It’s one of the hardest things to do as a small and a medium business owner. Knowing where to draw the line on being friends ith employees. It is a difficult line to draw because of the need to ensure that you’re not being too harsh and avoiding being social which is a large part of building a strong company culture and teamwork.

With that in mind here are some ground rules for building culture without compromising your ability to be the boss when you need to be:

• Don’t hire family. Rule No. 1 is don’t hire multiple family members. It never works and they can’t find the line. This goes doubly for if they’re your family. It’s not worth it no matter how great you think they are;
• Minimise socialising. Make sure that your presence is known at company events but always leave early, never get drunk with your workers and make sure that they understand that you’re sociable but not their friend;
• Avoid commenting on family. Despite workers bringing their family problems to work your job is not to be a counselor. You need to find the balance between being compassionate and being sympathetic. At the end of the day you need to strengthen your staff. Encourage them to realise the best thing for their family is to stay on top of their job. Don’t delve.;
• No socialising in the office Apart from birthdays or presentations etc there shouldn’t be any drinking in the office etc. If you want to have Friday afternoon drinks etc. take the workers out of the workplace and take them to a chosen venue. Let them know that the workplace is for work and the bar is for socialising; and
• Remind yourself you’re the boss. Every time you find yourself erring on the side of their friend, remind yourself that you’re the boss. Not to be harsh, be fair, but to remember that you can’t help your business grow and keep them employed if you’re trying to be everyone’s friend.

Good luck finding the balance, I hope that you can build a long term colleagues without crossing the line.

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Quoting is one of the key elements to your business. Without pushing out enough quotes you won’t build a pipeline of forward work. The problem with a lot of communication errors in business is a direct result of a lack of information. With this in mind, the best thing to do is to provide the most information on your quote as possible so that your client has every opportunity to correct errors. This will serve you very well when it comes time to pay.

The list of items to be included below doesn’t really go over what are probably your own statutory requirements but rather some elements that are often left out:

• Add-ons. This is critical! You must make sure that if there are any special conditions in your contract or alternatively things like fuel that you would normally add on at the end, put an estimate of it into the quote so that the client has a feel for this rather than surprise your client at the end of the job.
• Overtime. Make sure that you declare the need to pay any overtime to make a task happen. If this is going to be on top of a base rate clarify it and break it out separately.
• Potential variance. Put in a contingency on your quotes for variances. It’s good to build this in, it’s not something you’ll bill if you come on budget, but you are better off declaring your thoughts on potential cost blow out.
• Full breakdown. Your quote should have very descriptive information for each line item and a specific break down for labour, equipment, materials, even materials supplied by your client even if no $ amount is attached but let them know that your business is expecting to be supplied with fuel for example for your equipment.

I hope that this has helped you with preparing your quotes and reminds you of some of the information that you should include. Remember, in this case more is more, you need to include as much as possible in your quote to raise all the issues with your customer before the task starts.

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It’s 2012 and many companies should be planning their marketing strategies and who the new clients that their operations will target over the course of the year. In order to properly prepare a marketing strategy however

With this in mind here’s your list of things to do at the start of this new calendar year:

• Client list: It’s time to make a list of your current and potential clients. The reason that a business does this is to re-establish which clients are the primary targets. A client list allows the right sales people to be allocated to the appropriate client and the right strategy employed. Clients should be listed in Tier 1, 2 and 3 fashion working from most desirable to market to and 3 the least. For a pre-existing client these should be Tier 1 clients as an extra dollar from a pre-existing client is generally easier to come across.
• Marketing strategy: From here it’s time to work out with each client what is the appropriate marketing strategy for each client and split your marketing group into their teams and attack their plans at depth.
• Advertising budget: Once the plans are prepared it’s time for the business’ Marketing Director to meet with the Chief Financial Officer to determine the budget that has been allocated for the marketing team for the calendar year.
• KPI’s and Targets: With the budget set, marketing strategy and appropriate clients the Marketing Director needs to set with all marketing teams their key performance indicators and targets. From here at the end of the 1st Quarter the Marketing Director will have proper benchmark to mark against and then reassess for the rest of and throughout the year.

Reading this article should inspire any organisation to prepare for marketing 2012. Best of luck with your business’ endeavours for the year!

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One of the biggest questions for manufacturers and retailers alike, particularly this time of year, is whether or not to carry inventory. Carrying inventory presents benefits and risks which this article will outline.

