Entrepreneur Confidence Index

The formal press releases will follow later in January but in the interim I thought I’d update you on one of the initiatives that Rival is putting together for 2010 – an Entrepreneurs Confidence Index providing real-time information about what is happening in the small business segment in South Africa.

This index will commence gathering data in January with its first findings released in early February – we’ll tighten up the dates once we have our head around the number of contributors and some of the partnerships we are looking to tighten up.

The formal index can be found at www.entrepreneurindex.co.za – the site is due to go live in early January – the information we are looking to gather includes:

•  The level of confidence of South African entrepreneurs
• What do they see as the biggest opportunities and threats
• What sectors are planning to expand or contract
• Is there a demand for credit in particular industries and what the credit is likely to be used for
• Expansion and contraction are likely to be measured by credit demand, increased expenditure on staff and advertising and a few other variables

The data itself will be independantly managed by Rival Industrial and we’ll be releasing our findings on a monthly basis. This blog will then be the place for entrepreneurs to debate some of the findings and to stimulate debate around this sector of the economy.

Ultimately our aim is to be able to pin-point growth areas and get a good idea of what entrepreneurs in South Africa are thinking and feeling and the actions they are taking on the ground.

Admittedly there are a lot of indexes out there and many of them lose their credibility as time goes by. The various chambers of commerce and associations all tend to run indexes of sorts and often these create a lot of noise with limited “weight” behind them.

What’s going to set our offering apart? We’re not totally sure but the one thing that is definate is that small business is likely to be a critical part of the economic recovery and until we have a clear idea of what is happening in the segment we can’t take appropriate steps to assist it.

Hopefully that is where we can come in.

I am always open to ideas and to chat to different organisations and role players to ensure the best quality offering around.

Feel free to drop me a line:
Marc Ashton
marc@rival.co.za
082-561-1585

Otherwise feel free to post some comments below and we’ll try and interact and respond as new developments and partnerships are announced.

The Entrepreneur Confidence Index is a product of Rival Industrial cc.