Guest post Chris Poll, Chairman, SME Capital and Theodore Roosevelt Malloch co-author of Common Sense Business

Davos Man is dead and we need a new kind of economics to replace globalist transnational’s. The place to look: Small and Medium sized enterprises (SME).

You don’t hear anything about them at Davos.

Forty-odd years ago a kindly German economist, living in Britain, named, E.F. Schumacher, delivered a sanguine argument in his telling book: Small is Beautiful.

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Its equally weighty subtitle was: Economics as if People Mattered. It was ranked as among the 100 most influential books written since WW II by the Times Literary Supplement.

The point of that gem of a book was to assault what is meant by progress.

It asked what had gone wrong when a few live in almost obscene wealth while large parts of the world and portions of our own nations barely get by. The book was a call to arms, to understand things we all seemed to have forgotten: what is value? What actually matters in life? Should the means always justify the ends? What is work for? Is big always good?

The major question asked, which remains most relevant, is: Who put all these elites and economists in charge?

This was the original tract of ‘populist economics’. These are questions that reverberate back to us even more demonstrably today as we witness a near total frustration with globalization and the uneven economics and havoc it has wrought. The globalist Davos crowd has delivered wealth and livelihood for themselves but what about the rest of us?

That message should not be lost on leaders around the world, captains of industry, nor governments these days. It could be rephrased as: Small and medium sized enterprises are the lifeblood of our economies. Listen up President Trump, Prime Ministers and Presidents everywhere…

SMEs are the places where jobs are created; the location where economies truly prosper, and where innovations take place. In our current age we should come to a realization that SMEs are beautiful — as the place of economic action. We need to cultivate them — as good places and places for good.

Look at some very telling statistics: Small and medium sized businesses accounted for 99.3% of all UK private sector businesses at the start of last year. Total employment in SMEs was 15.7 million, 60% of all private sector employment in the UK. Three times more new jobs were created by SMEs than the FTSE 100 in the last years. This is where the current economy is centered—where people live and work. The same is true in the US and elsewhere but the elites despises and looks down on SMEs the way they do the common person.

SMEs are important in terms of employment and gross value added (GVA), especially in smaller countries. However, they are also significant in Germany, where they account for a high percentage of GVA created. The German Mittlestand is well known for its characteristics and world-class companies.

This is also true in the US, where 30 million SMEs accounted for two thirds of net new private sector jobs in the last decades. SMEs, according to international statistics, provide more than two thirds of all jobs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and 80 per cent in low-income countries.

We should celebrate these engines of growth and ask how can they do even more? What we need is a new way to foster SMEs — and that revolves around capital itself.

One way to do that is to favor flat tax regimes that put money back into the hands of the populace. Tied to that is what is called, Purchase Order Financing. That is a new and novel way of getting funding to these suppliers when they most need it. It has the potential to attract and boost smaller suppliers, enabling them to handle bigger contracts more reliably, creating a more resilient supply chain, lowering input costs, while helping contractors to deliver on time and on budget.

What exactly is SME capital? Is it possibly the very core of an emergent populist economics? It is a completely new way of financing small and medium sized businesses that are supplying into large supply chains, based on the buyer’s creditworthiness but without any advanced payment by the buyer or impact on buyer’s balance sheet. And it can be insured for risks.

Cash is advanced to suppliers at the point when it’s most needed – when the purchase order is issued – up to 50% of the value of the purchase order.

This process involves the buyer as a critical participant, but at zero cost to the buyer and with no impact on buyer’s balance sheet. The supplier pays a finance charge with no need for security or any director’s guarantee.

For the supplier this amounts to unsecured borrowing, available earlier and more flexibly than other forms of funding. It is cheaper than invoice-based finance and certainly than debt on the balance sheet.

Such a form of capital could be made available to construction and other industry suppliers providing access to finance that traditional providers of finance, such as large banks, struggle to provide, especially given the lack of need for security or collateral.

Such supplier resilience reduces the risk of supplier failure, and enables smaller suppliers to take on bigger contracts than otherwise might be possible. This grows small, local companies into medium sized ones and in the process adds many jobs and fosters economic growth.

Supply chain resilience means that not only do suppliers and buyers benefit, but also suppliers are attracted to work with buyers that take seriously the needs of their suppliers.

There is also a significant cost savings as more viable suppliers means keener competition, lower prices (potentially with big savings for buyers), and provides more incentives for suppliers to innovate.

The social benefits of this kind of collaborative approach provide a USP for contractors tendering for public sector construction projects and for companies looking for new suppliers anywhere. It would provide spending procurement budgets locally and allow for a Brexit-driven infrastructure push in the UK. In the US and across deindustrialized Europe, it would put jobs back in those down and out places that badly need them. In the developing world it would encourage market-based development and take businesses from start up phases into the next rung on the ladder.

This kind of financing favors smaller, more local suppliers, who are often more cost-efficient but have otherwise been unable to access finance. It strengthens local communities with social and economic benefits of multiplier effect by keeping spending and employment local, efficient, and more sustainable.

This new and better scheme of financing would complement prompt payment codes and transparency and fits around stage payments and approvals processes, helping to reduce cash flow volatility. Time is money and this fixes that problem. We need a market-oriented populist economics that benefits real people and the firms they create.

SMEs often struggle simply because they can’t fund growth and don’t have the financial ability to face off against giant companies. This process of greater flexibility to fund anything, including additional equipment, software, materials, manpower, or services such as training, puts them back in the game and makes them truly competitive. It is a lifeline.

SMEs need a sustainable way to do business collaboratively. By helping smaller and medium sized suppliers (SMEs) to compete and grow we all benefit.

We achieve what we all want: economic growth at a more robust and sustainable rate of development, while creating more good, well paid jobs, jobs, jobs—for hardworking, talented, everyday people.