Problem is, unless they actually structure some thought beyond the initial contemplation, they get back to the office and pretty quickly get sucked back into their day-to-day work, without properly planning what they will do to bring their great ideas to reality.

And you know what happens next…another year flies by and they find themselves (if they’re lucky) getting someway towards their new ideas, but most likely, still thinking about them and feeling frustrated with the same-old-same-old.

And THEN there are the businesses that just seem to flourish and grow and evolve effortlessly. Wanna know their secret? It’s not effortless at all – they’ve just made the RIGHT effort. They’ve taken the time to structure their strategic thinking and get it into a Business Plan.

They don’t necessarily have an MBA to do this, and sure – maybe some of them have a great coach like us in their corner, but in the very least, they do know how to take action on their great ideas.

I’ve created a quick video to share with you, my tips on how you too can flourish and evolve your business like a pro. (and it’s not just me saying “Hire an Elixir coach.” Promise!) Click Play on the video below to check it out!

 Sue Viskovic, Elixir Consulting

Click here to find out more about the Juice Console, or to get some help with your planning.

To attend the business planning bootcamps around Australia in January, click here.

The post Why is it that some businesses just flourish? appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Sue Viskovic

Independent consulting business, Elixir Consulting has released new dates for their ‘Business Planning Bootcamps’ to be held around Australia in late Jan/early Feb. These workshops coincide with the launch of their new software tool, the Juice Console which was launched just prior to Christmas.

Managing Director, Sue Viskovic said “We’re really pleased with the interest we have already received in Juice. We’ve had a flurry of subscribers already and are fielding lots of discussions with individual businesses as well as licensees, keen to support their businesses with their growth plans for the future.”

The Juice Console is an innovative software tool that combines a business analysis process, with the creation of a business plan, and then empowers businesses to report their progress against that plan via their desktop or mobile app on their phone/tablet. “The power of having visibility on where you want to take your business, and keeping the whole team accountable as they track back against their plans is incredible. Juice provides total visibility on business performance in one place, and is brilliant at keeping people in touch with what’s really important to them as they evolve their business”, Viskovic said.

“ In the current environment, financial advisers are finding they need more focus on their business than ever before, and they’re seeing Juice as a great tool to help them identify and plan the areas of their business they want to improve on, while staying focused on growth targets and service delivery to existing clients.”

Businesses can purchase Juice to use on their own, or can register for a Recharge Workshop – a ‘business planning bootcamp’, where an Elixir Consultant will walk them through the creation of their business plan and help tackle their big issues for 2015. Dates for the Recharge Workshops are:

• Perth 22^nd January 2015
• Brisbane 4^th February 2015
• Melbourne 6^th February 2015
• Sydney 10^th February 2015

Click here for information.

The post Elixir offers Business Planning Bootcamps as market responds well to new software appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Effective planning can assist when things go wrong.

I want to share the story of Peter. But his story is so raw and personal that Peter is not his real name.

I’m not telling Peter’s story because he is a model coaching client, and has reached amazing heights of success thanks to Elixir, but because I believe Peter’s story is being played out right now in the lives of many many business owners and people in this profession…and yet it’s not openly talked about. In fact he urged me to share it with others so that perhaps anyone in his situation won’t feel quite so isolated.

When Pete started his business a few years back, he was filled with excitement, passion, and a little apprehension about taking the monumental leap to back himself and start his own business.

To most people, Peter is an exceptional practitioner. He is kind, technically proficient, well respected, and it looks like he runs a great business. He’s got it all going on.

And yet the past eighteen months have been some of the most difficult of his life. After running a successful business for many years, Peter finally realised that he simply wasn’t making any money. He felt like he was doing a great job; the clients he was working with loved what he was doing; he enjoyed working with them. But there came a time when his credit cards were maxed out, and he had to extend his payment arrangement with the ATO yet again. He could no longer delude himself by thinking if he just kept servicing his clients and doing a good job the market would turn around and business would pick up. In the cold hard light of day…Pete realised that he was paying more to his staff and his landlord than he was earning personally.

The more I talk to people about what’s really happening in their life and their business (rather than just the surface-level ” things are going great” conversations many people have)…I discover that Pete’s story is not unusual, and there are in fact many people who are struggling in business who keep up a façade and do not share their real situation, for obvious reasons.

