The Lone Ranger had support; do YOU have enough?

We all know that life as a Business Owner can be tough going. This recognised reality actually works in your favour, as it lessens the competition you face in the market, for your product or service. It also provides you with the opportunity to do well financially, if you are able to surmount the hurdles that you will inevitably face, as you develop and grow your own business.

One of the critical elements, that will determine whether or not you will be successful as a business owner, is the degree of support you can engender from others as you travel along the path to eventual success.

This external support is absolutely necessary to keep you buoyant and focussed on your objectives, despite the difficulties you will encounter on a daily basis. The various types of support you will need from others include;

a) Someone to act as a sounding board for you to bounce ideas off and to assist you to evaluate the validity of your ideas before you act on them impetuously, or erroneously,

b) Someone to help you with brainstorming ideas for problem resolution, promoting and marketing your business, development of new products or services, and effectively managing your available resources,

c) Someone who will provide you with continual encouragement to continue to persevere with facing the daily challenges that need to be met to make your business a success,

d) Someone in the same boat as yourself as a business owner to share information, share leads, share celebrations of the small wins you make each week, share the emotional ups and downs that only a fellow business owner will understand, and share the pain when everything doesn’t go as well as planned.

e) Someone who can introduce you into appropriate networks that you need to be part of to gain the required level of exposure in your market, in order to be highly visible to your customers or clients,

f) Someone who is willing to allow you access to their similar business so that you can benchmark your operations against theirs to determine areas for improvement in your own, and

g) Someone who can act as your businesses financial guardian angel to point you in the right direction and to ensure that you don’t make any terminal mistakes in the management of the cash flow of your business.

It is likely that you will need support from a number of different people to ensure you have the support that you require.

If you are very lucky, you will find two or three people, who between them, can give you the level of support you need to get your business to the stage where it can then afford to engage professional firms or individual professionals, to provide the support systems that every successful business needs, to enable it to continue to thrive and prosper.

So where do you find the people you need to provide the support to you that can make your difficult role a little easier and provide a greater chance for you to become a successful business owner?

The following list highlights great places to look for the people you can turn to for the necessary levels of support for yourself, as you grow your business;

a) Members of your immediate and extended family,

b) Members of clubs, associations and groups that you belong to or have had previous associations with,

c) Programs for business owners established by your Local Council, State Government Instrumentalities and National Government Departments,

d) Networking Groups specifically set up to support SME business owners,

e) Informal networks of non-competing local business owners in your immediate vicinity, and

f) Social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter that have a business focus.

To garnish the support you need you must be passionate about your business and the outcomes you are trying to achieve, and use the right approach when sounding others out for the level of support you require.

You will usually find that if you approach the right people in the right way, even if you have not had a really strong previous relationship with them, most will, within the bounds of reasonableness, go out of the way to help others, especially if there is any form of reciprocity involved.

Are you acting a little like a modern day Robinson Crusoe?

Do you understand the benefits that the types of support outlined above can deliver to your business?

Will you now develop a plan to ensure you get the level of support you deserve and need?

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Is your Business a Nest Egg or a Future Millstone?

If you are a business owner not planning to sell up in the next five years and you wish to avoid future unpleasant financial surprises, especially when the time comes to retire from your business, then this article is for you.

If however, you are one of many business owners who are planning to retire solely on the proceeds of the sale of your businesses during the next 5 years or so, you may already be too late to avoid an unpleasant surprise, but you may still be able to mitigate the extent of the unpleasantness, so I have also included a few suggestions in this article for achieving this outcome.

The unpleasant surprise referred to above, which has its roots in the large bulge of baby boomer business owners all planning to exit their businesses around the same time and the likelihood of far fewer prospective purchasers being in the market at that time, will most likely take the form of significantly lower selling prices, usually well below expectations, being achieved for the sale of these businesses.

A more extreme, unpleasant surprise which is likely to be experienced by sellers for many of the last century style of businesses still owned by many baby boomers, will be little or no demand at all, from potential buyers for these businesses.

For baby boomer business owners, your key challenges in the period between now and your planned retirement date will be to; reinvent or revitalise your business, systemise it so that it can operate independently of your direct involvement, enhance its saleability by any other means available to you including quickly increasing profitability, introduce succession planning or plan for an internal buyout at a specific future date, and perhaps to consider introducing new shareholders now, rather than at the time you choose to retire.

For all business owners of later generations, the situation unfolding now for many of the baby boomer business owners is one you should seek to avoid, at all costs.

