A simple way to value your SME
The value of your business is absolutely dependent on its ability to generate free cash flow, which in its simplest terms, is the cash required to keep the business running, after necessary capital expenditures have been considered. It is a measure with...
The excruciating paradox for the innovator.
Successful innovation generally comes from being small, with little baggage, no institutional 'downside' and few inhibitors to the ability to be truly agile in response to weak feedback signals from customers. Innovation is also a consumer of cash, rather...
The one rule to ensure you attract attention.
The real fight out there, the one that is for most businesses 'make or break,' is not for likes, or new friends, or how many social media feeds you showed up in, it is for attention. The problem with attention, is that it is transient, hard to get, and...
9 questions for a ‘quick and dirty’ StrategyAudit.
In 1712 the British government started taxing newspapers by the number of pages they printed. The predictable response was that newspapers started printing on what became known as 'Broadsheet' paper to minimise their tax. A rational commercial response,...
The real measure of marketing effectiveness, and how to deliver it.
Marketing is a functional silo on an organisation chart, as is Sales, Operations, Finance, HR, but unlike the others, marketing deals with unknowns, the future, whereas all the other functions deal with the past, or what is immediately in front of them....
3 foundations that will enable Amazon to disrupt supermarkets.
Shopping is a physical and sensory experience, humans evolved doing some sort of physical 'shopping' even if for most of our history, the similarity of that activity to a trip to the supermarket has been fleeting. Much as we might hate the queues at the...
Why Operational improvement and change initiatives usually fail.
How do you make short term operational and process improvements 'stick' for the long term? Most change initiatives fail to deliver on their early promise. You get some short term improvement, some changes made, but the effectiveness of the process dwindles...
How to choose your marketing and sales automation software
One of the common questions I field is which tools are the best to automate sales and marketing processes. The right answer is that there is no right answer. There are just so many tools out there that may do a really good job for you, some need to be...
Amazon, Whole Foods and the future of supermarkets in Australia
Amazon would not have paid $13.8 Billion for Whole foods without a plan. The purchase came as a surprise to most, but it should not have, they have been evolving into bricks and mortar for some time, with books, Amazon Go, The Washington Post, and a few...
The simple 4 letter word that underpins every improvement initiative.
Improving the performance of businesses is often like being set loose in a commercial kitchen without a recipe. Random ingredients, absence of some staples, disaffected staff, erratic processes, and severe cost pressures, but still being expected to...