How We Work

1. Features And Benefits

Your customers are generally only interested in product features that translate into benefits. So, whether you’re developing a new product or exploring a way to repackage an old one, it is important to think clearly about the benefits you provide. Product features are not important in themselves. Great as a product may be, customers won’t love it for its own sake. They’ll only love it for the benefits it provides.

This topic is about translating product features into benefits that meet the needs of your customers. It covers market research to identify benefits from the customers’ perspective, how to develop a Unique Core Differentiator and how to incorporate these benefits into marketing strategies to provide you with long-term growth.

2. Inventory Management

Inventory control is rated as the second biggest source of problems for small businesses that sell products. It only comes behind lack of capital. However, the two problems are often related. Poor inventory management can tie up large amounts of cash, eating into capital resources. Good inventory management, on the other hand, can free up significant amounts of cash and reduce business-borrowing requirements.

Deciding how much inventory to hold is partly a matter of weighing up costs and benefits. It means analyzing when and where you will have a crucial need for inventory. This can be key to business success or failure. This topic is an introduction to developing systems and processes for successful Inventory Management.

3. Smart Pricing for the Small Business

There are a lot of variables to consider when you set a price, such as, ‘What is consumer demand for a product? What pricing standards do your competitors set and how are they likely to react to different pricing strategies?’

There are many pricing pitfalls too. If you set your price too high, consumers may opt for cheaper alternatives. If you set your price too low, consumers may assume that you’re selling a poor quality product.

This topic will provide you with a better understanding of pricing and marketing to help you build a stronger business. If you can effectively analyze pricing issues you will be more confident in your business decisions and you will be a better business planner.

4. Trademarks And Patents

This topic looks at the importance of intellectual property, dealing specifically with patents and trademarks and their importance in your business. Intellectual property can include processes you may have developed, original products or manufacturing processes and marketing graphics. These can be a competitive advantage for your business and are able to be included on your company balance sheet as an asset so it is essential that you know how to protect them. The presentation explores Patents in detail, including how and when to apply for patents, patent protection and patent rights. Learn about trademarks: how to choose a good trademark to distinguish your goods and services from your competitors; develop a unique brand identity; and how to register your trademark to protect it.

5. Unique Core Differentiators

Perception is reality and people buy based on the differences they perceive. It’s the differences that potential customers perceive that drive them to choose one business over another. And those differences make the customer feel more confident about their final decision as well.

Unique Core Differentiators (UCDs) clearly articulate what makes your business different. They are the special things about your product or service or business that compels customers to buy from you, rather than your competitors. Well-formed differentiators target your customer’s ‘hot buttons,’ real buying concerns or key frustrations. In one statement, UCDs educates them about exactly why they should buy from you.

This topic will help you to identify or create your company’s own UCD’s and will provide strategies for ensuring that all of your marketing efforts clearly articulate why you are unique and why customers should buy from you.

1. Approaching Marketing Strategically

A small business cannot be all things to all people. A good marketing strategy recognizes this and reflects the need for the business to analyze its markets and its own capabilities so as to focus on a target market it can serve best.

This seminar explains the core concepts of a marketing strategy for small and medium-sized enterprises. It explains how to identify target markets that a small business can serve better than its larger competitors and how to tailor product offerings, prices, distribution, promotional efforts and services towards that particular market segment.

2. Becoming Customer Centric

Today’s successful companies are the ones that revolve their business around their customers. Yet how often are products or services dreamt up, produced, marketed, sold and distributed without any input from a potential customer? And how often are the internal procedures of a business set up to suit the business’ convenience rather than to enhance the experience the customer has with the business?

Unless the customer, and the customer’s needs, are the real focus of the business there can’t be any concerted effort to providing superior value. This BGR discusses how to focus on adding value by designing processes such as technology, training and internal processes to support a strategy of customer-centricity throughout all areas of the organization.

3. Branding

Branding is the consistent execution of your business’s unique personality. It’s literally your face to the world. It’s your name, how that name is visually expressed through a logo, how that name and logo are extended throughout all of your communications, and what people think about when they see or hear it. It’s the one thing that you can own that nobody can copy or take away from you. The time, money and care that you spend in building, growing and nurturing your own brand can pay off handsomely, not just here and now in awareness, reputation and sales, but as an investment in brand equity.

This topic is an introduction to Branding at a broad level. It introduces the branding concept and sets out current business thinking on how branding works, its value to their business, and some of the issues around developing the most obvious aspect of a brand – the logo.

4. Business-To-Business Marketing

For companies whose primary or sole client are other businesses, getting a foot in the door of good prospect companies can be a difficult task. And even after you do have a contract in hand, maintaining a business relationship in the face of rival vendors can be a hard road.

