Yemeni Small Biz Shares Your Issues

The government wants to help small businesses, but it also gets in the way. It’s not just America where this happens.

When we think of the Middle East, major social and political issues come to mind. Oil prices probably rate at the tops of most people’s minds, when they aren’t worrying about the day to day demands of their small businesses.

In Yemen, the government wants to support its small businesses for the same reason our leaders wish to do so here, according to the Yemen Times. In many ways, Yemen stays tied to its agrarian roots, but some 33,000 small businesses averaging a couple of employees operate within a few, generally service, niches.

The refrain of a barber will sound familiar. New sales taxes applied to his business coupled with existing burdens devour a month of his income. Rising costs elsewhere hinder the flow of customers to his shop; he calls the government money grab a “rip-off.”

He sounds downright American, really.

Some business consultant types in the country believe education on the nuances of concepts like profit and loss would help. Yemen Times said not many of these owners understand the basics of maximizing profit; few attempt to crack into underserved niches due to being risk-averse.

The groundwork sounds like it is in place, lacking only the small businesses to take advantage of it. Some of those lessons apply in the US just as they do along the Gulf of Aden: do you understand your business from a cost analysis standpoint, are you trying to compete with numerous other established and new players in a niche?

Lessons in small business, it seems, apply globally, without regard to the state of modern society. People have wants and needs, and the effective small business will serve them.