How Small Business Can Achieve Rapid Improvement

Small to medium enterprises are the engine room of the economy.  They employ a staggering 99.8 of the Australian workforce.¹

Yet they are also the most vulnerable.²

For example, they are vulnerable to:

• fluctuating banking policy and behaviour;
• inability to fund growth and innovation;
• the buying and marketing power of large enterprise;
• the ebb and flow of broader economic conditions;
• and not the least, the red tape and suction of government bureaucracy.

Perhaps the least understood is the dependence they have on the effectiveness of leadership within the small business.

So many smaller enterprises grew from the owners’ hard work and excellence of product and service, and the relationships they formed with customers.

Too many of them never had the opportunity to learn financial management, systems scaling and leadership.

They’re focused on surviving, getting their product or service out the door and getting paid.

They are the least supported by government, lacking the lobbying power of big business with their revenue and cash reserves.

With better developed leadership and management skills, they’d have the awareness and capacity for better financial management, operational systems development, marketing and sales expertise, and as their people grow in numbers, better people skills, often the most challenging of all.

To get clarity about this dependence on effective leadership, let’s unpack the consequences of achieving the ‘holy grail’ of commerce, sustainable growth and profit, by working backwards:

1. To achieve sustained growth and profit, they must have delighted customers and other stakeholders
2. To have delighted customers and stakeholders they must have evolving quality of product and services.
3. To have evolving quality productivity, they must have innovation mastery.
4. To have innovation mastery they must have performance mastery.
5. To have performance mastery they must have employee engagement.
6. And to have employee engagement they must have effective leadership and management.

Of all the challenges facing small businesses trying to progress from surviving to thriving, the people issues are the greatest.

Establishing or resetting the culture to influence better performance is the fastest route to improvement and moving into a thriving state.

Fortunately, acquiring the leadership skills to achieve an improved culture is no longer a mystery and small business owners and leaders can access these skills readily and conveniently with a massive return on investment.

The key skills to acquire are these:

1. The ability to identify the human root causes and remedies of all errors, accidents, dysfunction and conflict.
2. The ability to earn or re-earn trust
3. The ability to reset the culture to that of a values-based high performing innovative team.
4. The ability to performance coach as a leader.

There are a range of other elements that interlock with these key skills.

We run this program over a period of eight weeks, conveniently online, with live interaction coaching support once a week for six months.

We take applications from business owner-leaders with between 15 and 150 staff, who are committed to learn themselves first, and recognise that their people are truly their greatest asset.

To learn more and discover whether this program is suitable for you, go here.

References:

1. Source: ABS Counts of Australian Business 8165.0, Feb 2016 and ASBFEO calculations (excludes nano businesses with no GST role)

2. Source: ABS Counts of Australian Business 8165.0, Feb 2016 and ASBFEO calculations.