Five stages. One system of record.
Assess
Every SME starts with a structured GAP assessment — scored by a mentor across seven business categories, so the starting point is measured, not assumed.
Plan
The gaps become a growth plan: focus areas, milestones and support scoped to what the assessment actually found.
Mentor
Structured mentorship sessions work the plan, with progress and evidence captured against each focus area as it happens.
Track
Programme dashboards keep every beneficiary's status live — verified, at-risk or overdue — with spend tracked against target.
Report
Sponsor reports and audit packs are generated from the same live data — not rebuilt in slides at quarter-end.
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.
Growth Plans & Mentorship
Assessment results turn into working growth plans, delivered through structured mentorship sessions — so development is driven by evidence, not intuition.
Programme Management & Compliance
ESD spend against target, verification deadlines, beneficiary statuses and an immutable audit trail — structured around the Amended Codes of Good Practice (2023).
Sponsor Reporting
Board-ready reports for the sponsoring corporate, built from each beneficiary's live assessment and programme data in GrowthIQ's house style.
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.
The machinery that keeps it honest
Where a record comes from, how a status is worked out, and how the audit pack gets built.
Everything lands in one record
Your beneficiaries, spend categories 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.
The record updates at source
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.
Status is worked out, not typed in
Verified, At-risk and Overdue are derived from what is actually in the record — evidence against requirement, spend against target, date against deadline. The same rule fires the alerts, so a flag is never somebody's opinion.
The audit pack is assembled on request
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.
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.
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
- Governance and compliance help sized for a small business
- Access to corporate clients
- Reporting tools and clear communication guidelines