Category: Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the South African business landscape in a number of ways, with the pressures of lockdown having turned daily operations for many companies on their head. When it came to staff, businesses that could had to adapt to remote working, while those that couldn’t, had to implement a host of rigorous COVID-related occupational health and safety measures.

As the pandemic led to a more urgent adoption of advanced technology, companies have also had to review their processes and adjust accordingly. This review might include revisiting their business model and evolving it in line with client needs or diversifying the business offering. Adding to this pressure, reputational risk has been on the up as well, forcing businesses to review how they handle aspects like customer feedback and complaints.

Below are some practical steps that local businesses can take to ensure they emerge out of lockdown successfully and adapt smoothly to a post-COVID world: 

Have a game plan 
As Winston Churchill said, “He who fails to plan, plans to fail”, and this couldn’t be truer for businesses right now. As such, the first step to getting your business back on track is taking the time out to complete a full strategic business plan, which requires you to answer three crucial questions: where am I now; where do I want to be; and how do I get there?

Assess your current reality
Considering the past six months and all that has happened, now is the time to conduct a full, thorough assessment of your business in order to gain a better understanding of how the business is doing. Factors to consider include your target market; suppliers; existing competition; internal capacity and the external environment – including political, environmental, social, technological, and legal influences.

Don’t reinvent the wheel
Luckily, there are a number of existing business frameworks and models to make use of when undertaking this assessment. You’ll just need to select the one that is most relevant for your business. For example, for newer businesses, it is recommended to develop a Business Model Canvas – a simplistic model that helps answer questions relating to your Value Proposition (the value a company promises to deliver to customers). While for more established businesses, the primary model that can be easily adopted is The Ansoff Matrix, which looks at market penetration, product development and more.

Look forward
By using the above tactics, you will be able to identify key focus areas for the business going forward – and you’ll need to take into consideration planning for the short-term and long-term period. In addition to this, the business vision, mission and goals will need to be revisited and possibly updated to consider the new reality of the business and its desired destination.

In the world of corporate consulting, dominated by a handful of huge international auditing and consulting firms, you would think it unlikely that a tiny local company can grow to hold its own against the giants in a difficult marketplace. But that is just what a remarkable trio of women has been doing over the past thirteen years.

Back in 2007, when Anne-Marie Pretorius, Jessica Tandy and Seugnet van den Berg did a management buy-out of the small Johannesburg-based consultancy – Bizmod for which they worked; they started off as a company of four. Since then the trio, who were finalists in the 2019 Entrepreneur of the Year® awards, a competition run by Business Partners Limited have managed to grow the Bizmod team to 41 consultants, and they have no intention of slowing its growth.

Anne-Marie, Bizmod managing director, makes no bones about it: “Our competition is the big four (international auditing/consulting firms)”. It means that they are up against a formidable dynamic that pushes against any emerging firm that tries to play in the big league. The big four firms have enormous resources, they are close to 100 years old or more, and current and former associates of theirs form vast and seamless networks throughout the corporate world.

Anne-Marie, 46, describes a relatively simple set of attributes that allows Bizmod to punch above its weight.

First, Bizmod’s cost structure is a fraction of that of the international firms. Long before COVID-19, Bizmod pursued a work-from-home model. Most of their consultants are placed at the offices of their clients where they work on projects, and the expense of having a big corporate head office was seen as a wasteful indulgence.

Second, because Bizmod does not have the huge tentacles of the big four stretching into the corporate world, every contract has to be earned through hard work and sterling performance. “We have never been given a golf-course contract,” says Anne-Marie, referring to easy contracts given by corporate managers to their former colleagues at the big four.

It has honed a culture of hard work and excellence in Bizmod. “We get our foot in the door (of a new client), work hard, build and cement the relationship, and repeat,” says Anne-Marie. It sounds simple, but it is by no means easy. Every three years or so Bizmod has seen a growth spurt, which means that the three entrepreneurs have had to scramble to adjust their systems and processes to cope with the increase of work and staff.

“It is never comfortable, but it is a lifestyle that entrepreneurs have to make peace with. You just have to compartmentalise so that your panic at two o’clock in the morning does not spill over and affect your family,” says Anne-Marie, a mother of three.

