Small Business Management

The secret life of employees!

2010-10-20T09:36:00.001+11:00

Ever wondered what is going on for your employees at the different stages of their development in your business? Have a peek into their world

For more help managing your team contact us

Book an initial meeting. The coffee is on us!
Call 0413 670 417
Email support@whiteroomgroup.com.au
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Want what they are having?

2010-06-23T09:00:00.001+10:00

"It is amazingly refreshing and rejuvenating to be able to plan for the future and make proactive decisions about the direction of the business, and see the limitless opportunities that are in front of us rather than the usual fire fighting and reactive responding that we were so accustomed to.

"As a small 12 y.o. family run business of 15 people, we were frustrated with the constant bush fire fighting we found ourselves doing, to keep the business ticking along. It was totally exhausting dealing with the never- ending queue of issues that needed to be resolved. The more issues that arose; the more hopeless the situation appeared to be. There was a point where we were asking, why do we even bother? It seemed like we were running out of options and everything just seemed to be just one big tangled ball of string; which one do we pull on first to try and unravel the mess? How do other businesses do it? There must be a better way!

"White Room Group’s involvement in our business brought a systematic and very comprehensive overhaul of the business. Cleaning things up from inside out, and giving everyone involved, the clarity they craved around expectations and responsibilities, has meant that we saw a very quick change in our business’s landscape and the storms on the horizon have just cleared away to blue sky!

"Now, 12 months down the road, we are looking forward to delivering a better that expected result for a financial year that we were not expecting to get through at all before White Room came on board. So far, we have seen an ROI of about 12.5 times the investment for the services of White Room Group – and that is just in the first 12 months!"

Hannan Technical Services

Read the full testimonial here

Get some of what they are having now

Book an initial meeting. The coffee is on us!
Call 0413 670 417
Email support@whiteroomgroup.com.au
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Hot Topics: Staff Incentives

2010-06-03T09:00:00.001+10:00

Great article and report on creating incentives for staff based on the same principles as we discussed in an earlier post.

download the article

Hot Topics: Fair Dismissal

2010-05-27T11:00:00.002+10:00

This is an excellent, simple and “straight from the horses mouth” piece on the process of fair dismissal in a small business (under 15 staff).

We are using this with our clients who are unclear about where they stand.

download the article here

Business Budgeting or Where are you going in the next 12 months?

2010-05-20T07:00:00.007+10:00

Federal budget time is a good time to schedule doing your own business’ budget. While the Government’s probably took months to prepare, most small businesses can get it done in under an hour.

Really, it’s not the onerous event most owners think and it can provide you with so much value as a benchmarking tool to measure your business’ performance and manage expectations. We really don’t know how any business manages without one. For us, it would be like starting out on a trek without a destination in mind. It isn’t going to end well.

Now the key to speeding up the process is to realise that you don’t need to do this exercise line by line. As far as the expenses are concerned, about 80% of the expense lines won’t have changed much from last year except for a bit of CPI. We have seen some very complicated spreadsheets that would scare even the most seasoned of us but a similar result can be achieved with a simpler approach.

The key things to pay attention to are the big items; your sales forecast, your wages cost, cost of goods/sales (as applicable) and then any additional investment in growth, like marketing, staff, IT etc.

Once your March quarter accounts are complete, you have all the information you need to do your budget. To get started you can simply export your P & L into an Excel spreadsheet from your accounting software to have a ready-made and perfectly tailored structure to complete your budget.

For the full how-to on creating your budget click here.

Book an initial meeting. The coffee is on us!
Call 0413 670 417
Email support@whiteroomgroup.com.au
Visit www.whiteroomgroup.com.au

Dis-incentive programs and how to avoid getting one

2010-04-20T12:43:00.005+10:00

A poorly designed incentive program can be unmotivating at the least and produce little, or in the worst case, a costly program that is difficult to exit.

We have seen them all and have some tips on what not to do and a downloadable process on how to design an effective and relevant-to-your business program.

Don’ts for incentive program design

Don’t pick up another business’s incentive program and apply it to your business.
Don’t run the same incentive year after year without reviewing your business strategy, capacity and objectives. For example, you may be in a phase where client retention is more profitable, so increasing the value of each client is the objective and there is less emphasis and target allocated to client acquisition.
Don’t make up or rough out the numbers. Model out the scenarios and calculate the cost and return to the business and value to the revenue producers. You will also likely identify administration issues or audit requirements.
Don’t build an incentive where external influences can contribute to the target’s achievement. For example, exchange rates improve and push up the value of the sales. Rises in the share market contribute to growth of funds under management and increase commissions received as revenue. Make sure it rewards the actual efforts and activity of the revenue producer.
Don’t forget that an incentive is part of a remuneration package and you need to account for any base salary in your calculations and identify what that rewards.
Don’t not set a base sales performance target. You need to be able to manage under performance in your business. Just covering a producer’s base salary in sales or achieving last years result is not necessarily going to get the business to where it wants to go and is consuming your valuable resources.