The problem is, that often the company wanting to get into B2B work hasn’t appreciated that marketing to another business (B2B marketing) is quite different from marketing to consumers (B2C marketing).

This BGR explains the way businesses operate between each other and the marketing strategies that firms who want to break into B2B must utilize to be successful. It covers all the stages from initial client targeting, to building and maintaining long term relationships with business clients.

5. Classifying Your Customers for Increased Profitability

For most business only a small portion of customers yield the majority of a business’ income, while a much larger proportion contributes much less per dollar of sales. This is the 80/20 rule in action.

In this seminar learn how to classify customers into groups so as to increase profits and simplify working arrangements. The result will be increased focus on those “A” class customers who are both easy to deal with and generate the largest share of profits. This seminar also explores suggested strategies for culling the “D” class customers – those who are least pleasant to deal with and/or provide the lowest returns per dollar of sales.

6. Converting Contacts To Sales

Staying in business means selling. So it means moving contacts on through to being customers – and the better your system for doing this the more likely you will be to close the sale.

This topic examines the steps in the selling process – acquiring contacts, managing them through the sales process, and closing the sale. Getting any one of these steps wrong and you are likely going to miss out on an income opportunity.

We cover the importance of calculating contact-to-sale conversion rates and outline what they can tell you about the success of your selling system. There are tips on how to increase sales conversion rates and a discussion of how to recruit and reward members of the sales team.

A business has to sell –the information in this topic will help it sell more effectively.

7. Crafting Customer Communications

This topic looks at how to craft marketing messages and design marketing material delivery schedules that will keep you in regular and effective contact with your existing customers and clients. If you make regular contact with your customers you can significantly increase the length of time they do business with you and you can convince them to increase the range of goods and services they purchase from you.

We cover best practice hints for creating marketing materials including choosing the right tone for your message, follow up mailings, writing tips and effective phone scripts. Communication schedules are looked at in detail with a review of the various methods of scheduling effective delivery of communications to targeted customer groups so as to maximize the likelihood that they will result in a sale.

8. Creating A Profitable Sales System

Many business owners don’t focus on their sales function – mainly because they aren’t comfortable selling and prefer to concentrate on what they do best. But what would be the financial impact on your business if every team member could double his or her sales? We look at the sales process in a way that will break it down into the nuts and bolts, and make it less mysterious and daunting.

This topic covers:

• The sales function and why some people are not comfortable with it
• Why it is ultimately an internal process that you must systematize like everything else in your business, and how to do this
• Some key selling strategies
• Ways to manage the sales process

9. Customer Lifetime Value and Profitability

This topic explores why it’s important to understand the value of the existing customer base, how it can be segmented to give a profile of individual customer value and how to quantify the value of different customer groups.

When it is understood that some customers provide very little profitability to a business, it’s an easy step to realizing that not all customers are equal. The different segments can be marketed to and serviced differentially to improve customer satisfaction, save the business time and money on marketing and ultimately improve profits.

Also covers how to use the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) metric as a management tool to evaluate and monitor the potential and actual results of marketing and loyalty campaigns.

10. CRM – Managing the Customer Relationship

CRM stands for ‘Customer Relationship Management’. It’s about knowing your customers and using this knowledge to form profitable relationships with them. We hear a lot about ‘CRM’ these days but most of us don’t really know what it means. This updated BGR topic will put you in the picture of what CRM is and how it is being applied in businesses.

What is new about CRM is the development of software applications that can be the basis of a customer relationship management system in any business. This BGR reviews how these systems can be made to work, and why they often don’t.

You’ll see how CRM can deliver a profitable focus on customers that can really pay off for any size of business. The BGR also covers the steps of developing and implementing a CRM strategy and what it can and can’t achieve. You’ll also learn how to tell if you’re getting value out of a CRM system and which are the most important metrics to monitor.

11. Dealing With Customer Complaints

Statistics vary, but for every customer who makes a complaint, you are likely to have between twenty and thirty dissatisfied customers who say nothing. Or at least, they say nothing to you, but they’re happy to tell other people. In fact, customers are likely to tell between eight and ten people when they are dissatisfied. And each of these is likely to pass the word on to several others.

There is a positive side to complaints however: they can be used to improve your business processes AND even cement customer loyalty. Complaints are a valuable resource. They provide low-cost feedback and if you handle customer complaints well, you can confirm customer loyalty. Good complaint resolution can actually assist in turning even customers who have a complaint into long-term clients who will recommend your business to others. This topic will show you how to handle complaints effectively and use them to actually improve your business.

12. Developing Quality Marketing Materials On A Budget

Businesses often scale back on marketing in difficult or uncertain economic times. However, the challenge in tough times is to continue marketing effectively, but at a lower cost.

The way to do this is to develop a sound marketing plan in line with your budget and market to your strengths. Your marketing materials should not focus on the features of your products and services, but rather what those features can do for your customers.

