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Category Archives: Australian Indigenous

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Do you have the skills to be a Board Director?

Do you have the skills to be a Board Director?
Having spent a lifetime advising Boards of small and larger enterprises, I now spend a considerable amount of my time sitting in Board myself as a Non-Executive Director. It is interesting to me when I look over the meeting tables at my fellow Directors and see what they bring to that table. I believe many Non-Executive Directors bring technical skills to the Board, and others bring their management experience having run their own businesses. This is all well and good, but I believe that being a Non-Executive Director, you need to bring a different set of more helicopter-level skill-sets. Funnily enough, I believe these skills are very similar, if not the same as those of a good leader in a business, or those necessary to run your own good small business, even though the extent of the practice of those skills is different. Here is what I think you need to do if you become a Non-Executive Director. * To start with, you need to learn as much as you can about the business and industry, especially if it is an industry you have not actually worked in yourself. You need to understand where the company sits in the industry and its market...
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How non-financially trained people can prepare a budget in 5 easy steps

How non-financially trained people can prepare a budget in 5 easy steps
Preparing a budget is "easy" for an accountant and small business people who have some finance training. However for many it is the stuff of voodoo. But when you break it down, there is no real mystery around the preparation of a budget, it is based on your plans and intentions, costs that you can obtain from suppliers, and some judicious making of assumptions and estimates. In truth, any non-finance executive or business owner can do it if they approach the task logically. Here are 5 basic steps to take to compile your budget. 1. Tell the story of your plan first. A budget is no more than the costing of a story. Is your story one of expansion, or of reduction? Does your story include the need for more staff or capital equipment? Is your story about opening more stores? So the first step is to provide a narrative of your operational plans for the period of the budget, usually a year. If you don't have a business plan, look at your business and ask yourself what you will do within it for the year ahead. List any new initiatives, identify any areas you either want to close or reduce in size, identify your...
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Stop Micro-managing!

Stop Micro-managing!
I had a meeting with a client yesterday. Amongst other issues we discussed the fact that even as her company grew, she had to continually look over people's shoulders, tell them not only what to do, but also how to do it in a satisfactory way. When I asked her what was a "satisfactory way" she explained that it was the way she would have done it, the way her customers had come to expect how her company would do it. She gave me an example where her version of "satisfactory" included a hand-written note to the customer the next day to see if the product met his needs and if she needed to explain any aspect of it to him. In other words quality was not a fixed value but a set of behaviours that had come to represent what the customer wanted. Only, she seemed to be the only one in the growing company who seemed to understand that, despite her experienced (and expensive) new hires. Readers will tell me this is not uncommon. When you start a small business, often you and your key team members know exactly what to do, and how to "do it satisfactorily" because you...
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Three things to check to find the “best-fit” staff to your team

Three things to check to find the “best-fit” staff to your team
I provide strategic consulting services to Not-for-Profit clients who perhaps are not best equipped or experienced to apply corporate procedures that most of us would find "normal". However, when an NFP has a highly-paid CEO that once worked senior positions in significant banking and investment companies, you'd expect better. I was asked to assist in recruitment interviews for a General Manager position by the CEO of an NFP that I have had a relationship with earlier in their history. In fact, I had participated in earlier interviews for various finance staff recruited by this CEO when he had first arrived, and in the process had provided to the organisation a recruitment "checklist" for those earlier interviews. So, imagine my surprise when the CEO asked me to assist in the GM interviews, and I discovered that a complete Job Description was still being discussed, that an advertisement had been published without reference to key details such as employer industry and location (regional town), and before other details such as remuneration ranges and basic terms had been agreed internally. Having heard this, it was no surprise to me to learn that various highly qualified potential candidates had made initial inquiries, and when told...
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OTS Management