In determining whether or not to keep inventory a business needs to look at the following factors:

1. Raw materials input. Inventory for manufacturing relies almost exclusively on raw materials. If your products require raw materials then no matter the desire to make more inventory without the raw materials it is a fruitless exercise to forecast anything. Know your raw materials. Know your limitations and the business’ ability to produce a certain number of items. Once this is calculated a business can then calculate how much additional raw material would be required to produce inventory at the drop of a hat and how long this would take. From this an enterprise has a gauge for its inventory flexibility. This allows planning, and ultimately allows a business to prepare its customers should a disappointment arise with regards to a realistic timeframe to produce inventory to provide for them and leave them with the option rather than be left without answers.
2. Time to delivery. If you have the ability to produce something quickly even at an additional cost and therefore less margin it can be wiser to be more conservative with inventory. Being able to deliver for clients without having to hold inventory when your business is smaller may generate less profits but it does shield your business from over investment in stock that may never be cleared. After a certain number of years of operations a business will then have more data with which to project inventory and the business can then produce more inventory as its trends and patterns emerge.
3. Holding costs. Depending upon what it is that you manufacture or hold as inventory storage can be an issue. This could be a direct result of the size of the item(s) or it could be due to energy costs, for example refrigeration, or it could be legislated such as a sell-by/use-by date with food goods.
4. Less is more. There are certain cases when you will wish that your business had more inventory and had more to sell. However no one went out of business by underselling. Most businesses go under from over production and expectation of demand that doesn’t arise. In some industries in fact the anticipation is sufficient and customers will prefer to have something that is in demand rather than something that is easily obtainable – a la Apple. However don’t make the mistake of continually disappointing your customers like some telcos and their reception – sometimes your customers or clients just want the item or service and they want it now, forget the excitement.

Hopefully this article will outline some of the beginnings of best practices for inventory management within small business. Without much historical data it can be hit and miss for the first few years which is why a business should err on the side of caution. As more experience is gained however the trends and patterns that emerge in a business should not be ignored, they should be catered to if an enterprise is to prosper.

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This article is the final installment in the series “Going Green” by the TBL team. So we’ve decided to focus on arguably one of the most discussed and ‘easiest options’ considered by companies looking to go green.

So what are some typical forms that offsets take the form of:

• Forestry credits There are many pine and other plantation programs that you can utilise to purchase carbon credits to offset your carbon footprint. It is important to remember that you shouldn’t utilise forestry credits as an excuse to pollute, and they don’t cover everything! Still these credits can be utilised to help your business deal with its output in the interim.
• Direct planting A business can become directly active in offsetting through programs for environmental renewal including planting of vegetation. This kind of offset can be particularly effective when combined with employee environmental awareness and involvement programs.
• Sequestration Taking of waste and dealing with waste products directly, particularly used goods or inputs that your company deals in can be particularly effective. These programs encompass the entire life-cycle of your products and your business. It also provides very good promotional material and demonstrates a commitment to your products beyond the sale – something less common that customers and interested parties hope – be different.

So this article concludes our Going Green series. You’ve read a lot about the potential environmental costs sitting within your business. Now it’s time for you to act. Not just for the sake of the environment but also because it makes business sense. Best of luck with greening your business. In the TBL team’s personal view, in the near term it will pay dividends far beyond what can be anticipated now.

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Continuing our going green series this article looks at Transportation and Selling and its impact on the ability of your business to deliver cost effective environmental savings.

So what are some of the questions that you should be asking your business in order to determine whether or not you have savings available in your business? Here are some of my thoughts:

• How do you deliver to your customer?
• Can you re-think the way in which you transport or alter your production facilities to increase transportation efficiency?
• Are your suppliers or clients passing on unknown or known costs to your business?

Having asked some of these questions should you know that the following areas need to be examine and solve:

1. Delivery fleet
2. Supplier inefficiencies
3. Inventory Management & Warehousing
4. Storefronts and Locations

Look closely at all of these areas within your business and utilise the framework that we’ve been establishing throughout this going green series and then add these areas to your potential savings areas.Good luck, your transportation department is hard to analyse because it is often the beating heart of retail or service organisations.

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Letter to the Editor accepted ANZJPH 2012 (in press)

Thank you for publishing the editorial by Professor Baum based on her 2011 keynote address to the Australian Health Promotion Association which has given much food for thought to those of us unable to attend [1]. I agree with Professor Baum that it was perhaps ‘forgivable’ in the 1980s to rely so heavily on social marketing campaigns focusing on individual behaviours to deliver health impact but now we do know better. Knowing is not doing however.