It’s a common experience for those in the first few years of business, madly building cashflow until they reach critical mass. It can also happen when a young business has finally reached profitability and the principals then get comfortable. And it’s happening to mature businesses, now struggling to remain relevant with their old business model, and finding declining revenues and increasing costs have long gone beyond eating into their profit margin and are now eroding their basic ‘ salary’.

It can be disheartening – even soul-destroying to come to the realisation that your dream of running this fantastic business where you take great care of people and really make a difference in their lives…isn’t working. It’s all good to be able to say that you’re your own boss, you run your business on your own terms, you’re completely independent and you don’t have to promote someone else’s agenda…but all of that is meaningless if you can’t earn a great living from it.

It can be hard enough to admit it to yourself let alone anyone else…that this grand dream of yours isn’t quite as brilliant as you first thought. And it can be incredibly lonely – you feel like you’re the only one in this position – you can’t tell your staff, certainly not your clients. Burying your head in the sand won’t help. I’ve been there myself. I’ve been through times at Elixir where I’ve paid more to others than I’ve earned myself, and I’ve put everything on the line to run this business. I know what it feels like to just wish I had even one dollar for everyone who told me what a great business I had and what fabulous things we were doing in the market. I also know that you can be even prouder of what you develop, coming through adversity, facing it head-on and triumphantly coming out the other side a little road-weary but smarter, more resilient, and aware of what’s going on in your business.

One way to look at it is that without such a difficult time, you could just continue on with a mediocre business and ‘ get by’, instead of building something you can be truly proud of, and that creates an enduring legacy of financial freedom in return for your passion and dedication. That’s how Pete chooses to view it. “You know, even when I was in the depths of it – when I had those heart-wrenching calls from my wife when the credit card was declined at the grocery checkout…even then I knew that if it hadn’t got to this point, I might have just continued on doing what I was doing, and just getting by. Instead I chose to confront my reality, and after I decided that yes, this really WAS what I wanted to do with my life, it gave me the enforced impetus to change a few things – and now I am so thankful that I did.”

“I’ve now paid off my tax debt, I can see that I won’t need to enter into another payment arrangement with the ATO for my BAS, and I am physically happier in myself and my life. It sounds ironic, but by physically stepping out of the business more frequently and keeping an honest eye on it, I am enjoying my work in the business even more – I’m working with clients that I love, doing work I really enjoy, and I’m being financially rewarded for it. I’m not so naive as to think that there will only be happy days ahead, but I do know that when I am faced with difficult times in the business, I will see it coming sooner, I’ll be much quicker to take evasive action, and I will approach all things with a more open mind. I can already see more opportunities and new ideas than I was ever able to recognise in the past. It’s been a really tough time – and I’m glad I went through it. Really glad I’m out the other side – but glad I went through it nonetheless.”

When you’re worried about whether there’ll be funds in your account to pay wages let alone pay off your credit card bill…and the added humiliation that you’re someone in authority helping other people to get control and manage their finances; it can be easy to feel like a fraud. The fact is, that for many advisers, they’ve been so focused on ensuring their clients’ affairs are looked after, that they’ve neglected their own. It’s not that they’re not “a good business person”, much less a good adviser, they’ve just allowed their attention to shift from it for perhaps too long. If a plumber has leaky taps, does that mean he’s no good at plumbing.

When Pete got to his rock-bottom, the next thing he did was really confronting. He re-examined why he was in business in the first place, then reconnected with his initial purpose and drive – and accepted that perhaps the first iteration of his business wasn’t the best option. He had the fortitude to call things as they really were, and the difficult acceptance that what he was doing needed to change. In Pete’s case, I was incredibly moved to hear that some of our articles and free content helped give him motivation and ideas at what was a very lonely time.

“What did I learn from that time? I will never outsource (or ignore) the management of my cashflow again. I will never let myself get so busy (or distracted) that I don’t stop and check how we are tracking against my goals for the business. And I will never allow a year to go by that I don’t refresh my business plan and re-focus on what we’ll be doing in the business. I’m really happy that I’ve also now rebuilt to the point where I can invest in external advice to help me with these commitments and give advice from arm’s length.”

So if you’re in that place, how do you get beyond it?

