Small's not so beautiful

by Tony Kaye in The Australian

AUSTRALIAN small business, in many respects, is recognised as the backbone of the economy. According to government statistics, there are more than 1.88 million small businesses, employing 3.6 million people. Their combined capitalised worth is $4.3 trillion -- more than four times that of the Australian Securities Exchange.

Yet the statistics mask the reality that most small businesses are very small, with many being home-based, and most of these micro-businesses never manage move to the next level, if they survive beyond the first few years.

"Running a business is a challenge: it's an emotional, financial and mental merry-go-round and it has become even harder with red tape, tax and professional standards being so much more complex," says Tony Steven, chief executive of the Council of Small Business of Australia. "However, the basics remain the same."

Getting back to the basics of business is one of the key themes explored by business coach Dr Greg Chapman, in a book he has just released, The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

Chapman, who is also a Telstra Business Awards judge, says a high percentage of businesses stay small because their owners lack the vision, passion and skills to take them ahead. "What happens to most small businesses is nothing. They just stay small," he says. "Up to 98 per cent of small businesses are effectively 'micro-stayers', trapped inside a microbubble with little prospect of escaping, because they don't know how to grow."

Chapman says there are basically five reasons why micro-businesses don't move to the next level, with a lack of vision by the owner as to where the business is going to be in the future being top of the list.

"Without any direction, you really don't have any strategy, and strategy is the lever that lifts you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future," he says.

A second key reason is a lack of passion in their business, with many owners not having the commitment to take their business to a higher level. "You need the right vision to give you the passion, the commitment to stay the course and overcome the obstacles that do appear," Chapman says.

He says another reason why businesses stay small is that they don't plan, and therefore don't have the confidence to take the risks they need to take to achieve better results.

"It's not enough to have a vision and a passion; you actually need a plan to take you there. It's the roadmap; without a plan, all you really have is a dream, and we know how often they come true."

Chapman says the fourth reason why businesses stay small is that business owners don't value their time and are often working in their business rather than on their business, by performing tasks that can be delegated or outsourced.

Lastly, Chapman says business owners who fail to invest in education are also greatly limiting their growth potential. "When you value your time, you will also understand the value of knowledge," he says. "If an owner is not willing to invest in their own education and sees that as a cost instead, they have just resigned themselves to the school of hard knocks."

If business owners don't address these key factors, Chapman says, "they will be unable to grow beyond a certain level. The owner becomes frustrated and ultimately resigned to being a micro-stayer."

He says owners need to be open and honest that they are caught in a trap. "It's as if you've got a medical problem; you've got to diagnose the problem before you can do anything about it. Business owners have to be committed to really addressing their problems and doing something about it".

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Where to Start?

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When looking at your business, is it like looking at one of those houses that real estate agents love to call: “a renovator’s delight”? You know, it is basically sound structurally, but the paint is peeling, cracks are showing and the garden is a mess. It does not need a huge amount of effort, just a bit of love and attention, some elbow grease and a bit of know-how. Or is it like a sapling with shoots growing everywhere but with no clear growth direction and shallow roots?

Whatever your business looks like, when seeking to renovate or prune it into shape, the question is where to start? Should it be on your marketing or your systems, or perhaps your website or sales? The correct answer is to re-look at your goals so that every effort you make is taking your business in the direction you want it to go. Otherwise you will waste considerable time and money with unfocused strategies- scarce resources in small business. This is the difference between a light bulb and a laser beam which can cut through steel.

A systematic approach to renovating or pruning your business into shape is provided in the NEW book:

The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success

This book, which has a forward from Tony Steven, the CEO of COSBOA, the peak small business organisation in Australia, comes with a $100 of business tools, and provides an easy to understand, step-by-step approach on how to improve your business, starting with your goals, right through to systems and sales.

When you truly understand where your business is going, the job of defining a marketing strategy and putting in place systems becomes much simpler. Without this understanding, every day is a battle for survival, a hand to mouth existence. With it, every strategy you implement is about creating an unassailable position for your business in the marketplace.

