Spring is in many ways the most interesting time of the year. After a long and dark winter, the days are getting longer. When you go to work in the morning, it's not dark, and when you leave work, you still have time to do anything during the daylight. At least for me, I notice that I wake up in the morning easier for the day when it's not pitchblack outside. Spring also means the beginning of the season for many micro-entrepreneurs.
Especially in the service sector, the midwinter months can be very quiet, excluding the Christmas season, which makes a good spike in sales figures. In the spring, people start to spend more, which means more regular customer traffic in stores. During the Eastern, many families visit their cottages for the first time after winter, and often when they leave the cottage, they take their year´s first shopping list with them, which includes what needs to be done for the cottage. Cottagers and summer residents bring lot of money to the localities during the summer months. This requires that local services and products are easily found and available. Summer residents are happy to buy from local companies, if by that they can avoid unnecessary sitting in the car.
We in the SavoGrow region want to do our part to support our companies so that their services are well on display. The region's joint summer magazine - Savon Villin Lännen Sanomat - will be published again at the end of May, where we offer the companies of our municipalities a free opportunity to market their own product/service in the magazine in the form of a discount coupon. The prerequisite for participation is an offer of the company's product or service valid for at least for the summer, which can be redeemed with the discount coupon. The idea of the coupons is to illustrate the versatile service offering in our region. The magazine is distributed to all households in the SavoGrow area, summer cottage residents and a sample of people who have moved out of the area. I can also recommend this to other areas if you are thinking of ways to make your companies visible for wider audience.
Spring is also the time when families start planning summer vacations. The corona era was a stroke of luck for domestic tourism companies in the sense that Finns learned to find the gems of tourism in Finland and as a result many small companies made good results. We, too, in the SavoGrow area have taken a cue from the development of small tourism operators. Tourism activities in our region are very small-scale and fragmented. The operators are mainly micro-enterprises or part-time entrepreneurs. Few operate year-round, and even fewer derive their main livelihood from tourism. We strive in many ways to strengthen and grow the tourism industry in the region and to increase the recognition of the Tourism Region at the national level. We are participating in the domestic tourism fair in Tampere at the beginning of May (2023).
New EU-program period is about to start, and the regions are waiting feverishly as the funding taps open. Rural financing has been promised to open in spring, and it is good to hope that this will also happen, because it is also the most important financing instrument for micro-enterprises in our region. We also hope that there are instruments in the financial guidelines that support the needs of companies better than before. The high expectations are also supported by the recent Suomen Yrittäjät’s entrepreneur gallup, according to which SMEs show signs of improvement. More than half of the companies estimate that the financial situation is either very good (17%) or fairly good (36%) and since last autumn the situation of the companies has improved even more. The situation was made easier by e.g. the fact that the expected high electricity price increase did not occur.
I see supporting micro-enterprises in the green transition as one of the most important things in the coming years. Currently, the pace of change in the operating environment is fast and we should keep up with it. Micro-enterprises and entrepreneurs are often so busy running their own business that there is simply no time to monitor what is happening in the environment. The green transition is still seen in many places as a distant "thing that doesn't belong to us".
Our task as business advisors will be to verify and develop environmental responsibility in micro-enterprises. The goal of micro-enterprises in the coming years should be that they see the green transition as an opportunity, not a threat. Through this, their competitiveness improves when they find new products and services that are more environmentally friendly than before. It is important to all of us that the companies in our region do well. It is especially important in a sparsely populated area, where the existence of services is constantly being fought for. Could the green transition be an opportunity for jobs to increase and services to improve in sparsely populated areas? Could utilizing JTF funding be the key to this development work? We as a network can be key factors in this development.
Happy spring and upcoming summer to everyone! Shall we make a summer promise that we will try to buy local products and services from local companies as much as possible? I promise to be at least involved!
Author:
Olli Kokander, Business Advisor, Suonenjoki, Development Company SavoGrow Oy, Chairman of the MicroENTRE Partnership Network in 2023
In Kerttu Saalasti Institute's blog we write about the topics of the Institute's research groups, micro entrepreneurship education and the Institute's general topics. The authors are researchers, experts and members of networks.
Our topics are: micro entrenepreneurship, future manufacturing technologies, regional excellence, micro entrepreneurship education