ALBANIA AND NORTH MACEDONIA SMALL BUSINESSES GROW WITH BUSINESS TRAINING AND COACHING
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the Western Balkans need business enhancement services to improve their business performance and operations. This is especially true for smaller, family-owned businesses that operate with small management teams. These SMEs must rely on external professional business services to increase their visibility and marketing efforts to reach European and international buyers and markets. To tackle this issue, USAID Economic Development, Governance and Enterprise Growth Project (EDGE) supported LinkAcross in launching the GrowBiz business training and coaching project.
Since July of 2020, GrowBiz has serviced 90 SMEs in the Western Balkans through targeted training, executive coaching, industry consulting, and digital marketing services. Specifically, SMEs in North Macedonia and Albania in agriculture, tourism, and light manufacturing sectors have learned about these services, aimed towards growing their business and increasing sales and exports. These SMEs received training essential for business growth, such as strategic management, market research, digital marketing, customer engagement, environmental and social responsibility, manufacturing efficiency, and export strategy. GrowBiz provided a select group of 12 SMEs with 10 months of personalized business coaching from experienced U.S. business coaches and helped them develop and begin implementing business growth strategies. Additionally, 26 SMEs received technical assistance through GrowBiz project in production of promotional videos and/or expert consulting in the areas of digital marketing, manufacturing efficiency, and environmental sustainability.
Below are some of the stories and experiences of SMEs from Albania and North Macedonia that received knowledge transfer and gained crucial skills to successfully manage and expand their business operations.
Caravan Horse Riding is a tourism company from Albania which has been operating in the long riding trails since 2011 providing tours for horse riders from all across the world. They have 40 Albanian breed horses, and provide seven and twelve-day tours throughout two regions in the southern part of Albania. Through these tours, they create income opportunities for 12 families Apparel workers at Textile Solution, North Macedonia and provide an authentic experience for clients as they get to experience the local rural life. Caravan Horse Riding’s bookings drastically reduced by almost 80% during the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, and had to overcome major difficulties. They adapted quickly by diversifying their business, branching out with C-Adventures & Tours, which focused on 13 new tourism products and services such as hiking, off-road, city tours, and culinary experiences.
Kristina Fidhi, Administrator and Co-owner of Caravan Horse Riding Albania, said that the GrowBiz project improved their online marketing, and they now have two websites for their products. Additionally, she said “through GrowBiz, we improved company management, marketing, and also new practices for operating in the tourism market especially during the Covid-19 crisis. We have learned to better use our human resources and invest in our staff in different ways. Kristina explains, “We now clearly know where we are headed and can better plan our steps. We were assisted with creating a marketing plan and a promotional video, both of great benefit to the company. Through coaching we wrote a business growth plan to reorganize many different internal aspects of our business.”
Kristina shares their ambitious plans for the near future. “We have plans to invest in a new product a riding track to provide trainings for new horse riders: “Horse Riding Lessons Holidays.” This future investment will require more assistance in order to create a full training program for both the riders and the horses. We are also working on creating new three-day tours during January for our Greek clients.”
Another company participating in GrowBiz is Textile Solution from North Macedonia. The company was founded in 2016 by an ambitious, but also very experienced management team, which has been professionally accomplished in the textile industry for 20 years. The primary product of the company is protective clothing. Textile Solution initially started with the production of standard hazmat clothing, but soon the team recognized the possibility of adding an additional service with implementing specific “Seam Sealing Technology” due to the lack of such a service in the local market and beyond. In this way, they created a new service in their business portfolio that raised the company to a higher level than other companies offering basic cut-measure-trim (CMT) apparel service. Their entire production is exported as a complete product, and they are planning to create their own product label in the future.
Maja Aceski, Executive and Production Manager at Textile Solution, said “We heard about the GrowBiz project at an event organized by the Textile cluster. The concept was very interesting for us. All services are of great importance to our company because they helped us in many ways to check and improve operations. The production audit gave us very good notes and directions in terms of seeing where we are and what we need to improve. The marketing audit also gave us many useful tips on how to improve the promotion of our company and how to create a modern and useful website.”
With a growing number of SMEs like Caravan Horse Riding, Textile Solution and the other 10 GrowBiz companies recognizing the value of professional business services and customized coaching for their business, the EDGE Project expects the interest for such services will only increase. EDGE will continue to work to expand these benefits to SMEs throughout the region.
