What’s Your Working Capital Timeline telling you?

Understanding your working capital timeline allows you to control it. Understanding how cash flows to and through your business is the first step on taming the beast and setting yourself up to win.

Download your free working capital timeline infographic

Understanding your working capital timeline allows you to control it. Understanding how cash flows to and through your business is the first step on taming the beast and setting yourself up to win.

Download your free working capital timeline infographic

 

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Brisbane Junior Chamber of Commerce Speaking Resources 19 March 15

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I’ve put together some resources that I mentioned throughout the Business Structuring and Tax workshop that was held at the Commonwealth Bank, organised by the Brisbane Junior Chamber of Commerce.

 

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Business Structures Made Easy

Your 6 Keys to Understanding Business Structures and how to set yourself up!

Have you ever wondered whether or not you’re in the right business structure?

Or if you have no idea why you’re set up the way you are?

To clear up the mist surrounding business structures, we’ve put together an eBook that answers the most common questions about business structures.

We share:

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• An overview of business structures
• A detailed ‘Advantages and Disadvantages’ of each
• And a word of warning about getting it wrong

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Click Here to Download the eBook

More information and a preview of this book here.

 

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Basic comparison of common business structures

Sick of being a ‘One Sale Wonder’? How else can you serve your customers?

One of the biggest killers of highly profitable businesses is the ‘One Sale Wonder’.

Now we’re all in business to serve our customers.  So we must believe that we provide value for what we do.

And from that logic, you should be safe to assume that any additional services you’re able to provide to suitable customers are a good thing for those customers.

Not only is it that you will better serve your customers, but the easiest ways to increase revenue (and ideally profit!) is to increase the number of times or dollar amount that an existing customer buys from you.

So how do we transition from a ‘One Sale Wonder’ to a business that serves its clients to the best extent?

So what am I referring to as a ‘One Sale Wonder’?

Really, it’s any business with a strong focus on:

• the first sale;
• a once-off sale; or
• haven’t yet looked at a business model of providing ‘after sales service’.

The first businesses that come to mind are:

• Digital agencies who focus on the build of the website
• The painter who just paints a house
• The mortgage broker who sorts out a home loan
• An electrician who installs solar power systems
• An audiologist who sells hearing aids
• The cleaning company who work primarily for end of lease bond cleans
• Even cafe’s with meeting rooms for hire

Yes, of course.  I get that customers sometimes want the bare minimum or only see the value in the initial ‘bump’.  But we must strive to serve our customers to the maximum that our businesses can.

Here’s how you can avoid being a ‘One Sale Wonder’

1. Change your business model to incorporate ‘after sales service’
2. Create or sell additional services to your existing customers
3. Work with partners who provide the ‘next logical step’

Changing your business model

For this, let’s take the digital agency as an example.

What about changing the whole focus of your business; your marketing, the language you use, the sales process – all to focus on the ongoing value of content creation vs reacting when a prospect asks for a website?

It may take a bit of education with your market on your behalf, but the rewards of this will work wonders for your recurring revenue.

Additional services to your existing customers

Look at the table below. Which quadrant do you think would be the easiest to sell to?

Of course, the answer is the bottom left—selling services you already have to clients you already know.

But businesses often focus on selling to the bottom right quadrant instead. Take our advice, and stick with what you know and who you know.

And if you don’t have existing services yet, do get into product development mode and work with your team to identify the needs of your clients and if you’re in a position to provide them.

Work with Partners

Working with partners who provide the ‘logical next step’ to your customer, or who provide the step before needing yours.

They can provide the leads for your business (if they are the step before needing yours), or you could negotiate a referral agreement or partnership with customers that you send (if they are the next logical step after you).

Let’s review the examples from above moving away from a ‘One Sale Wonder’ 

Digital agencies who focus on the build of the website	Focus on the ongoing content creation, campaigns and development of the site
The painter who just paints a house	Come back every so often to clean the surface and add a coat of paint
The mortgage broker who sorts out a home loan	Keep in touch with the home owner for car finance, second property etc
An electrician who installs solar power systems	Implement a maintenance contract to clean and repair the panels
An audiologist who sells hearing aids	Replace batteries and offer upgrades on a maintenance contract (similar to a mobile phone?)
The cleaning company who work primarily for end of lease bond cleans	Partnering with a party hire business – in the hope that the parties may need a cleaner…
Even cafe’s with meeting rooms for hire	Follow up each hire with a coupon or deal for catering as an incentive to return

Build your business on the rock vs on the sand

– multi-level marketing

– cloud accounting

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The Age of Engagement – Internet Marketing Evolution

Following on from last week’s post we’re continuing to uncover some of Roger Hamilton’s insights in to the future of markets, technology and doing business in the age of Web 3.0.

Roger Hamilton is a visionary, futurist and social entrepreneur who connects with Richard Branson, the startup culture in Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurial think-tanks and charities around the globe.