You may find that keeping persistent, low-key contact with your customers, using inexpensive materials, will give you just as good a result as more costly campaigns. This topic explores the range of low-cost materials that could be used in your business, such as flyers, hand-outs, business cards, faxes, emails, postcards, and giveaways such as mugs, buttons, pens, or ornaments, and how you can use them most effectively.

13. Develop and Manage Your Brand

You might think that only big companies have a brand but almost every business has a brand – including your clients, no matter how small.

Brands can be worth a lot of money to a business. They can be very good when looking for new customers or for retaining existing ones. But they do require good management to be effective.

In this topic we have provided a walk through of what branding is about at a broad level. The idea is to introduce clients to the concept and give them current business thinking on how branding works, its value to their business, and some of the issues around developing and managing their own brand.

14. The Elevator Speech

Have you ever been presented with that golden opportunity – a chance meeting with a potential big customer? Suddenly you scored one short window of opportunity to get this person interested in your products or services. And you blew it!

You need to develop an ‘elevator speech’!

An ‘elevator speech’ is a concise, carefully planned, and well-practiced description about your company that your aunt should be able to understand in the time it would take to travel a couple of floors in an elevator.

This presentation shows you how to put together your ‘elevator speech’ – what to put in and just as importantly, the turnoff statements to leave out. It also shows you how you can develop it to work anywhere from in the elevator to a business club meeting.

15. Features And Benefits

Your customers are generally only interested in product features that translate into benefits. So, whether you’re developing a new product or exploring a way to repackage an old one, it is important to think clearly about the benefits you provide. Product features are not important in themselves. Great as a product may be, customers won’t love it for its own sake. They’ll only love it for the benefits it provides.

This topic is about translating product features into benefits that meet the needs of your customers. It covers market research to identify benefits from the customers’ perspective, how to develop a Unique Core Differentiator and how to incorporate these benefits into marketing strategies to provide you with long-term growth.

16. Finding New Sources of Business

A healthy business targets and achieves growth. A business that isn’t capable of finding new sources of business will eventually become unsustainable and fail.

This seminar shows how to set growth targets for a business and measure progress towards them. It covers the many ways of finding new sources of business with an emphasis on those ways that will generate a growth in business but not a huge growth in expenditure.

It also outlines a process for analyzing a business and deciding which will be the best ways for it to achieve growth.

17. Getting The Most Out Of Your Advertising

This seminar takes a broad definition of advertising to cover not only promotions in the media, but also a wide range of other ways in which a business advertises itself – through its branding, its vehicle fleet, the appearance of the workshop and offices, the way the phone is answered etc.

There are tips and tricks on making each of these work effectively so that the business is ‘advertised’ by everything it does, as well as advice on designing and delivering the more traditional direct marketing, radio and television type advertisement.

18. Guarantees – A Sales Opportunity

A good guarantee can give your business a significant marketing edge. It can help you win new customers and cement existing customer relationships. This is because a guarantee has credibility. Consumers know that guarantees and warranties are legally binding. This is important as consumers are becoming increasingly skeptical about advertising claims. A direct, generous, and unambiguous guarantee can cut through this skepticism. The stronger the guarantee, the more selling power it has.

This topic is a general introduction to some of the factors business owners need to consider when offering a guarantee. When you implement a guarantee you will want to look over your procedures and make sure that all parts of your business will live up to the guarantee standard. Run your business on sound quality management principles and you will be able to tell the world about it through your guarantee.

19. Improve Your Marketing ROI

Tracking return on investment (ROI) for each marketing activity in your annual program is essential for effective marketing planning. If you know your total marketing expenditure, and with some figures on sales per channel you can really drill down into what’s working and what’s not.

But, without detailed ROI tracking for each marketing activity, you have no objective way to determine which tactics were most effective and which provided lower returns. In other words, you can’t see the trees for the forest! Detailed ROI information is critical for deciding which marketing activities to pursue for next year.

20. Making A Promotions Plan

Your promotions plan will keep you focused on marketing. It’s difficult to come up with marketing ideas when you are busy solving short-term business problems. So follow good time-management principles and set time aside for long-term planning. Take a global and strategic look at your business, gather all your marketing options and rough out a schedule for the year.

First look at your marketing plan and considering your overall objectives, the nature of your business and its products and services. Map out the year, with predictable and seasonal features highlighted. Then make a list of all the marketing strategies that are suitable to your business and match the strategies to the different events in your business year, ensuring that you have at least one thing planned for each month.

You then have a promotional plan. Follow it and you will have a higher and more reliable stream of revenue into your business.