Anne-Marie was always interested in business, and remembers her school shutting down her booming fire-cracker trade that she had started on the playground. The school system did not encourage entrepreneurship as a career option in those days, and Anne-Marie found herself studying law. She experienced it as rigid and uncreative, although she recognises now that the logical, analytical nature of legal thought makes for an excellent foundation for business analysis. She has since completed an honours degree in human resource management and an MBA on a part-time basis.

In her search for a path out of law, Anne-Marie landed a job as a motor recovery clerk at the short-term insurance firm – Mutual & Federal, where she one day participated in a redesign of their department’s workflow. The moment she saw the business analysts in action, she knew that was what she wanted to do. She made it known to her managers and soon she was working as a junior business analyst in various units of the company.

On one of these projects Anne-Marie met Seugnet and Jessica, who were working for Bizmod at the time and hired by Mutual & Federal as outside consultants. It was the start of a life-long professional relationship between the three, and when Anne-Marie returned from maternity leave she joined them at Bizmod as a consultant.

Anne-Marie landed a contract for Bizmod at MTN, where she spent the next five years, consulting to MTN on various projects, which culminated in a year as acting national sales manager for MTN. This brought Anne-Marie to a crossroads in her career, in which she could choose to pursue a clearly promising rise up the corporate ladder at the telecommunications firm, or step away and continue to work for Bizmod as a consultant.

While she loved the year as national sales manager, Anne-Marie says her somewhat rebellious nature makes her ill-suited for a corporate life. She dislikes the politics, even the necessary and healthy kind needed to operate in a large organisation. And she likes the freedom and variability of being a consultant.

Her next move as a Bizmod consultant was at the life insurance company – Liberty, where she gained useful expertise in helping them adapt to the Promotion of Protection of Information Act (Popi Act).  

Meanwhile, the three co-workers at Bizmod were eager to grow the tiny consultancy, while the original founders were not so keen on taking on the inevitable pains that go with growth.

Three years ago, Anne-Marie took over as MD, allowing Seugnet to work on various internal projects aimed at strengthening Bizmod for its next phase of growth. “We are working hard on our succession planning so that the company can grow beyond us. It is something that is easily neglected, but we have been good at making ourselves uncomfortable before we actually have to get uncomfortable,” says Anne-Marie.

Things are looking up for Bizmod, which has come through the COVID-19 crisis remarkably unscathed. They started cutting expenses even before the lockdown in anticipation of a serious pandemic. “Apart from that, we just put our heads down and worked. It is all that we really had any control over,” says Anne-Marie.

The need for the financial firms and telecommunications companies to adjust to the Popi Act should keep Bizmod busy in the months ahead despite the slow economy, and as affirmative procurement is becoming increasingly important, Bizmod’s BEE Level 2 status and majority black ownership should help to boost its growth. Anne-Marie says growth for its own sake is not enough for the three entrepreneurs. “We want to build something that is truly South African, a company that represents the country as it really is. We have so much local talent. It is wonderful to be building a home for it.”

Business owners are forever seeking new opportunities to expand their operations – a characteristic key to entrepreneurial success. However, where there are people seeking opportunities, you can bet there will be fraudsters looking to scam them out of their hard-earned funds. One only needs to do an internet search including the keywords “businesses scammed” to see how common this is.

Most recently, a host of new scams against businesses have begun to emerge, specifically connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. While veteran business owners have likely learned how to steer clear of these scams through experience, the warning signs may not be as clear for first-time entrepreneurs, With this in mind, here are some of the most common warning signs that your latest “opportunity” might just be a scam.

Theo Baloyi, last year’s Emerging Business Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2019 Entrepreneur of the Year® competition, is proving his mettle by forging ahead with a phenomenal growth spurt this year despite the lockdown that has led to the biggest economic contraction in South African history.

While countless businesses are scaling or closing down, the 30-year-old entrepreneur’s Bathu Swag shoe company has opened no fewer than six new bricks-and-mortar stores so far this year, bringing its total to ten. And that is not counting its vibrant online store with which it started in 2016.

“By the end of the year we will have 15 stores, at least one in every province,” says Theo, sounding frustrated at the fact that his workforce has grown this year from 49 to 84. “We had planned to have more than 100 by now.”

