Inspired to blur the line between the haves and the have-nots
How we make it our business to make a difference
Some of us are born in war torn, drought ravaged countries and some of us are born into favourable circumstances in affluent societies and that’s the truth. And depending on which camp you fall into, the facts may be easier or more difficult to live with. It’s called fate, or luck or even providence and there’s really nothing that can be done about that. Or is there…
Happily, more and more businesses are looking to disrupt the status quo of accepting “the way of the world”, especially in areas we sometimes forget about. Brisbane-based Inspire CA is just one of a number of businesses inspired to search for and find new and better ways to shift the needle, to make a difference. B1G1 was that difference-maker.
B1G1 (Buy 1 Give 1 or Business for Good), a globally aligned corporate “giving” hub, inspired Ben Walker and Harvee Pene of Inspire CA. They discovered ways to both incorporate giving into the fabric of their everyday activities and keep it top of mind enough to celebrate achievements and milestones. Here’s how.
Send an email, it’ll be worth it!
Put simply, every email that enters or leaves the Inspire CA server is worth one cent which means safe drinking water for someone far away and in desperate need. There’s a temptation to mark all your emails urgent and important!
But emails are not the only catalyst. Prospect and client meetings yield funds for schools in Cambodia and strategic planning sessions provide food for impoverished children in India.
“This is great because it overcomes the inevitability of a very common problem with traditional workplace giving – we either lose sight of what we’re achieving as predetermined amounts of pre-tax dollars noiselessly, almost apologetically exit the account at regular intervals or because we’re human, which give us the capacity to care deeply, we have the capacity to forget… and feel awful about it, but forget nonetheless. Humanity.” Ben Walker CEO, Inspire CA on remembering what’s important
Everyday lives and prospects are improving with every welcoming handshake, email and initiative. Inspire CA and others have B1G1 to thank for providing the impetus and a new approach to disrupting poverty during the normal course of the business day.
If you want to create hope and better lives for others with every email or phone call, start by chatting to B1G1 at xxxxxxx
Mark Latham
Big is Better
AFR
A walking loudspeaker that is not connected to an Engine Room.
50% employment
2.5 mil small business
http://www.afr.com/opinion/columnists/big-is-best-so-why-are-politicians-capitalising-on-small-business-20150529-ghahzq
Inspire CA
Media Release
24 November 2016
Finally! Accounting is cool again
Awarding a charitable and family first worldview
Brisbane-based chartered accountants Inspire CA are doing things very differently and hope to win the Innovation Award in the 2016 Anthill Magazine Cool Company Awards in Melbourne next month.
By reverse engineering their shared goal of making the world a better place, they have done away with timesheets preferring to focus on reducing the tax burden on Inspire CA’s clients. CEO and Founder 26 year old Ben Walker believes that the growth of innovative entrepreneurial businesses is being stunted because business owners are paying too much tax.
“It’s unnecessary, unhelpful and it comes from a lack of knowledge and acceptance of the status quo,” says Ben. “Measuring our own worth against how many tax dollars we save our clients as opposed to how much we bill them is central to everything we do. It means owners can focus on how best to spend time and earnings with their families as opposed to giving it back to the ATO.”
Speaking of giving, Inspire have helped break the mould of conventional workplace giving by working it into their everyday routine. Inspired by corporate donations facilitators B1G1, every email sent or received by Inspire CA means life-changing clean water for those in need around the world. “The key is to make our giving literally part of our everyday routine and that meant thinking about things differently – which is what we do,” offered Harvey Pene, General Manager.
Having saved Inspired CA clients over $1.2m in tax during the 2016 pre-tax period and also contributing over $90k worth of water, nutrition and hope around the world, this company is making every dollar count.
About Inspire CA
Accounting should be about adding value not merely presiding over the books and paying tax. By focusing on making more of your funds available to the business owners we serve, we’re making a world of difference to them and our whole industry.
For further information visit https://inspireca.com/
Media contact:
Ben Walker, Inspire CA, CEO and Founder xxxx xxx xxx
Email: xxx@inspireca.com
Plan for Profit in the New Year intro
Hey, it’s Harvee here. If this is your first experience with us, Inspire, I would like to take this opportunity to be introduced. We’re the guys who help young families use their small business to achieve big goals. We definitely are here to sort out your tax and do the things that accountants are great at doing. Ultimately we want to help you get some great advice about how we can use your business in such a way to fulfil your big goals.
