Question 3 and 4: Ins and Ons (10:00)

Let’s go into Ins and Ons please Ben.

BEN: Yes. What those two dots, the In and On mean is time spent in the business versus time spent on the business. This concept is shared in a book written by Michael Gerber called the E-Myth where usually people spend too much time in the business that they never get time to build it and look at those systems and fill the holes where they need to.

HARVEE: That’s right. If I could just add there too Ben, the rationale behind that is, and if you’ve read Michael Gerber’s stuff you’ll understand, is that most people go into business because let’s say they’re a great smoothie maker or they’re a great accountant, or architect or marketer. They’ve got a technical skill and they think, you know what? I could run a business and they don’t realize all the other pieces that are involved in doing that. What ties you all, gives you a tendency to want to work in the business is because you can actually do those technical pieces. I understand the struggle, it is in actually taking your hands off. Have you found that Ben in letting go of some of the tax and technical stuff in the last six months?

BEN: Yeah, that’s right. You’re always learning what you need to get out of the way from. Yeah, business is great. You need to prioritize the on time and it’s just such a default, like a human condition default. Where we resort back to our technical or where we came from. We must take time, really disciplined to work on the business.

HARVEE: Understood. I read a book, Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, and his recommendation was to straightaways go Mondays and Wednesdays are off and out of the business. Now, Ben and I won’t know exactly how to pull that off straight away, but what we’ve been doing consistently for the last, let’s say four months would you say Ben? Is our unique thing of what we call WOW, or Work on Wednesday. That’s the day that we’re out of the office and we’re specifically working on the business and on projects based around creating systems or creating marketing content or strategizing new product lines or ways to improve our existing product lines and letting the team members keep running ahead with working in the business side of things.

For the context of this, let’s get a predefined goal of what are the days you want to be working in the business and what are the days you want to be working on. For the days you are in the business, what are the times that you want to aim for. This is helping us be able to construct what an ideal week might look like for you. Ben, let’s get onto the final point in this really important considerations and that is Retreats.

Question 5: Retreats (12:36)

BEN: Yes, yes, and you might look at this as an excuse to go somewhere lovely, but it’s exactly what we’re talking about at the start, where Stevie and I and Harvee went away for a couple of days with the sole focus of relaxing and also working on the business. Yeah, taking ourselves away from our normal working and home environments. What we did is, how many of these retreats do we want each year? We’ve also booked in some time to take them. I reckon they’re so powerful and Harvee’s going to share one of the two big things shortly, that we made a decision on for this year. That wouldn’t have happened undoubtedly, if we weren’t in Northern New South Wales, surrounded by some lush green fields of grass. Yeah.

HARVEE: That’s so funny. For everyone who knows what’s common in Northern New South Wales, it’s not what we were talking about. Very cool. Just on those retreats, what is the tax implications of that? We went away, spent four days, we spent however much money what was invested in that side of things. We were working on the business specifically, but also having a bit of fun. What are the tax implications, is there another benefit or justification in taking these retreats from a tax perspective?

BEN: Yes, being careful. Part of those retreats is what you can claim. The part is, there might be a blog article on very shortly.

HARVEE: Yeah, awesome, cool, thanks very much for that. If in doubt, seek advice from your taxation professional and make those decisions wisely. Any other things you wanted to mention Ben before we move on at the end of our webinar today?

BEN: Yeah, I think that’s, we’re all good to keep moving.