Now that you know what not to do, click here to get the good stuff on designing an effective program.

Book an initial meeting. The coffee is on us!
Call 0413 670 417
Email support@whiteroomgroup.com.au
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Getting on it!

2010-03-18T18:25:00.012+11:00

Much is made in the media, in business education and publications about the concept of working “on” the business not “in” it in. There is no disagreement from business owners about that, but the problem remains.

Even some very commercially savvy and experienced business people from the corporate world we met recently are struggling to action the concept now as small business owners, and are frustrated by the progress of the development of their business. That they were a partnership was no solution to the problem.

Corporates have extensive resources in people, system and methodology, to deliver in parallel, action in the three areas of a business; administration, production and planning.

For small business this concept, as so many others in small business, needs to turn from problem to solution and implement-able ideas based on their resource levels for there to be significant progress. There is an overwhelming amount of business tips, ideas, education and information available yet very little actionable stuff.

So if you are ready to get “on” it in your business and want to know how to get out of the day to day then click here to download the process we use with clients to break the nexus of making the time to work on the business when it seems your days are already full to overflowing.

Book an initial meeting. The coffee is on us!
Call 0413 670 417
Email support@whiteroomgroup.com.au
Visit www.whiteroomgroup.com.au

Peak Performance or Pathway to Hell

2009-06-22T14:15:00.010+10:00

The value of Business Performance Indicators

Often, we are brought into a business when things have reached a crisis point. One of the common reasons that things reach such a point before action is taken is that the owner is not working with any business performance indicators (BPIs) to alert them earlier that things are getting off track. Assessing performance by looking at a standard business report like a Profit and Loss statement won't identify the issues specifically and the results come too late to take prompt action.

Business performance indicators help assess and manage a business in areas like production and administration. Production indicators like chargeable hours per producer for services companies, number of jobs on the board for a recruitment business, can alert them to issues like sales trends, productivity, and capacity utilisation. Administratively, BPI's like number of debtor days, can tell us about impacts on cash flow.

Recently, we were brought in to work on a succession plan; while the business had done okay over its life from an income point of view, it had certainly not run at its optimal level. It was saddening to see the impact this underperformance was having on its end value now that it was time to sell. There was no crisis as such, however there was an unnecessarily large overdraft; but because there were no BPIs established, the owner had no way to assess what it could and should have been producing as a return for him and what the affect on valuation would be.

Setting and monitoring these indicators is like knowing what our body temperature should be, so that we know if it goes up or down there is a problem and the degree of seriousness of the problem.

BPI's are not about having to run at peak performance or being there just to avert crisis. It is about establishing a benchmark of where the business needs to run at for owners to be getting the return they want or expect (and deserve) for the risks they take in running a business. Importantly also, it gives clarity about what is going on to minimizing stress.

For every business, there are a handful of indicators that if set and monitored can keep things steering in the right direction and allow for immediate action to be taken if necessary. Better to be making small corrections along the way than trying to turn the ship around when it is about to hits rocks.

What are the key things you need to monitor in your business?
Call us for an initial meeting to assess your businesses performance.
It's on us!
Call 0413 670 417
Email support@whiteroomgroup.com.au
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Charting a New Course

2008-10-12T15:17:00.004+11:00

In The Press

White Room has been quoted in BRW 9th October 2008 in Emerging Companies - "Charting a New Course". A turnaround story by Tony Blackie on our client Havenhall, a product and distribution company. Read at www.whiteroomgroup.com.au/docs/WhiteRoomBRW.pdf

Tony Blackie knows small business, the joys and the heartache. Our thanks to him for his support of small business and informing them of the help available to ease the journey, which White Room and many other dedicated small business consulting companies offer.

Also see Tony's column "Blackie" next to this article for his view on the Liberal Party's sudden about face on small business. Good news for us, shame it seems more like a political manoeuver than a genuine concern for small business and an understanding of the cornerstone role they play in an economy. Not sure how come it has taken them and other successive governments a couple of millenium to figure this out. We know that entrepreneurs have always been the soul of business.

Get the support you need. Book an initial meeting to see if we can help. It's on us. Visit http://www.whiteroomgroup.com.au/

Dreaming of a business that runs without you?

2008-10-08T21:01:00.013+11:00

The dream of many of our Small Business Owner (SBO) clients is to have their business operate without being dependent on them day to day. The achievement of that from wherever you are today is an evolutionary process and will need a structured path and certain mindset to achieve it.

