Trending Topics & Issues Vital to SME Growth and Survival

Do you really know your customers? Can you anticipate their purchasing behaviour? Do you understand what drives them to purchase – from you or the competition?
Savvy marketers do, and will be able to convert one-off customers into long-term subscribers, keeping them engaged month after month, year after year.
Subscription based businesses have proven to be very successful business models in many different sectors, often experiencing strong growth. Interest in subscription models is only growing.
Constantly proving your worth long-term can be challenging, but there are tricks you can use to make the job less taxing and more effective.
In this session, Lauren Moloney, founding member of News Corp Australia’s digital marketing agency, News Xtend, will discuss why knowing your customers and providing ongoing value is the crux of a successful subscription business.
Moloney will share some of her challenges and barriers as well as the all-important steps your business could take to create value that appeals to your subscribers and turn the churn.

Want to know how to generate practical ideas that will grow your business?

Judy will present the steps to unlock your team’s creativity and harness the power of your audience. Then with a little magic turn them into ideas to drive innovation.

Stop following and start leading. It’s the secret sauce to winning in business.

Memories are the link between our past experiences and the present that can be triggered by a thought, word, smell, even an ad on TV. Did you know that in our brain we have one centre for rational thinking and five emotion centres. It only takes a 12th of a millisecond for our emotion sensors to react.

As providers of the brand experience and creators of memories, no matter what your product or service offering is, you need to connect the head and the heart, having your customers experience the emotion, not just be exposed to it.

It is about you making a promise to the customer and following through on that promise, creating a lasting impression.

In this presentation Michelle will share tips and strategies. How to own your brand, breaking the industry stereotypes and ensuring your brand stands out for all the right reasons.

Harry will be sharing his story of success, failure, and resilience. From the lofty heights of getting his first job at age of 16 managing a company’s entire search division to the lows of a failed business and homelessness not long after, Harry knows much about getting back up.

Tapping into his inner strength and determination he refused to admit defeat. Slowly he started to pick up freelance SEO work. After that grueling first-year things eventually started to pick up, and as more regular work came in, he hired his first member of staff.

If you’re looking to grow or scale your business, you need to hear this. Working with over 60 organisations on their growth strategies, plus scaling Wiise, Managing Director Jonny, will take you through a proven framework for growing your business, with real world examples. At a time where the pace of change is accelerating faster than ever, running a business is not what is used to be. Cash flow management, order fulfilment, technological change, fierce competition, marketing, keeping on top of admin, attracting and retaining talent, regulatory change, the list goes on. Learn a framework that champions these challenges and helps scale your business.

1.        Empower and support the general manager

It’s important to maintain a good balance between staying involved as chairperson and offering the right support to management versus remaining over-involved. There should be regular, scheduled interactions between the general manager or CEO and owner however, for the most part, the business owner should aim to stay away from the day-to-day to accelerate the transition.

Within appropriate levels of accountability, ensuring the general manager has autonomy and is empowered to deliver results is key. It isn’t easy to step out of day-to-day business activities however owners must transition out of the business to achieve growth objectives.

2.        Get the right finance skills

To get the business up and running requires one set of finance skills. However, the chair requires a number of superior finance skills to be successful in driving accelerated growth. These are:
·        greater depth of balance sheet understanding
·        understanding different options for funding the business
·        understanding different models for investment analysis
·        appropriate financial governance techniques.

3.        Reviewing the different options and choosing a way forward

Once the business structures and processes are in place to underpin reliability, and cash flow is being generated to support its operation and future growth, the owner as chairperson will have time to focus on new growth options.

Some growth options will be more involved and complex, so it’s important to carefully consider the right approach for any individual business. Among the many options to consider are mergers and acquisitions; franchising and licensing; geographical expansion; or channel expansion.

It’s important to consider which business model will suit best. For example, a franchise or licensing model offers a high degree of leverage as the growth will be driven by the capital and time of the franchisees, not the owner. Other things to consider are scalability, marketability, risk levels, and potential return on investment. These factors will all help to determine the right business model.

In all cases, their successful implementation depends on the owner, as Chairperson, investing sufficient time and effort on them.  In most cases, this is only possible after stepping back from the day-to-day.

4.        Change the mindset

Ultimately, a successful transition out of the business will come down to the mindset of the owner. Generally, most business owners will have a combination of intimate knowledge of the business, emotional attachment, and deeply-held familiarity. These all underscore the challenge of stepping back.

The first suggestion for business owners undergoing transition is to recognise that they are not the business. They are investors in the business. Changing this belief is absolutely central to being able to step back from the operations. Once business owners change this mindset, they can achieve the true freedom that business ownership can deliver. Reaching this point can trigger serious growth in the business, either because the company has to operate properly to enable them to step back, a skilled general manager is in place, or the owner can pursue a larger strategic growth plan.