He’s now saying the age of Content Marketing is dead, and we’re now in the Age of Engagement.

The Age of Engagement

Engagement is gold dust. When your customers start creating and sharing content based upon your brand, your impact is magnified exponentially. The cost is minimal, the reach phenomenal. The tricky part? Your job is to give them reasons to be genuinely enthusiastic about your brand. People interact with what they love.

The potential payoffs are both enormous and self-reinforcing. Your customers are far more than a source of income; they’re your greatest well of information about your business. Engage with them effectively, and they’ll become your greatest advocates.

How can you do that? Focus on attraction over action, and enhance the quality of your offerings before you plan on getting bigger. Give customers a reason to engage with you, and reward them when they do.

Internet Marketing (1.0)

This was internet marketing 1.0. You get the idea.

Content Marketing (2.0)

This is Content Marketing 2.0. Offer a ton of value, give away your product , then step people through a ladder of increasing prices for your product. This stuff still works, but there’s a new wave emerging.

Engagement Marketing (3.0)

Content marketing, where You create the content, is being replaced by Engagement marketing, where your Customers create (and share) the content. Roger created a free, 1-minute Genius test shareable on Facebook. It allowed people to identify their business Genius, see which Genius type their friends are, and build fantastic teams based on that knowledge.

It replaced his free e-book and has been shared by thousands of people. What’s your Genius and which circle do you belong to? (You can take the Genius Test here.)

The piece of absolute Gold to take away from this: create a test to identify

1. Where your customers are right now
2. Where they want to be in the future

Then supply them with the means to get there. There is too much information available today. We need direction, Not information. Content marketing simply added to the amount of information already available. With Engagement marketing you provide your customers with the clarity of direction, then supply them with the ability to get there. Couple that with the means to share with their friends and you have created Gold Dust – happy, engaged customers who will spread the word for you.

 

Oh, and join us at Roger’s ‘Fast Forward Your Business’ event in Brisbane on 21 and 22 March (and he’s also touring the rest of Australia, too!).

Ben will be joining the stage with Roger sharing some of his insight into innovation as an accounting ‘Gamechanger’ too.

5 Language Lessons all Businesses can Learn from Optus

 

Just this morning I read this letter from Optus.

And you must be wondering why on earth an accountant is writing about a letter from Optus.  So here’s some context for you.  I have really learned to appreciate the people who, for lack of a better word, “have a way with words”.

It’s the little things (or the “Power of Small”, as Paul Dunn puts it) that really bring out a brand and a point of difference in the marketplace.

The language that we use as businesses: written, verbal, internal and external define who we are in a way most people I believe understate.

Why Optus sent me a Letter

The letter is not normally something I would read, give attention to, or bother to take much notice at all of.  But something about the letter was different.  No, a lot of the letter was quite different, and something I am sure not many people expect from their ‘Telco’.

The purpose of the letter is to update me on a change in the terms and conditions of the contract with Optus.  A rather boring and annoying letter in the past.  Great for the shredder.

Before you read the letter too, keep in mind that the account is a business account.  So normally this would assume a more formal approach in any case.

I was quite surprised.

Here’s the letter (and do click the picture for a full sized image too).

And my 5 takeaways from the letter are:

1. The ‘stating-the-obvious’ icebreaker

I feel that this is a great way to break the ice of a somewhat annoyingly necessary letter.

And everyone feels better if the person writing points out the elephant in the room.

Even the font choice and colour of the text make it welcoming and a warm sentence to read.

2. Size of the letter far from intimidating

Short sentences.  Small paragraphs.  Tiny letter over all, right?

You know you’re not going to be reading boring jargon for hours.

The best bit is, like the icebreaker above, they’ve realised most people won’t read it and have accounted for it.  They’ve also listed when you might need to refer back to it.

3. Asking “How are you going?”

Do you really expect this from a Telco?  Does anyone think they care?

Apple is a great example of how customer service should be done.  But a Telco is the last place you would expect some personality or care.

“How are you going?” or “Really, how are you going?” is a sensational way of breaking the mould.

4. Casual slang throughout the letter

Now the “word nerds” out there might have their nose out of joint with this one.

And I can understand that this is very much the preference of the business writing the letter or using the language.

I am a fan of organised disorder though, and love the incorporation of this in the letter.  If Optus can get away with it elegantly, why can’t you?

(Oh, and do see Nassim Taleb’s book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder too, a great read.)

5. Random speech bubble with random text

“Pretty Handy”?

I still cannot work out what the purpose of this is, but it doesn’t bother me.

Maybe it fits in with the branding?

 

Well done Optus.

You made my day in a way that I would never expect.

 

5 Business Trends That Are Already Shaping Your Business and Determining Your Profits

 

What you were doing 5 years ago is vastly different from what you’re doing today. So how prepared are you for the next 5 years? And will you profit?

Roger Hamilton will.