Please visit Five Pillars for more information on “The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success”

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

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Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

The Fifth Pillar

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Most readers of this blog will already be aware of the

Four Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success

The first version of this, as my longest and most loyal subscribers know, was only 10 pages. It was, to be honest, a piece of marketing hype. Then I created a new version of this book which was a 10,000 word marketing brochure, although it contained some real content, unlike the first version. Many subscribers have complimented me on the quality of the information of this eBook, which if you have not received your own copy, can be downloaded FREE from the link above.

Some have told me they have taken the eBook as a blueprint for their business. Maybe I provided too much information to these successful people, as they never actually engaged me as their coach, relying only on the information in the eBook. However, I am always very happy to share what I know. My philosophy has always been the more you give, the more your receive.

While the feedback from this eBook has been extremely positive, I have been dissatisfied to the extent, that while the information was very highly valued, it did not result in action by owners to improve their businesses as often as I would have liked. So this year, I decided to move from the virtual world with a physical book that describes in some detail, the action Business Owners need to take. This book is called:

The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

One extra Pillar! The Fifth Pillar is the missing piece in the puzzle. The piece that makes the difference between thinking about success, and being successful. The book is several times the length of the original and provides a step-by-step plan for Business Success. It is due to be published in September.

To find out more about the book, you can either watch out for further information on this blog or contact me directly.

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Diary of a New Business 10 - The Workflow Process

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

No business can survive without processes and procedures. But when starting a new business, detailed processes can often wait and evolve as the business grows. The initial way of doing things is rapidly replaced with a better way of doing things. So spending a lot of time on systems before you launch can result in unnecessary delays in your launch. Afterall, when you start, you are generally not that busy, so many of your systems can grow with your business.

That is not to say that you can’t start without any systems. You must have some idea on how you are going to provide your services. The fundamentals must be in place. But if you intend to automate things, quite detailed planning is necessary.

With a manual process, you don’t have to think about every contingency. If something only happens rarely, you can take the view that you will address the process for that when the time arises. But if you intend to automate your systems, the logic of what happens next has to be considered so that the automation can handle it.

As the Australian Business Coaching Club was to be largely automated, the steps for each visitor to the website had to be considered one-by-one. The visitor decides to optin- but fills in the form incorrectly. If there is not an error checking process, I could lose a lead. Here are some other questions that I asked:

· What are the steps a visitor must take to a sale?
· What are the automated follow-ups?
· What alternatives should be given and managed?
· What payment options?
· How to manage a failed credit card?
· How to welcome people to the Club?
· What happens at each stage of their membership?
· What is the induction process?
· How is their membership managed?
· Are there loyalty and referral programs?
· How do they work and how are they managed?
· What happens when they resign?
· What happens after they resign?

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the coaching process! How much automation should be given to each aspect of the business?

A map was created from the first contact through to the final goodbye. Even where automation was undertaken, emails had to be prewritten, which would be triggered by the process. Web pages needed to be created where there were to be links from the emails. And reporting had to be in place to monitor the whole process.

While a large number of procedures were automated, some manual processing was maintained where the programming was considered to be very complex and saving little time or where it was believed that the process would evolve.

Before you launch your business, map out the fundamental processes that must be there the day the doors open.

Next- Getting it all done.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is a Business Coach and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

The Australian Small Business Blog

Diary of a New Business- 6. Getting the Marketing Right

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

As in any new business, the marketing was critical. It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, if no one knows about it, you have no business. The idea of if you build it, they will come, is just the stuff of movies. Especially on the internet.

For the Australian Business Coaching Club, being an online business, eMarketing was critical. But not enough on its own. However, I also had an advantage- the pre-existing marketing infrastructure of Empower Business Solutions, the parent of the Australian Business Coaching Club.

But, before anything else I had to understand my target market.

