Make Skills Development Your Growth Strategy This Financial Year

With a new financial year starting, many SMEs focus on cutting costs and increasing sales. SMEs have a new focus, a new direction and gathered a new perspective based on the learnings and challenges they faced over the last financial year. In this week's TuesdayTip we are going to dive into what a lot of SMEs forget to tackle - employee growth, and investing in the people already inside your business.

Hiring new staff is expensive. Recruitment, onboarding, salaries, and training all add pressure to cash flow. Up-skilling your current team strengthens your business without dramatically increasing overheads. The reality of business is that skill gaps in digital tools, customer service, sales processes, and operational efficiency are common across SMEs. Instead of replacing people to fix this, forward-thinking businesses are developing their teams to close those gaps internally.

Why should this be a focus for the new financial year?

It saves recruitment costs - Developing existing employees is often far cheaper than hiring new ones.

It improves productivity immediately - Small improvements in systems knowledge, sales confidence, or communication can increase output without increasing payroll.

It boosts retention - Employees who feel they are growing are less likely to leave, therefore reducing turnover costs.

It strengthens your competitive position - A skilled team delivers better service, faster turnaround, and stronger customer experiences.When a team member feels trusted and appreciated, their confidence and capability naturally grow. They are more productive and are eager to learn a new system and new skills. Investing in your employees not only benefits your business, but benefits your employee as well.

Why not apply it this quarter by:

Identifying one skill gap in your business that affects performance.

Choosing one affordable course, webinar, or internal mentoring plan.

Making training part of monthly operations, not a once-a-year event.

Many successful South African SMEs have scaled not by constantly hiring, but by building strong internal capability - empowering supervisors to become managers, sales staff to become team leaders, and admin teams to handle digital systems more effectively. The result is controlled growth without uncontrolled costs. Even small, consistent development compounds over time.

The lesson to remember?

Growth doesn’t always require a bigger team - it requires a better-equipped one.