Conclusion (14:37) HARVEE: Yeah, beautiful. There are the five considerations that I want you guys to give the gift to yourself of having at least, it doesn’t have to be perfect, and a wonderful five page plan. It can look as simple as some notes in your iPhone, or a little piece of paper where we’re scribbling these key numbers down. What is the magic number around profit? What would an ideal year look like in the terms of the number of holidays? Even get excited about the locations and the duration of them. Think about what an ideal week might look like? Is it Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday in the office and are those in times between seven and four, or is it even earlier so you can get home to pick up the kids? Is Wednesdays your work on the business day where you WOW like we do? Or do you have another day or another time that that’s done? Also, what are some excuses, or what are some pre-planned triggers that if no questions asked, if you don’t do the WOWs or the working on your business during the weeks, that at least every year you’re taking some time out, either with your business partner or yourself, or with the team as well, to actually have a plan about where we’re heading in that next period. With the keyword, or the key part of that word being treats. It is a treat and I don’t think we should shy away from that in business. We work our butts off and deliver a great value for ourselves and for our community and you absolutely deserve to be treated. That’s the end of our webinar. I wanted to give you guys a heads up on what’s coming up this month. I also want to ask for some help please. One of the things that Ben and I worked on in our work on the business was a one day workshop that we’re going to be rolling out this year for small business owners. That’s because we received a lot of feedback in the last 12 months about how business owners are in business, and they’re doing what they do, but they don’t really have firm control on the numbers. They aren’t actually numbers people and they want to get an understanding about what are the key numbers that we can set up, whether it be in calculations and lifestyle design, whether it be calculations and profit, or whether it be setting up key KPIs for the team members so that we’ve got this numbers based machine that’s running and pushing and helping us create a beautiful business. We’ve put together this business workshop and we’re running our first beta workshop in about two weeks time. Before I release this invitation to the world, if you like, in terms of coming on to that very first workshop, I really would love some feedback. If you guys are willing to give me an email address that I could flick you through the agenda. Please don’t share it with anybody yet, until I share it with the world. I’m just looking for a bit of perspective. Ben and I were in that zone in burn, but we want some second opinions on what else absolutely must be included in this workshop. If you’re willing to give me some feedback, either by email or a quick phone call after you’ve read through the agenda, I’d really appreciate that a lot. The way you can help us out, if you’re willing to do so is email hello@inspireca.com and I’ll get that and say, “Yeah, I’m willing to help and give you my two cents worth on the Cash Rich Business workshop.” I’ll send you through the agenda and if you can give me some feedback on what we absolutely must put in there, then I’d really appreciate that from whatever perspective you’re coming from. Whether it be a small business owner, or whether it be an accounting firm who may be in today’s session as well. The other heads up that I want to give you, especially if you’re a local here in Bris Vegas, if you haven’t heard, we have an Inspire meetup. They became very famous in 2015, we are absolutely bringing them back in a big way in 2016. Our first Inspired meetup is next Thursday afternoon at 4:30 pm. It’s an Australia Day themed meetup in which we’re celebrating great Australian businesses. We’ve got a great special guest speaker who is the founder of a very powerful movement here in Brisbane called Entrepreneurs of Brisbane and you’re going to love the message he’s got to share in celebrating all great things Australian. We’re also going to have lamingtons and meat pies and I think Ben’s dad is going to bring some sausage and have a barbie down there. This is a great opportunity for small business owners to come and connect and meet each other and network and share ideas about what’s working for them. We’ve got some really powerful meetups coming up this year. In fact, just a little bit of snippet. Jessica, who’s our event coordinator is on the phone with Warner James today, speaking about how we might be able to get some pretty powerful names and identities and profiled business owners to be able to share their unique stories. Definitely stay close if you want to be inspired about creating a great business this year. Thanks very much everybody for attending our first webinar. Happy New Year and welcome back. Again, give yourself that gift of taking the time, go out and grab a coffee now if you have to. Scribble down with your pen those five things. What profit do I want this year, what holidays do I want to commit myself to taking this year and next, how much time do I want to spend working in and on the business, and what about specific excuses like retreats or conferences, perhaps, could I attend that will give me the accountability to working on my business. Not just continually during the week, but to break up my year in one, two, or three segments. Give yourself that gift and I look forward to boosting collectively our profits in 2016. Thanks guys, we’ll see you next month or next Thursday at our meetup.

Business’ Giving Insight

Shedding light on the effect of sharing the wealth

Let’s start with a simple statement: giving to the needy is good.  We all know it and when possible, most of us are happy to contribute something – usually on a whim, oftentimes through some sort of set and forget direct debit system.  And that’s fine, it makes sense and every little bit really does count but it also keeps some of the world’s woes and interestingly, stories of relief from personal struggles at bay.  It would be good to change that.  It would be good to be able to regularly devote a moment or two to what we give and the quantifiable impact it may be having on a life…

Dr John Fawcett had his eyes firmly fixed on a comfortable, uneventful retirement in Indonesia before coming face to face with the cycle of blindness in Bali.  “People are blind because they are poor and they are poor because they are blind,” declares the masthead on Dr Fawcett’s foundation website (johnfawcett.org).  A familiar story of the ravages of cataracts and other treatable eye ailments that if left unchecked, often lead to blindness.  Having screened almost a million people, applied half a million medicinal drops and performed almost 45 thousand cataract surgeries, clearly The John Fawcett Foundations has had an unbelievable impact. 

Know the impact of knowing your numbers

But what’s even more unbelievable is that innovative avenues of business giving created by global giving initiative Buy1Give1 (B1G1) made it possible for my business to contribute to these inspiring numbers.  These impacts on the lives of the afflicted are partially made possible by client meetings and workshops that my company runs during the course of its everyday business.  And here’s the kicker: your business could be in the same enviable “pay it forward” position because it’s not about workshops and meetings specifically. 

At Inspire CA we decided that for every attendee at our Know Your Numbers workshop, we would fund an implant lens for a cataract operation in Indonesia.  We do this through our partnership with B1G1 but for you, any day to day function within your business could be the catalyst to change someone’s life for the better.

Send an email, it’ll be worth it!

Did you know that every email that enters or leaves the Inspire CA server represents one cent we donate which means safe drinking water for a family in desperate need for a day.  There’s a temptation to mark all your emails urgent and important!

But as mentioned emails are not the only catalyst.  Prospect and client meetings can 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 sometimes lose sight of what we’re achieving as predetermined amounts of pre-tax dollars noiselessly, almost apologetically exit the account at regular intervals.” Ben Walker CEO, Inspire CA on remembering what’s important

Every day, vision, lives and prospects are improving with every welcoming handshake, email and initiative.  Inspire CA and others have B1G1 and people like John Fawcett 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.

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.