21. Perceived Indifference Disease – Are You Suffering From It?

Most business owners will say that their customers’ key concern is price – that customers will only buy if the price is right – and in fact actually inquire about price first before anything else. However research continually shows that the single most common reason a customer leaves a business for a competitor is Perceived Indifference. Perceived Indifference is when customers have the impression that you couldn’t care less if they buy from you or not. Almost 7 out of 10 of the customers you lose walk away because they feel you are indifferent towards them. They felt that you didn’t care enough, didn’t take time for them, and really didn’t make a difference.

This topic looks at how much perceived indifference could be costing your business. It reviews the 19-point checklist of common areas where perceived indifference occurs and discusses ways these can be improved.

22. Power Of Word Of Mouth

Businesses have always known that a good reputation is key to success. They know that if they keep their customers happy, word will spread and their business will grow. Equally, bad news can travel fast. If a business provides poor service or sells poor quality products, word will soon get around and hurt sales.

Word of mouth marketing is emerging as a key tool for many businesses as traditional advertising becomes less effective due to increasing consumer skepticism. Consumers are more likely to make purchase decisions based on the opinions, rumors and anecdotes that they hear through the many informal networks they belong to. Good word of mouth can be the greatest marketing asset of a business.

However, most businesses are only just becoming aware that there are strategies they can use to generate good word of mouth. This topic looks at how to use networks to facilitate the spread of good word of mouth about your business and how to capture the interest of opinion leaders and early adopters to ensure your message is passed on.

23. Selling Solutions — Not Products

The best sales people know better than to wing it through a prospect meeting. They have a systematized sales process to work with. And the most effective system is relationship selling – selling based on getting to know a customer’s real needs and fitting your products and services to them.

Relationship selling doesn’t involve high pressure or manipulative methods. The salesperson here is a problem solver, a helper, and an advisor to the customer. They learn to identify the customer’s needs and sell them a solution that fits the need – not just a product. It moves the emphasis from price to value as a differentiator and provides a powerful advantage over competitors.

This seminar walks through the 5 key elements of the relationship selling process and explains the interpersonal techniques that will help you build relationships. Specifically business owners and managers will learn:

• How to use objections to further the sales process
• How to close, but only once, and successfully
• How to prepare a sales pitch so that saying ‘yes’ is the next natural thing to do
• How to build relationships so strong that your clients won’t think of going anywhere else

24. Sustaining Competitive Advantage

Basically there are three strategies by which a business competes in the marketplace:

• Price
• Serving a niche market better than anybody else
• Promoting the individuality of a product or service

Which of these is the better long-term strategy? Undoubtedly a lower price than the competitor is an immediate advantage – but will it deliver a continuing competitive edge? Differentiating your products from your competitors will provide a much harder to match advantage for your business. This seminar concentrates on how to deliver benefits exceeding those of competing products, by developing a differentiation strategy.

Drawing on some of Michael Porter’s ideas on how competition actually works in the business world, this seminar explores the value of performing a competitive analysis on your business. This information will enable you to focus on how your products and services rate against those of competitors – setting the stage for you to make informed decisions about the best of strategy to use with your product to gain a lasting competitive advantage.

25. Testimonials And Referrals

Endorsements in the form of testimonials and referrals from satisfied customers are major sources of new business for many SMEs, and yet a method that often remains underutilized. Frequently this is simply because nobody thought to use them, but it can also be because it’s outside the comfort zone to go out seeking them from customers.

This seminar discusses how to gather testimonials in order to enhance business credibility and then leveraging these endorsements in their marketing materials to assist in creating a referral system that will provide an ongoing flow of new customers in an inexpensive way.

26. Trade Shows & Exhibition Marketing

Every industry has trade shows and exhibitions. Research shows that 91% of decision makers in business prefer trade shows as their source of purchasing information, so there’s a sound commercial reason to add trade shows to any marketing mix.

This seminar examines the merits of trade shows and how to put their selling power to work. It runs through the basics of any show – how to compare the costs of one show with another, how to plan a display, how to get the team ready for the event, and how to calculate the value received after the show.

It tells how to qualify prospects at the show, how to evaluate them, and how to convert that first meeting into a long term business relationship by the right kind of follow-up.

For anyone that’s never exhibited at a trade show before but always wondered what it was all about, this seminar is essential. And even for seasoned exhibitors there’s a lot in here to help make the next show a real success.

27. Using Offers to Win Business

An offer is a proposition you make to your customers to prompt a response from them, to entice them into a purchase. An offer gives a potential customer a stronger reason to try you out. Essentially it is the carrot designed to push the customer over the edge and have them buy from you.

This topic looks at the way special offers can increase the range and volume of your sales, how they can introduce you to new markets and differentiate you from your competitors. By including an offer in your ad or marketing piece that appeals specifically to the people you want as new customers, you can dramatically influence the decision-making process and generate a far greater response for your marketing spend.

Learn about a number of techniques for making offers that will win customers and increase the likelihood of repeat business.

