What it really takes to make SME transformation last

I have spent close to two decades working alongside SME support programmes across Lebanon and the wider MENA region, and I have come to see one thing very clearly. Everyone in this field, the donors, the development partners, and the enterprises themselves, wants the same thing: change that lasts. A great deal of thought, funding, and real commitment goes into helping small companies grow. The hardest part has never been the intention or the effort. It is making the change take root so firmly inside a company that it keeps going long after the support has ended. In my experience, that is the real challenge we are all working to solve.

Over the years I have watched closely what separates change that fades from change that holds, and it has very little to do with how much funding or how many training days are provided. It comes down to the reality that owners of small companies live every day. In a small business, the owner is usually carrying almost everything at once, sales, production, staff, suppliers, and cash flow, all on their own shoulders. There is rarely a moment to step back and work on the business, because the business needs them inside it at every hour, handling whatever has come up that day.

This is the troubleshooting cycle that so many owners are trapped in, and it is one of the biggest obstacles to growth I know of. It is also why learning, on its own, is so hard to turn into lasting change. Owners do invest in themselves. They attend the training, they take part in the coaching sessions, and they often leave genuinely convinced of what needs to be done. The difficulty comes afterward. Back inside the business there is no time to put any of it into practice, no senior and experienced person the company can afford to bring in to carry the work forward, and, once the programme ends and the owner is on their own again, no clear sense of where to even begin. So the firefighting resumes, the good intentions are set aside, and the growth everyone hoped for never quite becomes sustainable.

“What changes this is not more training. It is having an experienced pair of hands inside the business for a time.”

What changes this is not more training. It is having an experienced pair of hands inside the business for a time, someone who works next to the owner and the team to do the work with them and turn it into everyday habit, at a cost a small company can carry rather than the senior salary it cannot afford. And it means keeping the owner at the centre of it the whole way through, so that the new way of working belongs to them and holds once the support steps back.

A few other things make the difference too. It helps to start from an honest picture of where the company really stands, which is usually some distance from where the owner assumed it was. It also helps to build the internal foundations first, the systems, the financial clarity, the everyday processes, so the company can take on new markets or new investment when they arrive instead of being swamped by them. And capital tends to work best when it is raised early, not left as a reward at the very end, so that the real prospect of investment pulls the whole effort forward from the start.

This is the thinking behind how we work at DEVONEERS, and it is why the platforms we are building begin with a proper diagnosis and a roadmap the company owns, then stay close enough to help a team live the change rather than only learn about it. Our aim is not to do this in place of the programmes and partners who invest so much in these enterprises. It is to help that investment take root and last, so that the effort everyone puts in turns into companies that keep growing long after the support has ended.