For anyone thinking that it sounds like an unsustainable flash in the pan, consider this: Bathu Swag is funding its extraordinary growth purely from its own cash flow. The company has so far not made use of any outside funding, not even its overdraft facility offered by the bank. 

It is often pointed out that many successful businesses had started during an economic downturn. The rise of Bathu Swag offers a fascinating glimpse of how that dynamic actually works. With so many businesses shutting down, Theo is in a very strong position to negotiate favourable leases with mall landlords, making it the best time to establish a physical presence for the new brand across the country.

At the same time, big fashion retailers have been hit hard by the lockdown, creating space in the market for an upstart with an affordable price range and a very cool image, clearly Bathu Swag’s greatest competitive advantage.

A legend of homegrown African aspiration and success is fast solidifying around the Bathu brand. The name Bathu is South-African slang from “shoes”, rooting the company’s stylish sneaker ranges unambiguously in local township culture. This image has been assiduously cultivated by Theo as the bedrock of his business, yet the story is authentic in that it mirrors the rise of the young entrepreneur who was born and raised in Soshanguve township near Pretoria.

His mother worked as a store manager for a furniture chain, and his father was a qualified nurse who quit his job to become an estate agent, a brave and entrepreneurial step which Theo believes was formative in his own career. “My father taught me to think intellectually about money, not emotionally. If you lose ten rand, don’t cry about it – rather think about how you can make the next twenty rand.”

Theo did well at school, and after matric studied accounting at a Unisa-based college in Johannesburg. His father had to sell his car to pay the fees, and soon Theo rose to excel inside and out of the classroom. As top accounting student he landed a sponsorship from the accounting firm – PWC, and in his spare time he and his best friend Andrew Lale sold unbranded perfume mostly in Alexandra, the Johannesburg township where he lived with his uncle. Their perfume business did so well that Theo became completely financially independent from his parents.

The PWC bursary set Theo up for an exciting corporate career. As a star recruit he was sent to work in the company’s Middle Eastern division. It was in Dubai where the seed was planted of the idea that would change his career. He met the owner of a French clothing store who described to him the potency of the reputation of French fashion in the success of his business. 

It got Theo thinking about African brands, or the lack thereof. As a “self-proclaimed sneaker head”, Theo had noticed that every continent in the world had at least one home-grown sneaker brand, except Africa, where sneakers are highly prized aspirational items. This was a huge gap waiting to be filled, he realised.

Quietly, Theo set about working on the idea of creating a sneaker brand that was affordable and aspirational at the same time, just as stylish as the international giant brands, yet distinct from them. He focused in on an idea of designing a sneaker made wholly from mesh, which up until that point was used only to cover gaps in the leather or canvas which formed the tops of the name-brand sneakers.

Having grown up in mild Gauteng and working in the sweltering Middle East, the idea of a cool breathable sneaker seemed a natural innovation to Theo. Furthermore, the “Happy Socks” trend had taken off, and the mesh design gives wearers a chance to show off their colourful socks.

Theo faced two main challenges to bring his idea to market. First, shoe factories were sceptical that a sneaker top could be made entirely out of mesh, and, second, the minimum order to produce a batch of shoes was way beyond anything that Theo could afford. 

After many pitches, a shoe factory in Durban finally agreed to produce only 400 “proof-of-concept” mesh sneakers. Tapping into his network of family and friends, Theo made sure that all 400 pairs were pre-ordered, and he impressed the manufacturers by telling them that the shoes had sold out in only 48 hours.

They agreed to a second batch of 1000, which did indeed sell out quickly as the first 400 pairs started driving word-of-mouth sales. By the end of 2016, when Theo formally launched his online store, the website drew so many views that it crashed. Since then, Bathu Swag has placed orders for tens of thousands of his mesh sneakers at the factory and has introduced a range of more traditional closed leather sneakers, as well as a suede range.

Theo actively sought – and won – praise from several local celebrities and online influencers who love their Bathus, including the acclaimed TV and radio personality Somizi and soccer legend Benni McCarthy. And his reputation has grown through awards such as the 2019 Emerging Business Entrepreneur of the Year. Theo says the award, which was sponsored by Business Partners Limited and Sanlam, not only helped with brand exposure, but boosted his credibility as a serious entrepreneur.

For a while Theo ran the business as a side hustle while still working for PWC in the Middle East. But when it took off, Theo decided to cut his promising corporate career short and choose the path of entrepreneurship.