You definitely need to utilise your business to provide the substantial nest egg that you will need to have in order to afford a comfortable retirement, but this should be achieved by ensuring that you are always an employee of your own business, and that the business makes regular contributions of an adequate amount on your behalf, to the employee superannuation fund run by the business on behalf of its employees.

To achieve this outcome, you need to ensure that the prime objective of your businesses today is to operate profitably at all times, and at a level which allows the owners to draw a living wage, and make adequate superannuation contributions on a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly basis for as long as the business operates.

If this can be achieved, any risk of the business not being able to be sold at the time it needs to be sold, or selling for a price far less than the amount needed for retirement, is completely mitigated. The bonus of course being that, if the business is able to be sold when desired, all proceeds are simply icing on the cake, and the price obtained is immaterial.

The difficulty in reaching this outcome is that few SME business owners have the achievement of a minimum level of profit as their prime and ongoing business objective.

It may sound easy enough, but it takes both foresight and discipline, as well as dogged determination on behalf of the business owner to implement, enforce and continually reinforce everything required to keep all endeavours of the business focuses on achieving the level of profit which allows the consistent payment of wages to the owners, and the making of the required level of superannuation contributions on a regular basis.

Is your business paying you a wage and making regular contributions to a superannuation fund on your behalf?

Is the making of a required minimum level of profit the prime business objective of your business?

Is your business culture capable of being reshaped to allow such an objective to be successfully implemented?

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New Eyes Rectify SME Blindness

Being a SME business owner can be both lonely and demanding and often this can result in the business owner experiencing the “not being able to see the forest for the trees” syndrome.

One effect of suffering from this quite common affliction is that a SME business owner can start to live wholly in their own world, and eventually lose sight of the bigger, business picture. I call this affliction SME Blindness.

The very nature of business ownership in the SME environment is such that SME business owners often have to severely stretch their personal skill sets, and can find that they are spending most of their time engaged in activities that are far from the best use of their time and abilities, and which tend to bury them deeper and deeper into their own darkening world.

The amount of time engaged in such activities, usually mostly of an operational nature, also makes it harder for the SME business owner to be as strategic in their decision making as they need to be if they want to grow and prosper with their business endeavours, and be well prepared to face greater challenges in the future with their eyes wide open.

In many cases, the business concerned is the owner’s “baby”, and the attachment can be so strong that objective analysis and cutting the umbilical cord when necessary, are almost impossible when the business is not performing as it should, or major changes need to be made to ensure ongoing survival. We all know that no mother ever had an ugly baby, but if you look around, some are definitely better looking than others, but who would ever directly tell a mother that she had an ugly baby.

If your business is not performing to your expectations, perhaps it is now time to bring in an independent pair of fresh eyes to help you to critically look at your business, so that you can gain new perspectives, and can then utilise the insights gained through this process to implement the appropriate changes to re-invigorate your business.

There are many ways you can avail yourself of a fresh pair of eyes for your business, but first you need to determine what will work best for you, your team, and your business.

You should consider your own strengths as well as the strengths of your business, your own ego and the culture of your business, your willingness to change and the capability of your business to adapt and quickly adjust to changes, the cash flow of your business and its financial capacity to meet any costs involved, and the adequacy of yourself and your team to take your business to a new level, or in a different direction.

Once you determine what you believe is holding yourself and your team back from successfully growing your business to the level that matches your expectations (remembering that this is your reality, but analysis by others may subsequently come up with different findings) you can target the market to find the fresh pair of eyes you need to give you a greater and fresher independent perspective.

You might decide to find a mentor, access community or local government resources, utilise resources from any associations of which you are a member, hire a business coach, engage a business advisor, call in a management consultant, or actually employ (either part-time or full-time) a good business manager, with complementary skill sets to your own.

Whatever you choose, you must be willing to work with the person concerned, and make sure that you establish upfront, how you will value their contribution. Where appropriate, ensure that where fees are involved, you look on the fee as an investment in the future of your business, not a cost to minimize at the expense of the quality of the outcomes likely to be produced.

In general, look for a pair of eyes that are well qualified, have broad business experience, have owned a business themselves, have a track record that demonstrates good analytical and consultancy skills, and who will commit to providing their expertise for as long as it takes for you to extract all that you can from the relationship.

Is your business well and truly in need of a fresh set of eyes to flesh out the reasons why your business is not doing as well as expected?

Are you willing to expose yourself to that level of scrutiny for the greater good of your business?

Do you see the cost that you may incur in bringing in a fresh pair of eyes to look over your business as an investment in the future of your business or an expense to be minimized?

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