28. Yellow Pages Marketing

Your clients will discover how to design a killer phone directory or internet advertisement that not only lists their contact details but markets their firm. This information will allow them to leverage a phone entry into a marketing strategy they can use to attract as many telephone calls as larger operations.

The topic also looks at telephone techniques that will systematize the way your clients deal with inquiries to help solve their customer’s needs easily and efficiently. And in the process they will learn how to convert a telephone inquiry into a sale or a meeting thus increasing sales via the phone.

1. Building a Winning Team

What business owner hasn’t wished they had people who could work more cooperatively to sort out things for themselves and come up with effective solutions? Maybe to even be feeding ideas back into the business about how to improve things?

To get people operating this way you need to turn your group into a team. And to do that you need to know how to build a business culture that will encourage teamwork to happen. But that’s only part of the story – the leader has to know the skills that will maintain team morale.

2. Downsizing As A Cost-Cutting Strategy

Companies consider downsizing and cutting costs for many reasons. A major factor will always be that they find themselves in a period of economic downturn. In this situation, companies will have to scale back on their growth expectations or may even struggle just to maintain their current size. However, companies may need to cut costs even in good years. For example, they may have to deal with increased supplier prices, excess capacity or a fall in client orders.

In order for it to be effective, downsizing should be done strategically. Poorly managed downsizing can hurt productivity. It can leave your organization with demoralized and less efficient team members.

This topic explores the human resources issues with downsizing, how to map your business activities to identify activities you might eliminate or outsource and how to manage the change with your team.

3. Hire The Right People And Get Them Productive Fast

Every employer faces the challenge of selecting the right people to join their team, then getting them productive as quickly as possible.

In small businesses especially, the need for productivity is critical. Time is money and the more time it takes for a person to learn his or her job, the more it costs you in lost productivity.

This BGR will give you some valuable insights into how you can identify the people who are ‘right’ for your business, then focus on getting your new team members productive from the start.

It covers the critical induction period and tells you how to set up a ‘Buddy’ system that will communicate essential knowledge and the culture of your business to new team members.

This is a companion product to the BGR ‘Recruiting the Right People’ that covers the fundamentals of sourcing candidates, interviewing and testing them, and complying with the labor laws that apply.

4. Money Ain’t Everything! Smart Ways To Recognize And Reward Your Team

There are a number of ways of looking at remuneration. You might think of it as a negative-a cost to your business. On the other hand, you could look upon it as an investment given that the right compensation package can help you attract and keep good people in your business. This topic looks at several innovative ways of structuring remuneration and reward systems that are not simply about money.

Surveys consistently find that money is only one reason that people take, or stay in a job. Some of the other reasons fall into the category of rewards. This means that you’ve got room to move when you’re setting salaries and wages or giving raises.

Learn about how to adopt good positive management practices and reward your team well, so that you’ll be under less pressure to offer salaries at the top of the range while, at the same time enhancing employee performance and boosting the productivity of your business.

5. Recruiting Good People

Having skilled competent people on the team represents a real competitive advantage – you will be able to produce higher quality product and deliver better customer service than competitors. And importantly, it will give you the opportunity to step back and work ON the business instead of needing to constantly manage everyone and being caught up working IN it.

However, recruiting top performers is one of the most difficult tasks a business owner will undertake and will only be successful if a number of best practice recruiting routines are followed so as to become more efficient and more aggressive in locating good candidates and selecting the applicant with the qualities you really need.

This seminar discusses how to improve procedures for:

• Sourcing candidates
• Selecting candidates from the applicants
• Interviewing applicants to establish actual skill level
• Testing for the necessary skills
• Using a probationary period to establish the fit of the new employee before final commitment
• Meeting labor law requirements for recruitment and hiring practices

6. Using the HR Appraisal for Performance Management

To keep their business pushing forward an SME owner/manager must deal with performance problems, develop talent, make the tough decisions about removing poor performers, and distribute pay equitably. All this can be done without implementing a performance management system likely to arouse resentment and controversy – yet a system that:

• Holds employees accountable for results
• Encourages and supports open, honest feedback between employee and employer
• Provides a convenient mechanism for developing talent
• Can, if required, incorporate a compensation process that is based on performance and pays the high performers more than it pays substandard performers

This BGR covers how to implement a system that will achieve all of these objectives.

1. Benchmark for Profitability

The importance of benchmarking is growing worldwide as increasing numbers of business owners and managers discover how valuable it is as a tool for improving profitability. As owners of their own businesses your clients need to understand what benchmarking is and how it works.

Benchmarking is a very broad topic, so this topic concentrates on what it is rather than how to do it. Your clients will also gain an understanding of what it can do for their business and hear about what it’s done for others.

