SMEs in emerging markets · Wassenaar, the Netherlands
Tim Bett
Seven years getting small and medium businesses in Africa, Asia and South America to work better. I run one workstream on your mandate, under your brand, and I stay until it is implemented.
- SMEs, emerging markets
- 7 yearsAfrica, Asia and South America
- Industry before that
- 30 yearsGlobal supply chains for multinationals
- Countries
- 11Growing by about four assignments a year
- Assignments
- 15 + 6In country, and remote
Who I help
Small advisory firms that win DFI and donor-funded mandates in Africa and Asia, and then have to staff them.
At the far end of those mandates is an SME: an owner-managed business trying to grow, in a market where that is hard. That is the only place I work, and it is where the last seven years have gone. Not governments, not NGOs, not charities — donor and DFI money is fine, but the business I am sent to help has to be a business.
I work under your brand, on your mandate, to your scope. I will not go round you to your client, and I will not bring you clients either. You win the work; I deliver on it.
The situation
You have won a multi-country mandate with three or four workstreams. It starts in about six weeks. The two or three senior people you trust are already committed. Whoever you put forward has to fit the sector and country the bid was scored on, and survive the funder reading the CV. You have days to decide, and if it goes wrong it is your decision to defend.
Or the bid has not gone in yet, and you are a named expert short for the technical proposal. That is the better moment to have met me.
What I do
Most of the businesses I am sent to are trying to grow and cannot. I work out how the company makes money and where it loses it, write the plan, turn it into something with owners and a sequence, and then stay alongside the management team while they deliver it. I look at the whole value chain rather than one function.
What I work on is the dynamics of the business, not the technical specialism. I will say what needs to improve in a product; I will not tell you how to configure the equipment that makes it. That is the reason I can move between sectors: the way a company makes and loses money is recognisable quickly. In agriculture it means commercialisation, market access and processing, not growing.
How I work matters as much as what I do. I am hands-on, and I work with people rather than at them. I sit with the management team — the owner, whoever runs production, whoever does the selling — go through the numbers with them, walk the floor, and build the plan together, so that it is theirs rather than mine. I coach as much as I advise. On your mandate I am part of your team: your brand, your scope, your client relationship, and no surprises for you.
I use AI tools heavily in my own work — research, analysis, drafting — which means one person on a workstream now covers ground that used to take two.
Why me
Seven years inside emerging-market SMEs
Most of it as a senior expert for PUM Netherlands: about fifteen assignments in country and six run remotely. Each one puts me inside an owner-managed business I have never seen, in a country I may not know, with a short window to find what is actually wrong and to earn the trust of the person whose company it is.
The problem is nearly always growth. The owner knows his product better than anybody and has spent his working life on it. What he has not done is work out how to sell more of it, or build a company that can carry the extra volume when he does. Scaling is where he gets stuck, and helping him through it is most of what these assignments are.
That is also where the versatility comes from. These markets do not behave like the mature ones in the West: supply is unreliable, credit is scarce or ruinous, the rules move, good people are hard to keep, and the family usually sits inside the business. Adapting quickly, across cultures, without lecturing anybody, is what I have been practising for seven years — and it is why I can be put in front of a client in a country I have not worked in before.
Sub-contracted delivery
An associate of Buck Consultants International since 2021. Inside that, one mandate of seventeen months on their engagement and under their brand: PMO delivery for a medical-devices multinational's European distribution redesign, from collaborative design through implementation. Their managing partner will take your call.
Nine months on donor money
Contracted to IDH the Sustainable Trade Initiative in 2019, as a retained adviser, to develop its catalytic role in Ethiopia's textile and apparel industry. Agreed with GIZ, I coordinated the Buyers Forum, which put global apparel brands in a room with the Ethiopian Investment Commission, the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Industrial Parks Development Corporation. Two programmes came out of it: In-Step, an environmental performance standard across the industrial parks built on the Higg FEM framework, and Fit & Ready, on the safe mobility of women workers travelling to the parks.
Thirty years before that
Designing and running global supply chains for DSM, Archroma, Rohm and Haas and Imerys, and consulting on the same at Camelot and Buck.
I stay
Rwanda, Kenya, Indonesia and Zimbabwe have all continued past the original scope, through remote coaching and mentoring. That is where a plan turns into an implemented one.
Worked in Zimbabwe Indonesia Bangladesh Rwanda Côte d'Ivoire Bolivia South Africa Kenya Ethiopia Nigeria India
If it is your business
You may be here because somebody sent you my name, not because you are staffing a mandate. Then the short version is this.
I work with owner-managed companies that want to grow and cannot. Usually the product is not the problem — you know it better than anyone. The problem is everything around it: how to sell more of it, at a price that pays, and how to run a company that can carry the extra volume once you do. I come in, work out with you how the business makes money and where it loses it, and we build the plan together. Then I stay while you carry it out, which is the part that usually decides whether anything changes.
I can also get a business ready for investment, and work with one an investor already holds to lift how it performs.
Writing
One way to start
If you are staffing a mandate: send me the format your CVs go in, and the country and sector of something you have coming. I will send you mine, cut to it. If it fits, we talk. If it does not, you have lost five minutes.
If it is your own business: tell me what is stuck, in a few lines. I will tell you honestly whether it is something I can help with.
Tim Bett · Wassenaar · the Netherlands