Businesses Boost Sustainable Development

Abstract

When it comes to long-term development solutions, ordinary aspects of doing business have become essential building blocks of development goals. One of the best ways for businesses to help reduce poverty is to integrate local producers into their supply chains. This is because it clearly benefits the company, saving the time and money associated with making multiple trips to the field, managing contracts, and payments. In this case, the company is helping coffee farmers to retool by increasing funding, marketing, and negotiating with local coffee exporters to sustainably increase their incomes. The company provided local coffee exporters with technical assistance while helping them partner with financial institutions that could provide capital for on-lending. The resulting Coffee Service Providers (CSPs) helped fund new wet mills, used their marketing expertise to get premium prices for the farmers’ coffee, and provided risk-management services to protect farmers against crop losses. Then, if companies want to hire more local employees and reduce unemployment, they should train them in the necessary skills for the job. Also, potential workers need an unspoken array of “soft skills”, such as a professional demeanour or the ability to work in a team. And that’s when companies are hiring in labour markets where supply greatly outpaces demand, entrepreneurship is also essential in reducing unemployment. Therefore, one way to address this is to provide a different type of workforce training for youth.

Reference: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/01/businesses-boost-sustainable-development/

Summary

Business development is the creation of long-term value for an organization for customers, markets, and relationships. It can be simplified to all ideas, initiatives, activities to enhance the overall business. There is commonly used metric in business development that is: revenue, expansion, and strategic partnership. In this case, Company XYZ’s business development team assesses further expansion potential. Then after research and studies, they concluded to expand the business to Malaysia. In the expansion there are linkage between divisions such as sales, marketing, strategic initiatives or partnership, project management or business planning, product management, vendor management, negotiations, networking, and lobbying, and cost savings. The BD scenario discussed above is specific to a business expansion plan, whose impact can be felt by almost every unit of the business. Personal branding can be done with using professional social media (example: LinkedIn). In the professional social media you can explain what kind of person are you, strength, and credibility. It also can be done through networking which can determine future possibilities and enrich career or add experience.