2. Business Interruption & Risk Management

This BGR topic is about business interruption and how to manage the risks that can cause it. It’s an important concept that every owner of a small business needs to understand.

Most proprietors have thought about the possible effects on their business of a disaster like a fire or flood. Some even have insurance against specific events like cyclones and earthquakes.

But that’s not the same as planning for a Business Interruption. The difference between planning for a disaster and planning for a business interruption can be the difference between recovery and going out of business.

2. CRM – Managing the Customer Relationship Management

CRM stands for ‘Customer Relationship Management’. It’s about knowing your customers and using this knowledge to form profitable relationships with them. We hear a lot about ‘CRM’ these days but most of us don’t really know what it means. This updated BGR topic will put you in the picture of what CRM is and how it is being applied in businesses.

What is new about CRM is the development of software applications that can be the basis of a customer relationship management system in any business. This BGR reviews how these systems can be made to work, and why they often don’t.

You’ll see how CRM can deliver a profitable focus on customers that can really pay off for any size of business. The BGR also covers the steps of developing and implementing a CRM strategy and what it can and can’t achieve. You’ll also learn how to tell if you’re getting value out of a CRM system and which are the most important metrics to monitor.

3. Creating A Sales System

Many business owners don’t focus on their sales function – mainly because they aren’t comfortable selling and prefer to concentrate on what they do best. But what would be the financial impact on your business if every team member could double his or her sales? We look at the sales process in a way that will break it down into the nuts and bolts, and make it less mysterious and daunting.

This topic covers:

• The sales function and why some people are not comfortable with it
• Why it is ultimately an internal process that you must systemize like everything else in your business, and how to do this
• Some key selling strategies
• Ways to manage the sales process

4. Dealing With Customer Complaints

Statistics vary, but for every customer who makes a complaint, you are likely to have between twenty and thirty dissatisfied customers who say nothing. Or at least, they say nothing to you, but they’re happy to tell other people. In fact, customers are likely to tell between eight and ten people when they are dissatisfied. And each of these is likely to pass the word on to several others.

There is a positive side to complaints however: they can be used to improve your business processes AND even cement customer loyalty. Complaints are a valuable resource. They provide low-cost feedback and if you handle customer complaints well, you can confirm customer loyalty. Good complaint resolution can actually assist in turning even customers who have a complaint into long-term clients who will recommend your business to others. This topic will show you how to handle complaints effectively and use them to actually improve your business.

4. Developing Quality Assurance Processes

SME owner/managers may think they don’t have time or money to develop complex quality assurance processes, but in fact quality improvements need not be overly expensive or involved – less in the longer term than the cost of NOT introducing them. Because, in the long term, quality assurance practices are the best way to bolster the bottom line since they achieve delivery of the highest value to the customer with the lowest costs to the company.

This seminar outlines the basic argument for introducing a quality practices review and provides a step-by-step guide on how to develop and introduce a quality assurance system.

6. Disaster Planning And Business Recovery

The best time to respond to a disaster is before it happens. A relatively small investment of time and money now may prevent severe damage and disruption of life and business in the future. Ask yourself: what if the worst happened to your client’s business? Would they survive if the business were closed down for weeks, months, or perhaps for an entire revenue season? What can they do to maximize their chances of survival?

This seminar explains the steps to take to reduce the risk of suffering a disaster by describing how to:

• Protect facilities
• Maintain business operations after a disaster
• Backup critical documentation

7. Improving Systems and Processes

All procedures in a business, no matter how well managed, are capable of improvement. And in the SME environment that usually means starting with systematizing processes so the owner/manager can stop working IN, and get the opportunity to start working ON.

This topic looks first at how to determine which processes to systemize to provide some breathing space, and then at the basic techniques which can be used to analyze processes (plot processing and flow charting), improve their efficiency and encourage their adoption by the team.

It concludes with a look at how technology can be used as an enabler to provide new levels of efficiency and service provision.

8. The IT Challenge

Many small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are not taking advantage of the very real benefits IT could bring to them. Those that aren’t are losing their competitive edge. This seminar starts by acknowledging the very real challenges many SME owners face in appreciating just what IT could do for their business and the equally real problem of understanding IT jargon and finding a supplier who can speak their language.

It sets out to make owners more comfortable about facing the IT challenge by explaining the framework for assessing what IT they might profitably implement (developing an IT strategy) and the policies and procedures they will need to put in place to ensure it works effectively, such as various data security measures and an acceptable use policy (an IT operating plan).

9. Key Performance Indicators — Tools for Business Performance Management

KPIs are the measure of a business’ success at achieving its operational and financial goals. When KPIs move in the right way you know the business is operating successfully. When they move in the wrong way you have a warning that something isn’t going according to plan. But what are KPIs? How do you decide which you need to track? How do you go about putting a KPI system in place in your business and how do KPIs relate to benchmarking?