Theo says it did not feel like a scary decision at the time, because he was simply following his father’s approach by carefully calculating the risk and reward of each option, with the minimum of emotion. Interestingly, Theo says looking back on it after a few years on the entrepreneurial roller-coaster, his decision to leave the corporate world seems scarier now than he experienced it then.

So far, Theo has chosen incremental, organic growth as a strategy, but there is nothing small about his plans of building a global but distinctly African brand. When the time comes, Bathu Swag will be ready for a round of venture investment, he says. The scale of his vision has steered him to corporatize his business from the very start by building a team of talented professionals and setting formal systems in place.  The result looks like an emerging force that not even a global pandemic can stop.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for many business owners to stay afloat, maintain or increase profitability levels as South Africa’s GDP contracted by 51 percent in the second quarter of 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

But there are measures that business owners can still introduce to maintain and even increase their profits during this difficult time, says Jeremy Lang, regional general manager at Business Partners Limited.

With a proactive, entrepreneurial approach, business owners should use the tough periods to streamline their businesses and aim to reach new levels of efficiency. Sometimes a major change of direction is called for, but more often than not the trick is to make small improvements to various aspects of the business. Together, these tweaks can add up to boost your profitability to surprising levels.

• Drive down your production costs: Consider which processes in your operations can be streamlined or automated. Study every aspect of your cost of sales to eliminate inefficiencies, and do so continuously.
   
• Look for alternative suppliers: While there is a lot to be said for building steady business relationships, “loyalty” to one or two key suppliers is just as often the result of habit.  Shop around, even if it is just to gather information that can help you negotiate better deals with your existing suppliers.
   
• Reconsider your labour costs: Usually the surest way to bring down your overheads is to take a set of pruning shears to your salaries and wages however this should never be done outside the ambit of the law nor without due consideration of other available cost saving options. Do you have the right number of staff members for your operation? Can your team be structured more efficiently? Can you still improve productivity? Do you have the right processes in place to deal with the non-performers or under-performers in your staff?
   
• Squeeze your working capital cycle: The idea here is to get your clients to pay you as soon as possible and to take as long as possible to pay your suppliers. This will increase the supply of cash in your business and boost your profitability. It may require careful negotiations with your suppliers, but it may also be as simple as asking them for the first time. The same goes for your clients, who may be quite willing to pay you sooner if you offer them an early-settlement discount.
   
• Don’t stop marketing: Often the first thing business owners do when they hit hard times is to cut marketing spend. It is good to try to cut inefficiencies out of your marketing effort, but resist the temptation to stop marketing until things get better. Improving the marketing function in your business does not need to cost the earth either. Social media has made it possible for the smallest start-up to establish a substantial virtual presence.
   
• Sell more: Either look for new customers in markets that you do not reach yet, or sell new goods and services to your existing clients, or do both. Localised businesses can tap new, wider markets by improving their online presence, for example.
   
• Harness the latest technology: Keep a constant eye on the latest technological advances, any number of which can help you to increase your efficiencies and effectiveness and ultimately your profitability. These technologies can assist in how you produce goods and services to how you engage with your customers.
   

• Don’t stop innovating: Businesses that stay the same are the ones who succumb during recessions. A business that is able to change, on the other hand, is much more able to survive a tough period and to thrive in good times. Innovation does not only apply to coming up with new or improved products, but also to the design of better processes and systems within a business. Entrepreneurs must constantly tinker and try out new and better ways of doing things.

• Plan carefully and stick to your budgets: Many of these ideas entail a certain amount of spending before they pay for themselves, which is difficult in tough times. The only way to overcome this problem is to work according to strict plans and budgets, which are important in the best of times, and even more important during economic downturns. 

Most entrepreneurs who use corporate careers as a springboard wait until at least their mid-30s before they take the leap to start their own business. Not Lyle Malander, whose ambition was far too expansive for any corporate career to contain for long. 

He had always wanted to be CEO of a big listed company, and at the age of 28 he decided to build his own business rather than claw his way up an increasingly narrow corporate tunnel.