For example, I cannot yet share Professor Baum’s inherent optimism about the likely positive long-term impact of ‘Closing the Gap’ when so little political and fiduciary control has been wrested back from non-Aboriginal bureaucrats and, instead, genuinely and whole-heartedly afforded to Aboriginal communities and their Aboriginal leaders. This persistent racism and distrust of Aboriginal governance will compromise ‘Closing the Gap’. In particular, ‘red tape’, staffing constraints and a reporting burden that would never be tolerated by mainstream health services impede the community-controlled Aboriginal health sector where health promotion of the scope demanded by Professor Baum is meant to flourish [2,3].

I agree strongly with Professor Baum that the Australian National Preventative Health Agency also must avoid the lifestyle drift. Perhaps it can examine whether we produce too many professionals far better-versed in individual lifestyle counseling, coaching and marketing strategies because of the research directions of their university rather than the demands of their future jobs. Nowhere do we see a course-based degree in public health or health promotion which puts front and centre the necessary macro-economic, micro-economic, social and business foundations necessary if these graduates are to add intelligently to policy formulation alongside quantitative ‘hard heads’ in treasury and other central agencies to ensure upstream social and economic levers are deployed to address the social and economic determinants of health as raised by Professor Baum. How do we judge employment compacts, public-private partnerships or tax incentive financing as upstream levers? Is it time for a director of health promotion to add value to their staff mix by appointing a macroeconomics graduate with expertise in tax policy or a lawyer with expertise in industry regulation? In addition, I suspect that most government-funded health promotion units are dominated by graduates wedded to the design and implementation of individual lifestyle interventions not only because of their training but also because of the continuing realities of their own funding base. ‘Lifestyle drift’ is so much easier to fund – and launch! Is it time to relinquish the individual lifestyle programs that perseverate the inequity so poignantly described by Professor Baum in order to release funds for a school-based breakfast service in disadvantaged postcodes run by our colleagues in the Department of Education?

As Professor Baum insists, we should also consider the accumulating Australian evidence for social and economic determinants of health. I conclude by commending another article in the Journal – in my view, one of the best to be published in 2010. Dobson and her colleagues demonstrated that death rates among the Australian Longitudinal Women’s Health Cohort are significantly higher for those women living in rural Australia than their urban counterparts [4]. As also shown with crystal clarity in their article, this inequity was not explained by differences in individual risk factors such as cholesterol, physical activity or weight. Rather, this mortality difference arises from fundamental environmental, social and collective conditions that are experienced every day by rural women. For starters, a far higher proportion of country women would see their spouses, children, extended family and friends out of work because of the poorer economic prospects in country Australia. Whether temporary, long-term or permanent, unemployment hurts. Unemployment in and of itself diminishes health and well-being of the entire social unit as readily as any virulent contagion wreaks physical disease or cortisol raises blood pressure. Rates of suicide are also far higher in rural Australia. It is not hard to imagine that a high proportion of rural women in Dobson et al’s cohort would have lost a husband, a brother or a son from deliberate self-homicide. To make matters worse still, women in rural Australia have poorer access to primary health care services – and this injustice is entirely out of their control. Closure of regional railway lines and withdrawal of daily regional air flights diminish community vitality and confidence. These exacerbated by large-scale but unplanned shifts in what we sell, buy, grow and make as a country. Each and every day these background conditions take their toll. No wonder that individual lifestyle factors cannot explain the differential death rates.

Professor Baum reminds us that health is not as much about your cholesterol level as the slick social marketing campaigns might have you think! It’s about where you live and what happens around you, what macro-economic policies are pursued by your government and whether anyone who cares is also responsible for the training, distribution and work priorities of the health workforce at your service.

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If you’re reading this then the first thing you’ll think, initially at least, is what do you mean by Non-revenue Generating Units. Well essentially all NGU’s as the TBL refers to them includes all your office administration staff and overhead – generally NGU walks on two legs and you’ve met them in the hallways of your office space.

