Business Advice

Many highly ambitious business owners and entrepreneurs have dreams of taking their businesses to the big time. But scaling a business is so much more than adding headcount or indeed customers. In reality, scaling needs to be part of a careful business strategy in order to retain the magic of the small business and unlock the benefits of a large business.

Cash flow is what drives your business and keeps you awake (or preferably, asleep!) at night. Put simply, cash flow is the lifeblood of your business. It’s also one of the most important measures of success of your business. Your business is like the game of monopoly – you can’t pass “go” without cash flow.

Managing a business can be overwhelming! More often than not you’ll be wearing multiple hats throughout each day as you flit between being a people manager, managing the businesses financials, forecasting, strategically advertising your products and/or services, researching new technologies along with a multitude of other tasks required daily!

Considering most ‘small businesses’ have 0 employees, followed by 1-5 employees (this makes up around 500,000 of the total), we’ve put together this Running A Small Business Guide for these businesses - although anyone growing a small-medium business should find these insights helpful!

With more than half a million small business owners in New Zealand, there’s a breadth of backgrounds, cultures and approaches that make up our community. But while small businesses really do take all sorts,  we’ve been able to observe the common traits that all successful owners appear to have. In this article, we’ll cover what some of these are. The good news? All of these traits can be worked on and developed with a bit of focus and the right support.

Okay, it may sound like a silly question. Of course you know your business! Who’s closer to your day to day operations than you? And that’s fair enough. But when small business owners are doing everything, there’s going to be elements of the business that get more attention than others. It’s only reasonable that providing your service to your customers is priority number one. Even well-established small businesses turning over reasonable revenue can lose sight of the detail around the financials.

Ever competed in a race where you weren’t told where the finish line was? Tried your hand at baking without a recipe book? How about leaving for holiday without packing your bags? If these all sound ridiculous to you, then let us draw the comparison with a business that doesn’t make plans. Making plans and understanding parameters is so important for business success, but many fledgling businesses have barely planned tomorrow let alone the long term.

It is very normal for business owners to be entrenched in the daily goings on of their businesses. With varying to do lists and high priority tasks requiring their daily attention, it can be hard to take the time to stop and look at the big picture. And that’s just the business part, let alone our busy, and somewhat chaotic, personal lives.

However, it is vital as a business owner or business manager to periodically pull your head out of the trenches and take the time to sit back and review your business as a whole, to ensure you are on track to success.

Needing to be involved in every part of your business can result in you being spread pretty thin and can be an expense to your business, not to mention a cost to your personal/family time.