To have independence from your business would require you to replace yourself in the business. The first step to that is a mindset shift to separate your ownership of the business from your role in the business. This separation of ownership and role is a common concept in medium to large businesses and we can leverage off their view of business to help take us forward.

They achieve this by conceptualizing the business using an organisational framework or model to represent their business and all the functions and tasks that are necessary to have it run and perform. They then allocate their current resources to these functions and tasks and use this framework to plan for growth. What you currently do (functions and tasks) as a business owner, will depend on where you are in your phase of development and how many staff you employ. However, unless you have already achieved independence from your business and are a passive shareholder, you probably still hold the top job, called most often in medium to large businesses, the CEO (Chief Executive Officer).

Now don’t flip out about the title. You don’t need to use it commercially in the marketplace. It is simply a way to identify a function that exists in a business that most SBOs are actually referring to when they say they are a business owner. Personally, I have never seen an organisational chart for a business that names a role called Business Owner. You can be a business owner and play no role in a business at all; you would simply be a shareholder. In the organisational framework, we use with our clients the shareholder issues are handled in the Function called "Board"

So what is the role of a CEO? We liken building a business to building a house and the CEO role to that of an architect. We need an architect (CEO) to co-ordinate the overall plan and functioning of the business in the following areas:

Scope out the site (Market and Product Management)
Design the building (Organisational Management)
Oversee the project (Operations and Administration Management)
Recruit the builders and other suppliers (Staff and Supplier Management)
Bring the project in on budget (Financial Management)
Keep the owners informed and happy (Shareholder Management)
And along the way, make sure that everyone works together and stays aligned to the vision (Cultural Management).

Sound like an onerous amount of time and responsibility? It’s not. How much time you spend on this function will be appropriate to the size of your business, its phase, and your ambitions. You might notice that you already have responsibility for these functions and tasks but had just not defined them. In addition, you may not have equipped yourself with the skills and tools to do them all or be spending time to do all of them.

Now how does a CEO do all that, retain his sanity and get the project to completion?

Just like an architect he must first have a plan, but more importantly be working with a broader structure of how the project evolves, and what is required at each phase of the project. If you do not have, a framework for the development of your business as part of your tool kit as a CEO, it is going to be a rough ride, probably costly, and you are going to get stuck at some point.

Secondly, he does not try and do it all himself. You are unlikely to have the necessary skill at every phase of business to take it to the next level. The right resource with the right skill doing the right job at the right time is part of the planning of both the CEO and the Architect.

One of our clients, a financial planner, who made this recognition some seven years ago and recruited us to help take his business forward, has been living the dream of most SBO’s for several years. He is able to take extended time away from his business and work in the roles that he prefers. At the source of his success is this fundamental shift in mindset to think more commercially about his business.

This commercial mindset is about making the time to work on the business, have a structured way to think about and plan the business using business frameworks and getting the right support to make it happen. This shift has also benefited his staff who are happier, staying longer and earning more. It has also allowed him to build a bigger business than was possible with the previous unstructured approach. For him it has, as he puts it, “kept the flame alive” a lot longer.

You won’t want to stay in business long if you do not get the commercial result of profit or if it becomes too stressful to manage. A way to a commercial return and a more enjoyable and fulfilling business journey is to start adopting some of the thinking of bigger businesses. The fundamental difference between them and small business is that their primary mindset is “I am a Business Builder” and they focus on maximum commercial return.

A quick snapshot of the differences in mindset of Medium Business Owner vs Small Business Owner

Acquire business knowledge proactively vs Trial and error approach to learning business skills
Hire in Expertise vs Try and do it themselves
Build Systems vs Recreate each time they need to do something
Have established advisors from whom they seek advice vs Only seek advice when there is a problem
Have a business plan and use business frameworks vs Reactive response to business issues
Look to maximize commercial return vs Focus on creating sufficient income
Business Builder mindset – “I run a Business” vs Product/Service provider mindset – “I am a Financial Planner, Accountant...”
Run the business commercially based on numbers, thinking and values alignment vs Feelings based approach to decision making

This mindset shift alleviates most of the issues we see faced by our small business clients, without losing their passion or humanity. And the sooner in their business development they start thinking like this, the more leverage they get in their business to achieve their goals.

Evolve faster, enjoy your business more, and live the dream. Book an initial meting. It’s on us.

White Room are Business Planning and Management consultants for small businesses up to 50 staff. Based in Sydney and servicing Melbourne, Newcastle, Brisbane and Adelaide.Get the support you need commercially and personally to run and grow your business with clarity and confidence.
Call 0413 670 417
Email support@whiteroomgroup.com.au
Visit http://www.whiteroomgroup.com.au/