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
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
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. |
Little Creatures in Freemantle
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
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;
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.
Happy New Year, Inspire Family.
I want to support your success in 2018 by sharing with you 5 tools that I personally use every single week, that I believe are critical to business and life success in 2018.
During this special FB LIVE for the Inspire Family I’ll give you the tools, share with you how I use them and inspire you to ‘fill in the blanks’ on the template versions I’ll provide.
This really has nothing to do with Tax & Accounting. It’s helping you to pull more money, time and happiness from your business.
Cheers
Harvee
Dream Big. Make an Impact. Remember Your Roots.
Watch entire Game Changing Tools webinar here
Download all 5 GAME CHANGING TOOLS here
Watch Part 1 – Bucket List
Download – Bucket List
(Download and customise for your own use)
Watch Part 2 – One Page Business Plan
Download – One Page Business Plan
(Download and customise for your own use)
Watch Part 3 – Activities Plan
Download – Activities Plan
(Download and customise for your own use)
Watch Part 4 – Business Budget
Download – Business Budget
(Download and customise for your own use)
Watch Part 5 – Your Ideal Week
Download – Your Ideal Week
(Download and customise for your own use)
“Deep down I reckon every person wants to make a difference. Maybe we’d all like to change something, but how do we do it? How do we tap into the little part of everyone that wants to change the world and do it in a way that’s really simple?”
Daniel Flynn, MD & Co-Founder Thankyou.
I’ve just returned from a life changing family holiday to Cambodia. We went to see first hand some of the impact we’ve been making to families in need. Needless to say, I’ve come back a different person, for the better.
We’re a strong advocate for the UN’s Global Goals as a framework to help business owners make a difference in the world by giving back.
Since we started inspire 5 years ago, we’ve partnered with B1G1 Business for Good as a vehicle that makes business giving easy.
Which of the 17 Global Goals resonate with you most?
With B1G1 you can select from 800 carefully screened, high-impact projects that are in line with the Sustainable Development Goals set by global leaders to create a sustainable future for us all.
Nov 2016 I got an invitation to go to Necker Island to meet Sir Richard Branson and spend a week collaborating with other entrepreneurs at the top of their game on how we could us business to make a bigger impact on the planet.
While it was a golden ticket so to speak, it came with a golden price tag too and so we decided to say NO to necker and instead just make a bigger impact.
That’s where the #GIVE1MDAYS campaign was born. A bold an audacious giving target to Give 1,000,000 Days of Life Changing water to families in need in Malawi. We figured the opportunity that is Necker Island would be there for some time, but for the 1.7 million people who are at risk of disease and even death – all for the lack of a bit of clean drinking water – there was really no time to lose.
The beauty of B1G1 as a giving platform is that you decide how your company will give.
Choose the ways to give that fit in best with your way of doing business. Because your membership fee directly funds B1G1’s developments, innovations, and operations, 100% of your giving goes directly to the projects you choose.
For example,
Imagine if every time someone buys a coffee at a cafe, a child is given access to safe clean drinking water.
Imagine if every time someone gets their tax return done at an accounting firm a family in Kenya is given a Goat.
Imagine if every time someone eats a meal at a restaurant, an orphaned child gets a meal.
B1G1 makes this possible and really makes every business a business for good.
So how do we integrate giving into what we do at Inspire?
With every dollar of tax we proactively save a small business, Inspire helps a person in need for a day – we call it ‘Day for a Dollar’.
(Inspired by how TOMS One for One initiative gives a pair of shoes for every shoe bought or how Zambrero feeds the hungry through ‘Plate 4 Plate’)
As of Dec 2017, we’ve given 3 Million days of access to food, water, hygiene and sanitation services, thanks to our partnership with global giving initiative B1G1 or Buy One Give One.
Why? As Accountants we love numbers, but when we found out that almost a billion people live on about a dollar a day, we knew we had to do something.
We believe that every business has the power to change lives by integrating giving into its everyday activities.
‘Day for a Dollar’ is a simple but powerful example of how together we can end global poverty, for good.
Caption: WE HIT 3 MILLION $3M in proactive tax savings for small business & 3M days of life changing help to families in need, across 16 countries (when we aimed to #GIVE1MDAYS in 2017).
I believe every business should make an impact, otherwise you shouldn’t be in business. I’m not just talking about building wells and feeding the poor. Think –
So why not link the direct impact that your business makes to an additional impact to affect families in need. I call this, becoming a Business for Good.
You get the point…
I believe that business should be the driving force behind creating a better world, and becoming a Business for Good is how to make that impact.
[Watch] 6 min overview of the B1G1 Business for Good Platform
Cambodia is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. The wounds that have been caused by decades of war, take a long time to heal. Today Cambodia is somewhat politically stable, but many people still lack some basic necessities for everyday life.