Like Pete did, first admit you have a problem, then face that problem head-on. Re-examine your own motivations and if you really do want to make this thing work, figure out how to re-position and change the way you’re doing things. Look for different, innovative ways to get your service out to the right clients. It might be a slight shift in your target market? Perhaps you need to start charging differently, create a new service offer? It may be that you have the wrong people in the wrong roles? For some it might even be that you’re not cut out for this gig after all (or any more)…and there’s no shame in that either!

It may be that your business model is flawed; or perhaps you just need a slight deviation in direction to remove the blockages. Or it may just be a matter of time – that your brand and reputation are slowly gathering momentum because of all of your hard work and it’s just about to pay off – in which case you just need some more patience, and energy to keep doing what you’re doing, because any day now the flood gates will open (or the trickle will at least become a flow).

It’s been said before by (I’m sure) many people far cleverer than I…but show me a business person who has been through tough conditions…who has been to the brink (and even beyond it) and I will show you a more resilient, more humble, more agile, and often more successful business owner than one who has only ever traded in good conditions.

If you can get through the tough times – whether that be by yourself, by reading inspiring stories and business ideas of others, by simply changing tack, or by getting in some external assistance…you will be stronger, better, faster, and ultimately more successful. Both as a business owner and as a person.

—–

By Sue Viskovic, Managing Director, Elixir Consulting

The post The story that has to be told appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Successful business succession planning is a complex interaction of engagement skills, needs, funding and planning. No wonder that financial advisers have taken the lead amongst the professions in developing business succession planning advice competencies; they are a natural extension of their skill set.

There are very few financial advisers who would dispute that the demand for their services is as tough as it’s ever been.  And yet, despite these tough conditions and their natural affinity with business succession planning, many advisers seem to shy away from the market opportunity, seemingly daunted by the complexity of the task.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink your attitude. Considering the sheer scale of the market and the size of the largely unmet need, can you afford to ignore it?

According to published government statistics, small and medium size enterprises contribute around 58% to Australia’s GDP and employ over 6 million Australians (defining SME’s as employing less than 200 people).

In 2009, there were 2,051,085 actively trading business in Australia – less than 1% of those business were ‘big’ business.

That’s a significant number of people whose financial security is inextricably bound up with their business.

And what’s often underappreciated is that it’s not just the proprietors whose financial security is at risk. The ‘forgotten’ people in business succession planning are the staff of these 2,051,085 businesses

Based on these numbers and drawing on research from EIM Business  and Policy Research, a research institute based in the in the Netherlands that studied the issues of Succession Planning and Small business  in the Eurozone and  which documented the following finding:

The importance of successful business transfer and the pervasiveness of the business  transfer challenge among small business is well documented. European estimates are that approximately 30% of firms in a transfer situation are on the brink of going bankrupt due to a bad preparation of the succession (European Commission, 2001). The European Observatory for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises estimates that this results in 6.3 million jobs that are at risk in Europe as a result of poor succession planning.

BRIA has estimated the human impact on a lack of adequate succession planning in Australia as follows:

In 2009 Government figures estimate that 319,400 SME’s ‘exited’ the market. A simple calculation from the available data, and using the 30% figure from the EIM study, suggests that this put at the risk the financial security of some 271,000 employees in addition to at least 319,400 business owners. (The data not indicate whether the business structure was sole trader, partnership etc).

That’s over 580,000 Australians every year who may be directly affected either as employees due to bad preparation for succession planning or because it is their business that is being exited.

That’s also a lot of people who would benefit from business succession planning advice from an experienced adviser.

BRIA believes that figures like these clearly demonstrate that business succession planning remains one of the most important and largely underestimated and underfunded issues facing small business in Australia.

BRIA also believes that now is the time for a new generation of Risk Specialists, who have a new approach to business risk, using modern engagement methods and with the support they need to succeed.

BRIA’s Business Risk Connect Program is the next generation of business risk training programs. BRIA call their approach ‘Positive Risk Management Solutions’.

BRIA is a new dimension for the Financial Services Industry. Offering training, mentoring and coaching, BRIA provides the platform for developing the leading Business Risk Advisers of the future.

For more information about these courses, click here.

The post The importance of a business succession plan appeared first on AdviserVoice.