This seminar has the answers and demonstrates how KPIs can be used to the benefit of any business.

10. Managing Risk With An Internal Control System

While small and medium-sized businesses may question the need for a set of internal controls, when they are presented with the options – inefficient operations, leaving themselves open to theft and fraud, incorrect financial records and fines for non-compliance with laws and regulations among them – putting a sensibly designed internal control system in place doesn’t seem like such an unreasonable idea.

In fact the question becomes, can they afford not to?

This seminar discusses why, for small businesses with their limited resources, the protection provided by internal controls is particularly important. It covers the types of control mechanisms available, how to select the appropriate ones for various types of risk, and how to develop a set of controls suitable to their business’ size and risk exposure.

11. Protecting Businesses from Occupational Fraud

Occupational fraud, the deliberate misuse or misapplication of the employing organization’s resources or assets’, is reported as being widespread among small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs). In fact SMEs are particularly vulnerable given their limited management resources; fraud starts with an owner who is too trusting or too busy chasing business to be able to also exercise vigilance over internal processes.

Fraud can have devastating effects on a firm’s finances, its reputation and the well being of the team and managers who have been its victim.

This seminar covers the reasons why SMEs are particularly vulnerable to fraud and the need to implement an internal control procedure to provide the necessary checks and balances that will prevent or expose fraud. It also covers creating a fraud aware culture. There is a checklist against which attendees can assess how fraud proof their business is currently.

12. Time Management

Effective time management is about increasing your personal efficiency in achieving goals. The benefits are not only personal though, from a reduced stress level, but it means your business will be more efficiently run as well. It’s about getting control, making sure that you are not tyrannized by a series of apparently urgent tasks. It’s about giving the right proportion of your time to planning for the future as well as day-to-day tasks.

Time management involves honing two business skills in particular – organizing and prioritizing – by developing a set of techniques that ensure you have clear, uninterrupted time to concentrate ON the business.

This topic provides solutions to help you get ahead of the game by prioritizing your tasks according to importance and systematizing your routines for dealing with them. It also includes tools for measuring levels of procrastination and perfectionism and provides strategies for dealing with these in the work place.

13. Working ON Rather Than IN Your Business

Most businesses fail or never reach their full potential because their owners spend too much time doing the work that the business does, rather than managing and growing it. Working ON rather than IN your business is the difference between your business just providing you with a job versus helping you attain your personal goals. Are you working IN your business, in the midst of it all and trying to handle it all and be all things to everybody?

An important step to breaking this cycle and start working ON your business is to simply develop systems for everything. This topic will help you to see your business as a series of processes so that you can create a “the way we do it here” manual. This means developing systems, processes, documentation and team member training to ensure your business runs smoothly, consistently, and most importantly, without you.

1. Financial Planning for Business Life Events

For many small business owners, their business represents the major part of their financial capital. It needs to generate sufficient income on a continuing basis to cover the whole gamut of personal life events such as buying a house and educating children. And finally the owner may be relying on it to provide the major source of their retirement financing as well.

But no one knows what the future holds. For too many SMEs what the future could hold is problems with one of several business life events, such as inability to continue meeting the cost of debts, loss of a key person, withdrawal of the owner because of illness or disability, and ineffective estate planning.

In these circumstances what can be done to protect the income stream from the business and maintain its market value? Financial planners have a wide range of products to assist business owners mange these critical situations. This BGR discusses several of them. It also promotes the use of a range of professional input to put together the most suitable financial plan for a business and promotes the use of a business coach or adviser to assist the business in improving its income generating capacity over time.

2. Getting the Best Valuation on Your Business

Why should a business owner in with no intention of immediately selling be interested in valuing their business?

Because understanding the factors that determine the value of their business will pay tangible dividends by focusing on ways to increase the firm’s short and long-term profitability.

There is no time like the present to begin to understand what a business valuation is, under what circumstances a valuation is customarily completed, and why it needs to be done with professional advice.

And when the process is complete the business owner can make some rock solid decisions -what their true net worth is, how much a banker will be likely to lend them, how much buy-sell insurance is needed, how much tax their heirs will owe, how to divide assets among heirs, and what someone will realistically pay for the business if it is to be sold.

This BGR covers the reasons why businesses should have a current valuation, the common methods used to compile valuations, and what a business owner can do to improve the financials of their business and improve their valuation figure.

3. Grooming Your Business for Sale

A business is only worth what the highest bidder will pay, so it will need to be operating at its best when it’s time to sell. The messier a business is, the less confidence a buyer will have and the easier it will be for them to talk down the price.

The goal of grooming a business for sale is to present the business in a highly marketable way, which will attract prospective purchasers, while at the same time maximizing the selling price. A program of grooming in the months, or preferably years, before sale could ultimately pay for itself several times over in a better final sales price.