This might sounds harsh but however it is the simply true your overhead is a non-revenue generating unit. NGUs can assist the people who do generate revenue, even support them directly but if an NGU actually doesn’t directly bring in revenue, then it’s an NGU. So why the mention of “Greening your business” with NGUs? Well here are some reasons and some options:

1. Easily outsourced. NGUs can be easily outsource.There are whole industries in fact parts of states and countries that are developed to this line of work. Remember though, just because you outsource doesn’t absolve your business of responsibilities or the environmental impact of our subcontractors, it just may be that they’re better and more efficient than your business is / could be through sheer scale of business.
2. Highest polluters. Often NGUs have the highest environmental impact within your business. Whether its printer paper, ink, electricity or in fact just purchasing kitchen supplies, your NGUs often incur the most indirect expense within your business and thus have the greatest impact to assess and potentially reduce. Study NGUs closely.
3. Hidden in the detail. Because NGUs generally cover a multitude of areas within your business and perhaps support and provide functions to multiple areas these resources can seem like they are absolutely necessary in fact irreplaceable. Do not believe this. The secret is in the detail. The more a division or resource covers the more layers of input it will have, the more it is ingrained in your business’ psyche. That doesn’t make it the most effective environmental resource allocation.

So hopefully you’ve read this, understand what NGU’s are and now will start to go through and look at how you can either green or outsource these units within your business – particularly as although they don’t generate revenue these units cannot be overlooked from a value or cost perspective.

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If your business is in the business of producing goods then this article will be most pertinent to you. However, even service-base businesses still utilise sufficient material throughput in their selling, general and administrative expenses for this article

Once you’ve determined your material throughput in terms of both actual carbon profile and then your business’ cost of material then you need to work out what you can do to assess, lower and offset these. With that in mind let’s look at what are some common solutions and problem areas:

• Chemicals. Many companies underestimate the emissions profile and environmental impact of the chemicals that they utilise within their business. You can ask your suppliers for an environmental profile of their chemicals that they supply you with. ISO standards like ISO:14001 are good examples of accreditation that will assist you with identifying suppliers who are at the very least aware of their impact and are attempting to put controls and systems in place
• Fuels, Oils and Lubricants. Most people underestimate just how much of their business is driven by or has a direction relationship to the fossil fuels. Take a good look at all the inputs of your business and determine just how many are either directly or indirectly derived from fossil fuels. Explore natural replacement alternatives if possible or understand / quantify your business’ impact.
• Contractors and Sub-contractors. Few people incorporate the material inputs that their contractors bring to their business. You need to examine the input your contractors have to your products and services and determine the impact of the materials they utilise. Ultimately their inputs affect or are directly incorporated with your business and therefore you’re responsible whether it’s taxable or not. Encourage your contractors and sub-contractors to be as proactive as your business is.
• Energy input. We’ve already discussed this element in the first of this article series however it’s worth examining the energy input for your materials. You can assess this and compensate for this accordingly as per the first article on this ‘Greening your business’ series.

Hopefully your business can examine it’s material throughput, not just from an environmental sustainability standpoint but also in order to quantify those input costs that may rise under an environmentally conscious community and legislature. Take the time now to examine, prepare and take action and your business will be better for it – both in terms of profile and cost structure.

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This article continues on from our previous article regarding ‘Going Green’. So having read that article you might be thinking to yourself that you’re still not convinced about this carbon business and about going green. Perhaps you’re still not convinced that your business needs to worry about dealing with its environmental impact.

For most small businesses that is probably not far from the truth at this point in time by conventional thinking. But your company’s energy profile does have some reasons to be considered regardless of your stance on environmental policy:

1. Energy Usage = $$$. Your company’s energy usage equals cost. It’s a simple equation. An equation that won’t change and hasn’t changed even with the discussion of emissions trading schemes / taxes. So if you can reduce your energy profile then you can reduce your costs.
2. Government Subsidies. There are numerous government subsidies in most industrial nations for energy saving devices and capital works. This is a double whammy. Your business can get clean and green technology subsidised by the Government to a lower cost AND reduce it’s energy profile aka your kWh used thus reducing your dollars in energy costs. You can’t lose.
3. Company Brand & Image. One of the elements of marketing your business to your clients or customers can revolve around your environmentally friendliness. It’s easy to introduce information into your marketing regarding your energy profile without it being over the top. Energy usage is the one area that people are conscious of from a sustainability perspective as well as an environmental one so if you can project to the community your reduced energy profile you’re likely to win brownie points.

Hopefully this article will convince you that your business can assess and fix its energy profile and reduce your costs regardless of your stance on emissions control or environmental policy. It makes business sense generally, so examine yours and determine things you can do to streamline your business’ energy usage.

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