work-life balance?

Based on our experience and market research, the ability to leverage digital tools has become a must for entrepreneurs to survive the ongoing and post-crisis. MSMEs and SMEs require technology to assist with 2 main major problems, which are: first, how to manage the business effectively in a cost-saving, easy-to-manage method; and second, how to increase sales through multiple channels with a solution to enhance product selling. To maintain the work-life balance philosophy, SMEGO builds and is ready to join an effort to help revitalise business owners by offering both offline applications that assist in managing the inventory, pos system, accounting, and an online e-store ready to sync to marketplaces and increase selling channels at the lowest onboarding entry, which enables an entrepreneur to save time in managing the entire operation while having more quality time with their families.

What are the challenges and issues of MSMEs and SMEs in Malaysia when managing their business and how SMEGO can address the issues? 

As the economy is facing a downturn due to pandemics and uncertainty post-COVID, many business owners have a crucial need to transform or digitalize their business by adopting new technology, yet a high percentage of business owners are still unfamiliar with digitalization. Firstly, SMEGO provides a solution to bridge the backend to selling in one system, focusing on the pain point of messy inventory, accounting, paperwork, and unreliable stock issues. Secondly, with the upcoming bridge to multiple marketplace selling channels such as Shopee and Lazada with a single button, millions of sellers in marketplaces today are now able to use SMEGO to manage all their retail and online sales with an automatic update to their stock inventory, accounting, and shipping. Finally, a high percentage of sellers in the market have undocumented sales or bookkeeping. Therefore, SMEGO enables small business owners to have their business in the automated system in order to apply for future bank loans or grant applications for expansion purposes easily. 

How the current tools in the market do not cater to the needs of local SMEs and MSMEs and what makes SMEGO unique from the others?

Some of the solution providers in the market were built on websites or required users to purchase software rather than an application. It often focuses on large corporations’ SMBs rather than micros, as large corporations are willing to pay high customization fees. Furthermore, some of the existing solutions are global in scope. Some players in the market do have similar functions but with higher costs compared to SMEGO. We focus on providing the most business-critical solutions at a low entry price strategy to help business owners go digital more quickly and effectively. SMEGO understands the pain points of business owners and well understands the local culture. Hence, SMEGO was built according to these. SMEGO’s competitive advantages are low price strategy with most needed functions; localization approach; simple and easy-to-use interface; suitable for all industries; and operating anywhere at anytime.

What are the benefits of a crowdfunding campaign as an investment and how does it correlate to SMEGO’s vision?

Technology has driven and escalator the entire business world ever since the COVID. Digital commerce is yet another new revolution and things are moving faster than ever. It has pushed digital commerce to both B2B and B2C buyers and has driven shoppers to purchase a product they’ve never bought online before, with a growth of 70% buying more than usual. Coming back to the question: SMEGO initiated this crowdfunding to speed things up and to scale things faster to cope with the everchanging digital world that we are in now and with the funding, we are also looking to expand into the Southeast Asia market in a short time. By escalating this crowdfunding as well, we hope to attract seasonal investors and potential partners to support us in knowledge and experience for our future expansion.

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