Today, five years later, the Malander Group employs fifty people, has offices in Johannesburg and London, provides financial, marketing, recruitment and IT services to dozens of listed companies, and Lyle has been recognised as a rising star in the consultancy and accounting world. Among other awards, Lyle has been recognised as a top 15 finalist in the 2019 Entrepreneur of the Year® awards a competition run by Business Partners Limited.

It was a difficult decision to set out on his own, says Lyle. As a young CA at the accounting giant Deloitte who already had two US stints for the company under his belt, his path upwards inside the corporate world was open. But he was too impatient for the long waits between promotions. As entrepreneur, he felt he could set his own pace, create an organisation with his own values and experience the satisfaction of creating employment and opportunities for others.  “I decided I was young enough that, if I failed, I could always crash on my mom’s couch.”

Lyle grew up in Kuils River, Cape Town, with a perspective on both a corporate career and the life of an entrepreneur. His mother worked for a large clothing retailer, while his father started various businesses ranging from a panel beating workshop to a newspaper. 

Lyle knew how difficult the entrepreneurship path could be when he stepped out of his job in 2015.

In an early stroke of luck, he was joined in his venture by a Deloitte colleague, Shaveera John. Looking back, says Lyle, he did not fully realise how important Shaveera would be to the success of the Malander Group. As it turned out, the two CAs complement each other’s skills, with Shaveera running the company’s finances and compliance as CFO, and Lyle overseeing the operations and projects as CEO. 

They started off with “two minds and two laptops”, says Lyle, and in another fortunate break they landed their first contract on their second day. It was for a finance related project at a large construction firm. Lyle explains that in the world of financial consulting relationships matter, and in their short careers at Deloitte he and Shaveera had built enough of a professional reputation to give them a foothold in the corporate world when they started out on their own.

More contracts followed, and a year later the two entrepreneurs recruited their first employee. As their growth accelerated, finding talent became a major focus, and Lyle decided to turn the cost of recruitment into a profitable service by starting up Malander Placements. 

He did the same for marketing. Rather than treating the business’s marketing functions as a cost centre, he set out to build it as another service in the Malander Group’s increasingly diverse set of offerings to its clients. The result was the acquisition of a Johannesburg based business-to-business marketing agency Evergreen Media. 

By now, the Malander Group housed virtually all the non-core services that any business needs – finance and admin, recruitment and HR and marketing – putting it in a good position to expand its client base from large and listed companies to small and medium enterprises.

Because the nature of small businesses differs significantly from corporates, the Malander Group houses its outreach in a separate unit called M-inent. Apart from expanding their customer base to a whole new segment of the market, the idea is to help grow some of their small-business clients into future large customers.

The different services of the Malander Group are each housed in its own unit, with its own team and leadership, but function synergistically as a whole. Currently, about 90 percent of the group’s turnover stems from its accounting and financial service, with recruitment and marketing contributing about 5 percent to revenue. In the foreseeable future, Lyle hopes to grow the recruitment and marketing sales to 15 percent each. Meanwhile, the Malander Group has taken its first step on the international stage by opening an office in London. Lyle sees international expansion as an important part of his company’s growth, as it not only opens up new markets but makes the recruitment of talent easier by providing opportunities for international experience.

Five years into running his own business, Lyle has no doubt that he made the right decision to start his own company. The hardest part for him is the relentless pressure of having to set the tone for the entire organization in terms of work standards and values. But he finds that his ambition to one day head up a listed company has not diminished at all. What does constantly change is the path to his goal, as each of his decisions opens up so many new possibilities.  

While many sectors have found reprieve in the easing of the national lockdown to Alert Level 1, which includes the reopening of borders to tourists, the South African restaurant industry is experiencing a slow recovery. Strict operating hours, limitation on a number of patrons that can be accommodated, health protocols, and social distancing measures remain in place for all restaurants, and added to this, a growing fear of a “second wave” is likely to keep many patrons away from restaurants for some time to come. From having contributed R6-billion monthly to the national economy and employing more than 500,000 people last year, COVID-19 has resulted in many once-bustling restaurant businesses having to fight for survival

In fact, the Restaurant Association of South Africa has stated that nearly a third of local restaurants have already closed shop since the onset of the lockdown, while 70% have had to retrench employees. Yet, despite being one of the hardest-hit industries, the latest Fitch SA Consumer & Retail Report estimates that 40% of restaurants have not received any form of Government loan or support. And unfortunately, I fear these figures may be on the conservative side.

