How GrowthIQ works

One partner from assessment to audit-ready.

About GrowthIQ explains why ESD delivery and evidence need to work together. This is how we run the programme from assessment to sponsor-ready reporting.

The service loop

Five delivery activities across the ESD journey

Every ESD programme runs the same five stages — Identify, Assess, Develop, Integrate, Verify. This is how GrowthIQ delivers against them, activity by activity.

What we deliver

The services behind a compliant, growing programme.

GAP Assessments

A structured baseline for every SME on your programme: mentor-scored across seven categories, actual against potential, with responses frozen at submission for a defensible record.

Delivers: 01 Assess

Growth Plans & Mentorship

Assessment results turn into working growth plans, delivered through structured mentorship sessions — so development is driven by evidence, not intuition.

Delivers: 02 Plan03 Mentor

Programme Management & Compliance

Spend targets, verification deadlines, beneficiary statuses and an immutable audit trail — structured around the Amended Codes of Good Practice (2023).

Delivers: 04 Track

Sponsor Reporting

Board-ready reports for the sponsoring corporate, built from each beneficiary's live assessment and programme data in GrowthIQ's house style.

Delivers: 05 Report

Dashboards, Alerts & GrowthAI

Corporate and SME views of the same programme, automatic at-risk flagging and deadline alerts — with GrowthAI on hand to answer programme questions in plain language.

Delivers: 04 Track
How it runs

How the system keeps the programme moving

Where a record comes from, how a status is worked out, and how the audit pack gets built.

1

Everything lands in one record

Beneficiaries, evidence requirements and verification cycle loaded once — never reconstructed at quarter-end.

Show the detail

Your beneficiaries, spend targets and verification cycle are loaded once. Each beneficiary carries its own cycle, evidence requirements and spend target from the moment it lands — one place, not three — so nothing has to be reconstructed at quarter-end.

2

The record updates at source

Mentors capture as sessions happen; beneficiaries reply on WhatsApp Business.

Show the detail

Mentors capture against the growth plan as sessions happen, and beneficiaries respond over WhatsApp Business — the channel South African SMEs actually check. Nothing is re-keyed from someone else's spreadsheet, so there is only ever one version of a beneficiary's position.

3

Status is worked out, not typed in

Verified, At-risk and Overdue are derived from the record — never somebody's opinion.

Show the detail

Verified, At-risk and Overdue are derived from what is actually in the record — evidence against requirement, date against deadline, task against owner. The same rule fires the alerts, so a flag is never somebody's opinion.

4

The audit pack is assembled on request

Built from the same records, with assessment responses frozen at submission.

Show the detail

Reports are built from those same records at the moment you ask for them. Assessment responses are frozen at submission, so a pack pulled in March still shows what was true in March.

GrowthAI

An AI guide, not just a database.

GrowthIQ's AI walks your team through the platform step by step, so there's no learning curve and no manual to read. It drafts first-pass audit-pack summaries and answers plain-language questions about your programme in seconds.

Because everything stays live, reporting is never a separate exercise — it's a click away.

Ask GrowthAI
“Which beneficiaries have evidence outstanding ahead of this quarter’s verification?”
3 beneficiaries are currently flagged At-risk. Apex Solutions has 4 evidence items outstanding with 6 weeks to verification — I've drafted a summary you can share with them directly.
Who gets what

A programme only works if both sides get something out of it

The left column is what your organisation gets. The right column is what your beneficiaries get — set out here so you can see how they are looked after while they are on your programme.

For the corporate sponsor

  • De-risks doing business with small suppliers
  • Supplier diversity and transformation you can evidence
  • A supplier database that stays compliant, not one rebuilt each cycle
  • Collaboration that holds up in practice, not only on paper
  • Compliance with the B-BBEE Act
  • Early warning when a beneficiary starts drifting off plan
  • Progress feedback to the sponsor, straight from programme data

For the SME on your programme

  • Skills transfer, coaching and mentorship
  • Executive and management support
  • Compliance help sized for a five-person business, not a corporate checklist
  • Access to corporate clients
  • Know what's due and by when — one clear task at a time, not a stream of requests

Scope your programme with us.

Request a demo