Empower Business Solutions target market was for small businesses with a profit of greater than $100,000 but with fewer than 50 employees. The market for the new Australian Business Coaching Club would be for businesses smaller than the target market for Empower Business Solutions. And I was aware that many people on my Empower Business Solutions mailing list were already in that category. These were people ideally suited for the new business, but not ready for my existing business.

The Australian Business Coaching Club was not designed for start-ups, although they would benefit. It was designed for the micro-businesses. The solopreneur, and one-man bands. Businesses that had already started, had some history, but were struggling on what they should do for their next phase of growth. They were also unable to afford private coaching. I was already attracting many of these leads to my existing website, just due to its prominence in the search engine listings. But this business would need its own, far more focused campaigns.

Step two was to develop a website more in keeping with making an online sale to my target market. On the Empower Business Solutions website, the marketing process was to establish sufficient online credibility and a call to action that would ultimately result in an offline contact, and an offline sale. For the Australian Business Coaching Club website, the whole sales process was to be online.

When you compare the two websites, you can see a totally different marketing philosophy. On the new website, you can see, firstly, it is targeted specifically for the micro-business owner. This site would not appeal to my ideal Empower Business Solutions client. Secondly, the website copy is far more sales focused. It also has more web technology driving the website- a far higher level of automation, as is essential for a lower cost service- but more on that in another posting.

Getting the website right was critical for the business. As it was going to succeed or fail due to its web presence, I devoted a very significant amount of resources to its development. As well as the marketing technology, what is also not visible to the visitor, is the service delivery- the members area- again, watch out for a future posting for more on that.

So the critical success factor for this website was its ability to make online sales.

The copy was important, as was the follow-up strategy, as most people would not make a decision to buy from an initial visit to the site. So the website was designed so that contact could be maintained after the initial visit until they were either ready to join, or unsubscribed.

But this was still not enough. I had to have a strategy to generate traffic leads for the website.

If you are building a website have you worked out your eMarketing Strategy?

The next article in The Diary of a New Business will be: Generating Leads.

If you would like to post a comment on this article, please click on the Comments link below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is a Business Coach and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

The Australian Small Business Blog

Design your business before you plan it - Part 1.

By Ron Stark

Designing your business for success comes long before you even think of having a business plan, or even understanding what a business plan is. So how can you define a successful business?

The best answer I can come up with is this: A successful business is one that delivers on your expectations and meets your needs.

That in turn means it is necessary to understand your own view of success first, if you're to have any hope of starting a successful business. After all, one person's motivation may be to start a corporate empire, another's to supplement their retirement income, and some, because they've just been retrenched and need a job. In each case it's not the business itself that defines success, but the founder's wants, needs and expectations.

You as an individual

Many people fall into the trap of starting a business for its glamour, its perceived profits or because it's a well-known franchise, and fail because they've overlooked the most important thing of all - your new business depends on your individual skills, experience and personality.

Some of the things you need to carefully examine are:

• Be honest with yourself about why you want to start a business. There are no right or wrong reasons, providing the business you want to start fits your motivation for doing so.


• Research what a particular business demands by way of skills - don't guess. If possible talk to others in similar businesses.


• Match your skills and experience to the requirements of the business. Be brutally honest with yourself - if you don't have the necessary skills, be prepared to employ somebody, outsource the work or get training. Once your business is running, you will be the key employee in your business, and you don't want to employ the wrong person!


• Explore the impact of your new business on your lifestyle. For example, if you have a young family, starting a business that needs to be open 14 hours a day, your lifestyle and family are likely to suffer.


• Consider the chores and tasks that you love - and absolutely hate. The thrill of a new business quickly disappears if you are always compelled to do those things you hate or are not good at.

Exploring one's self is usually very difficult, especially when reality risks getting in the way of your dream. If this is you, then it is best that you speak to an expert who is trained to ask the right questions. Your success may well depend on it.

The next article will look at you as an investor in your own business.

Ron Stark is the founder of Business Kits, a company specialising in helping new businesses before and during their crucial design and startup stage.

The Australian Small Business Blog