Roger Hamilton is a futurist, entrepreneur and visionary. He has predicted the future of markets and technology and continuously shared his insights over the years to closed groups. However, for the past 4 years, he has started to openly share what he’s seeing with larger groups of entrepreneurs around the world.

We took a look at his material from early 2014 to see if it was relevant to the start of our 2015. Here are 5 of the most important Waves of Change from his Fast Forward Your Business tour of 2014.

The Waves of Change

Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we were convinced the future would be all flying cars and pastel-coloured spacesuits. We may not be eating our meals in pill form and having our houses cleaned by robots, but it’s not all bad. At least we’re not living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the mullet is no longer considered an acceptable hairstyle.

The future may not have panned out exactly as we anticipated, but there are still massive shifts taking place that are already having an enormous impact on your business. If you’re not incorporating these business trends into your business strategies, your revenues could soon be deader than shoulderpads. Surf these waves, however, and your business could be moving at Warp 6 while your competitors are still trying to fix the flux capacitor.

 

A zettabite = 1 trillion gigabytes.   That’s a LOT of information. With this swell of information come many waves of change. Are you going to surf or sink?

World Wide Wave

Around the world, expectations have gone up while attention spans have gone down. If you want to engage an audience, you’d better say something they care about within the first couple of sentences, otherwise they’re gone. At the same time, traditional advertising models, targeting the broadest possible spectrum of consumers, are on their knees. In a social media world, people want quality, and they’ll ignore anything that doesn’t interest them immediately.

Mobile users now outweigh desktop users. Is your website optimised for mobile? Can your clients and customers subscribe, interact and pay from their mobile seamlessly?

 

The flipside of this is that, if you produce quality, people will share it, at no cost to you. How do you take advantage of this wave? Turn your website into a channel, redesign it for mobile phones (the percentage of internet traffic going through mobiles is exploding), and create a three-minute video that distils your message into something crisp, concise, and engaging.

 

Bernadette Schwendt surfed the World Wide Wave of change and pivoted her business from a copy school serving copywriters to an online media channel serving entrepreneurs.

There’s no doubt that mobiles are the biggest growth platform and where most people turn to these days. Will they see Your business there?

Turn your website in to a channel, optimise for mobiles and tablets and create 3-minute videos with your compelling message. It’s easier than you think.

That’s the first of our five big Waves of Change. Now that you’ve got the keynotes, stay tuned for the Wave 2: The Age of Engagement and what it means for your business.

Oh, and join us at Roger’s ‘Fast Forward Your Business’ event in Brisbane on 21 and 22 March (and he’s also touring the rest of Australia, too!).

Ben will be joining the stage with Roger sharing some of his insight into innovation as an accounting ‘Gamechanger’ too.

3 Speaking Rituals Entrepreneurs can use before Public Speaking

It’s no doubt that public speaking is an easy feat for mastering.

Some make it look so easy, and yet it can paralyse those who are finding their feet.  Myself included!

One of my key numbers in 2015 is to share my message on “Knowing your Numbers”, 60 times throughout the year.  This will be speaking engagements, webinars, self-hosted events and so on.  But a focus is more towards speaking in person.

And I’ve been fortunate to have some guidance from mentors who are seasoned speakers.

Here’s 3 rituals I run through before speaking:

1. Put yourself in a positive frame of mind, focused on delivering value to your audience.

There’s two ways I do this – the first is to listen to some really uplifting music.

I usually bring my phone and some headphones with me pretty much anywhere, and I just find an awesome track and pop a headphone in one ear.  Oh, and if I really need a revving, I listen to Eric Thomas.

The second way, one shared by a mentor Paul Dunn (B1G1), is to repeat out loud “FOR THEM” about 5 times before you walk out to present.  This one is a little less subtle, so you might want to keep this one for “backstage” but keeps value to your audience at the forefront.

2. Slow your breathing, forcing your body and mind to be calm.

A coach and mentor, Mags Bell of Creating Powerful Results shared this one with me.

This one was honestly a little difficult for me to understand, but it really works.

Basically slow your breathing down to about 6 breaths per minute.  That’s 5 seconds in, 5 seconds out.  You can do this one pretty much anywhere too, even on stage as you’re being introduced.

This one is good for getting to sleep too I’ve found!

3. Use body language as a key to confidence and getting your message across.

I’ve found that confidence is the hardest thing to front up with when you’re speaking.

And similarly to the breathing technique above, you can trick your mind and body into confidence.

An interesting TED talk by Amy Cuddy shares a little more on the science and the ‘how-to’ on this one.

She details on how a few minutes of “power posing” can lead to instant improvement in our body language and our own confidence, which translates to our audience.

Great to recite with your body in the minutes leading up to showtime.

 

I hope this helps to some degree when you’ve got your next presentation or speaking gig lined up!

CAANZ Brand Ambassador – A Hub for Innovation in Brisbane