We want to take this opportunity to share with you 5 key ways in which you can boost your profits for this wonderful new year of opportunity that we have ahead of us.
| We’re also going to share some cool personal stories that Ben and I, Ben Walker, if you don’t know him is the founder of Inspire CA, and the process that we went through just recently in planning for our very own businesses, how are we going to boost our own profits. We’re going to share that process with you today.
Whether that be taking more holidays or spending more time with the most important things in the world which are those little ones in the bottom right hand corner of the screen there. The point of it is to extract yourselves so you’re thinking differently. You should go away with one intention, was to plan out what was happening in the next 12 months, for the next calendar year. Great fun and that was peppered with nice meals and nice trips to the beach and we had some good fun together just as friends and also with your wife too, which was beautiful. What we want to bring you guys today are the five key questions or considerations that really moved the needle for Ben and I and we’re bringing this to our business clients this year. Before you can start talking tactically about how you might grow profits through this social media campaign or that HR strategy, or this efficiency methodology, there’s five key considerations that aren’t groundbreaking, but what we find in working with business owners is that we get so busy and caught up in doing the do that we never really take the time out for ourselves, like you can see us doing here in Newrybar, to actually answer these really important questions. I want you to use Ben, myself, Inspire and the beautiful community that we’ve put together, to give yourself that gift, give yourself that opportunity to answer these questions and think about the bigger picture about where things are going. In other contexts, this is a process of lifestyle design, but really there’s just five simple questions that Ben and I went through to kick that weekend off. They didn’t have to be formal or professional, we had beers in our hand and we were sitting in hammocks and we’re literally just having deep, quality conversations about where we wanted to be. Ben, I’ve got the five key questions up here. Do you want to kick off with where we started probably about this time last week? BEN: Yes. Before I do that, when we were putting this webinar together, I actually asked Harvee, “Harvee, do you think this is too fluffy for us? Is this too non-accounting?” Harvee said, “Yeah, actually part of me thinks this is too woo-woo and a little bit out there.” Why we’re starting with this is this sets the tone. This answers so many questions that things like budgets and cash flow forecasts need to have relevance to. |
Price does not drive cost – value and experience
Little Creatures in Freemantle
Why the Accounting Industry is headed for Disaster
Photo idea: trainwreck
– Fee pressures of outsourcing
– Inability of mid-tier and Big4 firms to change quickly enough
– If these firms are to switch their focus to the smaller businesses, unlikely to pay big prices so have to reduce
– If price reduce, service reduces and therefore still no value being delivered to the client
– All comes down to a crap way to price in the first place
YFSB Interview
Tom Freer – Wyntec.
Owner and managing director of Wyntec – ideal technology solutions.
Married to Christy since 2001, 6 years old daughter, Arwin.
Started company in 2005, around the time of the GFC and had a 6 month old daughter. – ‘Insane, is the word I would use to describe it’
What was your reasoning to start up your company?
I went into it with an inkling that things could be done better in the area of IT – thats why I started my own business. I have come from a background of working in IT for 15 years for big corporates but…
my passion is to help and make things run better as well as just wanting to do something different.
My parents have always been small business owners, so it’s in the blood.
In simple terms, what do you do?
Stress free IT – I fix peoples computers and I take the pressure off people as IT frustrates the heck out of most people.
People rely on IT so heavily – the more they rely on it and the more it becomes supposedly intuitive the more frustrating it gets particularly when it doesn’t do what you want it to do. So we take the frustration off our customers by fixing their computers – we remove that stress!
What makes a good husband? / working for myself as apposed to working for a company…
My role is to be a provider.
The same principle for both family and business applies;
- be there,
- be available
- be flexible.
We share everything as she works full time too.
Why start your own small business?
The driving force for me in starting the business was about having flexibility. If I need to drop everything and go to my daughters ‘fathers day parade’ at school then I don’t have to worry about trying to get that time off work, I can just go.
family rhythms – school morning drop off is my thing with my daughter and then I’m always home before 6 for dinner and story time.
weekends are generally family.
I try to do more strategic things at night after my daughter has gone to bed as there are less distractions.
What is your one piece of advice to manage both worlds Business & Family?
Make time!
Lack of time is not an excuse… You don’t have to be available 24/7 for your clients, yes, you are your small business, but you can block it out even for 2 hrs a day. My 2 hours is spending time with my family over dinner and then get back to whatever needs to be done after but its about making time – Blocking it out in the calendar.
Get Cashed Up
