I was on the phone to a customer earlier today and I mentioned that it had been more than a year since we had last talked about his staff reward and recognition program. “Yes,” he responded, “I know I need to do something but my biggest challenge at the moment is just finding people to apply to work here.” There is no doubt it is a tight employment market, which presents new challenges for employers looking to hire; potential recruits…
Category Archives: Smart Company
Right time, right place, right attitude
Last night I met a group of 12 prospective members of the Entrepreneurs Organisation. We came together to listen to Peter Kazacos, the inaugural winner of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award, who sold his business to Telstra three years ago for about $333 million. Since late last year he has been back on his own, looking for a new venture to create. What I took from his talk was that he is living proof that sometimes there are…
Clicking with technology
BlackBerry or crackberry? Some people love them could not run their businesses without them; others think they are a total intrusion. The point is, how do small businesses find out what technology would best suit them. If we believe that true productivity gains are going to come through technology, where are we going to find out what we need? Who can we trust to give us the best advice? We went through a stage of at least once a week…
What is really slowing us down ?
I have started writing a regular blog for the new online magazine for Entrepreneurs. SmartCompany My blogs appear on a Friday. Here is the entry from the first week. It is fun listening to big business and government tell people what is “up” with SMEs at the moment. I was once the marketing manager for small business at Apple (okay, so that was 15 years ago) but I did the same … read the research, simplified all the detail into…
Imagine running a business based on fun - that's what I decided to try when I left a very serious corporate career in marketing to set up RedBalloon...
Outstanding strategies
The one thing I hated the most when running my last business was waiting for money to arrive. It was agony: I’d have paid all the expenses, but have to wait between 45 and 60 days for my payment to arrive. You might even think that it is funny for me to be writing about the subject of debtors and cash flow given that many marketing types (like me) just take the whole process for granted. We like spending money…