From a private financing perspective, the situation appears just as dire. Based on BUSINESS/PARTNERS’ administrative involvement in the Sukuma Relief Programme (Sukuma Fund) – a private initiative aimed at supporting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are financially impacted by COVID-19 – businesses in the restaurant industry did not fare well. Of all applications received, the sector only accounted for roughly 8%, and of the restaurant businesses that did apply, only about 30% got approved for relief funding.

Generally speaking, the reasons for such a small percentage of restaurants receiving financial support during this challenging period appear to be two-fold. Firstly, employment in the industry is typically very unstable, with most restaurants only employing their front-of-house and kitchen personnel on a permanent basis. While wait-staff and other roles would be filled by casual workers, a business can only base its employment statistics on permanent staff, which makes it difficult to prove economic impact in terms of employment when applying for finance. Essentially, the number of permanent employees on paper is far less than the actual number of people supported by the industry.

Secondly, and arguably most importantly, it is often difficult to prove the financial viability of a restaurant. This is either because the restaurant’s financial information – balance sheets, profit statements, and so on – is not readily available or up-to-date, or, if it is, many of these businesses have actually been running at a loss over the past financial year. This is because, even before the COVID-19 crisis hit, the South African restaurant industry has been through a rough few years. While the industry recovered fairly well from the Great Financial Recession, picking up nicely in around 2015, load shedding soon became a major obstacle and, along with the drought that plagued the country from about 2018, times have been tough for the sector ever since, with 2019 proving to be a particularly difficult year.

Essentially, this highlights the lack of resilience associated with the industry and shows how vulnerable it is to cyclical economic downturns and consumer trends. The restaurant industry is also notorious for being fickle because patrons tend to just follow each other from hotspot to hotspot, and generally lack loyalty to any one particular establishment. This means that while a restaurant is wildly popular one season, it could be down and out the next. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Despite them being few and far between, there are certainly restaurants within South Africa that have managed to obtain the relief funding and necessary support to survive this challenging period and future-proof their operations in the process. With this in mind, here are four simple tips for local restaurants to avoid being left in the lurch, should something similar ever happen again.

1.      Keep your house in order

This applies to everything from your business structure and financial information, to your employment contracts and tax compliance – ensure that you have everything you’re supposed to and stay up to date. We found that something as standard as an EMP201 – a monthly payment declaration in which an employer declares the total payment together with the allocations for PAYE, SDL, UIF and/or ETI – was not always readily offered by restaurant owners. As is the case for any other type of business, these are the kinds of things that financiers – whether Government-based or private – will require proof of before offering any assistance or financial relief.

2.      Have an emergency fund

In addition to keeping your business affairs in order, it’s important to build up a fund of savings during profitable months to see you through should the business hit hard times. We generally advise that a business emergency fund should consist of two-to-three months’ net income, so this is something that needs to be built up gradually over time. Unfortunately, one thing that the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted in the restaurant sector, is just how many businesses were surviving on a month-to-month basis, which really isn’t viable from a financiers’ perspective.

3.      Be an early adopter

Over these past few months, terms like “unprecedented times” and “the new normal” have become commonplace. What we’ve seen is that the restaurants that have been able to adapt to this changing environment the quickest – by means of embracing technology to offer seamless online delivery and implementing innovative social distancing measures – have been the ones to come out of this the strongest. This, however, is often dependent on having the funds easily available, which ties back into the previous point of setting money aside for unexpected expenses such as these.

4.      Build up brand equity

During tough times, brand strength and customer loyalty will be what sets sustainable businesses apart from seasonal restaurants. In this sense, we can expect to see the franchise industry come out of this stronger than before, because people tend to remember these household brands over time and will continue supporting them because they represent a sense of reliability in a time of general instability. There will however also be the independent restaurateurs that have managed to achieve this same level of brand equity, proving long-term resilience in an industry of fly-by-nights. At the end of the day, it goes without saying that the restaurant industry is not for the faint-hearted. People often mistake it for being glamourous and fun, when the reality is that it’s a cut-throat industry that requires endless hours of work of commitment. That said, however, it’s an industry driven by passion, and there will always be passionate restaurateurs willing to step up to the plate and prove themselves.