The lack of a working infrastructure and the poor economic situation of the country, only serves to highlight the growing problems. The mass-murder of nearly 2 million people by the Khmer Rouge (1/4 of the total population), mostly out of the educated elite, caused a huge mental and spiritual deprivation. Today 40% of the Khmer live below the poverty line.
Unfortunately these problems have a massive effect on the children of Cambodia. Every day is a struggle for survival. Cambodia’s infant mortality rate is 17 times higher than Germany’s.
In their young lives, they are endangered by Diarrhoea, Malaria, Dengue-Fever, HIV, malnutrition, child prostitution and human trafficking. Without access to medical attention and school education, the future of the children is wrapped in darkness.
That’s why we chose Cambodia as a country to give some of the 3M days of access to life changing help.
Here are some of the highlights of our Holiday for Good to Cambodia –
Happiest Kids Ever ❤️ We visited the villages yesterday where we’ve been supporting the building of water wells, filters, toilets & health education in rural Cambodia. Although the children seemed so happy with nothing, they really loved the gifts of toys, books & coloring pens. Thanks to B1G1.
Make An Impact Some of the mums, dads, brothers and sisters, who make up the billion people globally who live on about a dollar a day.
They’ve given us more (life lessons) than we’ve given them today. Thankyou
2 boys, both 10 One won ‘the human lottery’ by being born in the land of opportunity – Australia – the other didn’t. We don’t get to choose where we’re born, but we do get to choose how and why we live. “Live to give”.
Real World Education I wanted to show our kids (6 & 10) that they already live in Disney land, everyday. We wouldn’t let dogs live in the conditions these children call home, that’s why I believe together we can (and we must) end extreme global poverty for good.
Clean Drinking Water I believe that business should be the driving force behind creating a better world. That’s why at Inspire we give a days worth of access to help to families in need, for every dollar of tax saved.
So far we’ve given 3M days worth of access to life changing projects like clean drinking water. Today we went to the remote villages in Cambodia to see first hand the impact we’ve made.
A Bio-Sand Water Filter (pictured) lasts up to two decades or more and is able to provide for an entire family. One of the easiest ways to combat poverty and disease is to provide access to clean water sources.
Together we can end global poverty – https://b1g1.com/projectdetail/675
Life Changing Water What a privilege to meet some of the families impacted by the provision of water wells and bio sand water filters (pictured). You can hear the stats about the world water crises but hearing from the people affected by it, will change your life. You can change theirs by integrating giving into your business too, here is the link to the specific project shown here (and you’ll be amazed at how little it costs) – https://b1g1.com/projectdetail/675
Want to 10x Your Impact? Go and visit the projects you are supporting to see first hand the impact that you are making. Take the family. Take the kids. Take the team. Take your clients. Take your alliance partners. Damn, take your competitors! You might just come home as collaborators!.
But seriously, a Holiday for Good is life changing not just for the families in need, but for you.
I have a personal philosophy that business owners should take 8 – 12 weeks holiday per year and that one of those holidays be a Holiday for Good.
Imagine going to Ethiopia, Laos, Moldova, Morocco, Kenya, Lebanon for a once in a lifetime experience that you couldn’t any other way.
When I do my holiday planning each year – I set aside the 12 weeks of holidays first, then book in everything else around that – I plan for 4 types of holidays.
So where are you off to next?
Now you might be asking, “how the hell do I afford to give, take all these holidays and not be in my business for 3 months of the year?!?”
The answer is simple. You get Cashed Up.
In working with thousands of business owners over 5 years we found that most were financially drowning, just keeping their head above water or seriously Cashed Up. Upon reviewing their numbers we found there 7 key mistakes that business owners were making that we’re keeping them Cash Poor. That’s when the Cashed Up Book & 7 Smart Financial Decisions were born.
If you’re in business and you want to pull more money, time and happiness from your business you need to start making smarter financial decisions.
The top 7 Smart Financial Decisions of a Cashed Up Business are –
The Cashed Up Book is launching in March 2018 in partnership with Commonwealth Bank, Xero and Buy One Give One.
I’d like to finish with a quote from a dear friend and mentor Glen Carlson (Co-Founder of Dent Global) who said –
“it’s not about how much you’re giving, it’s about how effectively you are engaging others to give as well.”
So once you’ve decided to make an impact by becoming a Business for Good, I recommend you tell everyone.
B1G1 lets you track every single impact you create in real time. You can easily share that with your team and clients via unique tools, such as interactive ‘widgets’ and maps.
Check out some examples of our Impacts –
Our Giving Impacts Widget
Our Giving Impacts Map
Becoming a Business for Good may just be one of the most important things you do this year. For your business, for your life and for the world.
Remember – Dream Big. Make an Impact. Remember Your Roots.
P.s. Stay Tuned for part two as my business partner Ben Walker returns from his Holiday for Good in Kenya