This BGR discusses a number of specific techniques for grooming a business but also makes a strong argument that the advice of both accountants and business advisers is an essential ingredient to maximize the opportunities for improving the final sale price.

4. Improving And Protecting Your Credit Rating

Credit reporting agencies track the creditworthiness of businesses to help suppliers and lenders make decisions about which companies to do business with. These agencies collect data for reports from banks, retailers, government records, and other sources.

Potential suppliers and financial institutions may use a company’s credit rating to determine how likely you are to pay their debts. The strength of a credit rating can impact the payment terms that vendors grant, interest rates that banks apply business loans, in fact whether a loan will be forthcoming at all.

But there can be errors in these records. Or a business can be operating credit in a way that gives them a worse credit rating than necessary.

Keeping a credit report in tip-top shape is smart for business. This BGR explains how credit rating works and offers practical advice on how to protect and improve a business’ credit rating. It also offers smart guidelines for protecting itself from providing credit to other poor risk firms.

5. Key Performance Indicators – Tools For Business Performance Management

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the measure of a business’ success at achieving its operational and financial goals. When KPIs move in the right direction you know your business is operating successfully. When they move in the wrong way you have a warning that something isn’t going according to plan.

But what are KPIs? How do you decide which you need to track? How do you go about putting a KPI system in place in the business? How do KPIs relate to benchmarking?

This BGR has the answers and demonstrates how KPIs can be used to benefit any business.

6. Managing Your Accounts Receivable

Credit can make or break a small business because of the direct and substantial impact it has on cash flow. So dealing with receivables to maintain cash flow is an important part of managing the small business.

This BGR covers two main areas associated with receivables management:

1. Setting up a credit policy and associated KPIs and tracking them for effective management.
2. Dealing with overdue receivables.

The section on dealing with overdue accounts includes a structured way of pursuing them, from initial reminder to legal action, with practical tips on how to handle the process.

7. Managing Your Cash Flow for Improved Results

Cash flow is a key indicator of a business’ financial health. Knowing how to maintain a healthy cash flow is essential to a successful business.

However, managing cash flow is one of the most difficult challenges facing owners of small and medium-sized businesses and an unplanned drop can put them out of business even as demand for their products or services is growing, or as they are about to turn the corner of a downturn.

Proper cash flow management is a matter of both good overall planning and effective use of cash flow strategies. This seminar explains the importance of cash flow management, the need to develop cash flow forecasts that track the inflows and outflows of cash and the reasons why they should be regularly updated.

Attendees will receive with a slide set handout, action plan and spreadsheet examples on CD to begin refining internal cash flow management processes within their own businesses.

8. Playing the Numbers Game – Managing by Financial Ratios

While many small businesses are run by entrepreneurs who are highly skilled in the technical aspects of their business they are rarely overly savvy in financial matters. And yet financial ratios are valuable tools for understanding and monitoring the performance of a business.

Ratios provide insight into every financial element of a business, from its profitability to the effectiveness of its accounts receivable department.

Ratio analysis can be used to chart a business’ progress, uncover trends and point to potential problem areas. An owner who understands that financial statements are essential for directing and controlling a business will more likely take them seriously – and be more likely to be open to advisory work based on the figures.

Many different financial ratios are used for different management purposes. Some very few are used for illustrative purposes in the presentation – the overall emphasis is on pointing out how they can be used to improve management practices and encouraging collaboration from an accountant/advisor rather than on learning formulas.

9. Smart Ways To Control Costs

To have a strong and successful business it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the financial impact that basic business decisions may have.

Many of those decisions have to do with costs – usually in an attempt to reduce them. But these actions are often ad hoc and not based on any appreciation of consequences.

This presentation shows how to analyze costs into components, how to use gross profit margin and contribution margin to monitor their effect on profitability, how to use ABC costing to establish the true costs of production and some strategies for minimizing costs.

It should open up opportunities to promote some of your traditional accounting services such as Income Statements and Cash Flow Forecasts as well as some consulting in the areas of Activity Based Costing analysis and CPV analysis.

10. Starting Up A Business

This topic is a must for anyone who may be considering starting up his or her own business.

Starting and running a small business can be tough. You are subject to high levels of mental stress. You have to deal with uncertainty and anxiety and, if you make mistakes you have to accept the consequences. And there is no guarantee you will even succeed. But if you are suited to running a business, you may find that it is one of the most exciting and rewarding things you do in your life.

This topic includes a series of self-assessment questionnaires to help you to identify whether you have the necessary characteristics to be a small business owner.

Other areas covered are:

• Franchising
• Your Unique Business Concept
• Competitive Advantage
• Researching Your Market
• Analyzing Your Costs
• Preparing a Business Plan
• Start-up Funding