Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2018 i NZBusiness+Management

A lot of international business surveys enter my inbox every week, and in many of them New Zealand ranks towards the top, if not at the top. A recent survey carried out by UK-based online marketing firm Reboot Digital Agency (rebootonline.com) delved into research to determine which of the world’s economies rank the highest for ease of starting a business. Guess which economy pipped Hong Kong’s and Canada’s to grab first place? New Zealand, of course! Yes, Aotearoa is the world’s number one economy for starting a business, with a ‘Distance to Frontier’ (DTF*) rating of 99.96. In Auckland, says the report, “it would take just one procedure, half a day and less than one percent of income per capita to start a business. This presents the strongest case in…

The travel and tourism sector host familiarisations or more casually, ‘famils’, as a way to showcase their product to decision makers. These trips offer the opportunity to gain in-depth information about different regions, attractions, accommodation options, venues and conferencing services. While there is usually a measure of fun on a famil, the primary objective is to showcase available products and provide an experience to attendees for well-informed future purchasing decisions. If you are selected to join a famil, there is etiquette to be aware of. Are you a qualified buyer? When a hotel select guests to attend a famil they are looking closely at what type of business you work for. Do you currently purchase hotel room nights for your travellers or conferencing, not necessarily from their hotel? There is…

There was a cute distraction at Lizzi Whaley’s K-Road Spaceworks HQ the morning NZBusiness rocked up to research this story. Luckily there were other people there who could babysit the CEO’s totally lovable French bulldog, while we sat down to discuss innovation. Lizzi believes many Kiwi business owners don’t know what innovation is, what it looks like for their business or where to start. Innovation can perhaps be better described as agility, she says. The agility to move where the market’s going, to what people want, and what your staff want. “You don’t have to be clever; just ensure that you’re continually providing a product or service that the market wants.” For designers in the the commercial interior design space, determining what the market wants has been made easier with…

BUYING A franchise gives people the opportunity to get into business for themselves with training, support, a known brand, buying power and many other benefits. But it doesn’t guarantee success; franchisees still have to learn how to use those systems to run a business, and know how to manage a business as it grows. If you already know those things, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t join a franchise, though – it means that a franchise could help you make the most of your knowledge. Recent research from the Franchise Relationships Institute has identified seven habits of top franchisee sales performers. To those who think that franchises are about business-by-numbers and robotic ‘Would you like fries with that?’ regimes, you might be interested to see the ways that individuals make…

HAVING JUST witnessed the ‘Vuelta’ (the Tour of Spain cycle race) come through the city I live in, some illuminating information has started to leak out. Like all big races the route varies from year to year as cities compete with each other to attract the tour. Our city is a little larger than Hamilton yet felt it was necessary to hand over €3 million1 in direct sponsorship to the tour as well as large additional costs – for policing, traffic management and more. Did the city get value for money? Did it heck. The tour is a major national sporting event and the city a world heritage site, yet TV coverage was zero apart from the 20 to 30 seconds for the start in the main square. It wasn’t…

The qualitative research into Perpetual Guardian's trial period by Helen Delaney, of the University of Auckland Business School threw up some interesting ideas on how staff made themselves more productive. In her research she reported that the planning discussions prior to the trial’s commencement stimulated employees’ intellectual engagement as they had to ‘think differently’ about their work both individually and as a team. “Such discussions were new to many teams, and many employees expressed a sense of greater voice and empowerment in their work.” She noted too that the trial’s planning phase resulted in many employees designing and implementing innovations and initiatives to work in a more productive and efficient manner. “These practical micro-initiatives included automating manual processes, changes to meeting behaviour (shorter, focused, only when necessary), sharing email inboxes,…

A world leader in the business of ethics, Emmanuel Lulin, L’Oreal’s senior vice-president and chief ethics officer, who was in New Zealand recently, has just been named as a SDG Pioneer for Advancing Business Ethics by the United Nations Global Compact. The UN noted he “has harnessed the power of a giant cosmetics company with more than 80,000 employees in 150 countries to develop an innovative ethics programme that is setting global standards while advancing the Sustainable Development Goals”. Management asked him what New Zealand companies could learn from L’Oréal, which is one of the few companies in the world to receive an AA+ rating from Swiss corporate graders Covalence. What led L’Oréal to decide it needed a chief officer of ethics? L’Oréal’s ethics programme is voluntary and proactive; it…

LEADERSHIP, AS opposed to management, can be defined as inspiring people rather than overseeing them. However, in the same way that success looks different for each organisation and all of the individuals working within it, the definition of leadership is specific to what a company aims to achieve. Understanding what leadership means within a business is key to learning how to develop it. A good leader has the ability to hire the right people and support them in creating an environment where they enjoy their job. Good recruits are interested in doing their job well and can get on without being hassled to do so. When the balance isn’t right, management can spend a detrimental amount of time overseeing people and dealing with team dynamics. A company cannot make progress…

VUCA – VOLATILE, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous – was a term coined by the American military to describe battle fields in Iran and Afghanistan but is now spreading into the management lexicon as it aptly describes the conditions many industries and businesses face. Previously I looked at the meaning of VUCA. Having owned and run a magazine publishing business for the last 25 years I am something of an expert at operating in a VUCA environment, as media is certainly an industry that has had to face extensive disruption. When I started in the industry the Internet was a fledgling, mainly used by universities and geeks, and a magazine publisher did just that – publish a magazine, and that was only just starting to become computerised versus the old hand…

CATCHING EMPLOYEES RED-HANDED EMPLOYEE THEFT IS A REALITY THAT ALL KINDS OF BUSINESSES MUST DEAL WITH. AND SOME OF THE STORIES OUT THERE ARE ALARMING. ‘WATER OF LIFE’ COMING TO REEFTON WEST COAST START-UP REEFTON DISTILLING CO. IS ABOUT TO OPEN THEIR NEW DISTILLERY RIGHT IN THE HEART OF HISTORIC REEFTON. GOFI8URE WINS XERO PARTNER AWARD AGAIN ACCOUNTANCY SOLUTIONS SPECIALIST GOFI8URE HAS WON XERO’S NZ BOOKKEEPING PARTNER OF THE YEAR AWARD FOR THE THIRD TIME.…

PART 10. THE END GAME Unless you plan to hold on to your business for the rest of your life, you will need to plan your exit strategy. The earlier you start planning and preparing for your exit, the better off you will be when the time comes. PREPARATION FOR AN EXIT This may seem like an obvious statement, but it’s amazing how often this gets overlooked: You need to ensure that your business gets to a state where someone else would want to own it and, ideally, the business should not in any way be reliant on you personally for its continued operation and success. When you started your business, you would have been ‘working in’ your business – whether that be in sales, operational management, building widgets, serving…

You don’t need to look far to understand why the personal computer fell out of favour in recent times. That phone in your pocket does most, if not all, of the work we once gave to PCs. As a result the PC market has fallen. After peaking at 364 million units in 2011, global sales are now down to around 255 million a year. That’s a 30 percent drop. Earlier this year there were signs the market may have stabilised – although it is too soon to talk of a recovery. The personal computer market didn’t exactly stand still during the lean years. True, the innovations have not come at the rapid pace they once did – yet there have been many improvements in computer design. Some are cosmetic, others…

THIS CHRISTMAS, do you want to compete on price, or customer experience? The obvious answer is to say ‘experience’. Of course you’re going to ‘wow’ your customers every day, and win their hearts. But what is the reality going to be? Will you invest in your staff and empower them to love customers this Christmas? Or are you going to slash prices? Will you gather real-time feedback to control the customer experience? Or are you going to take out TV ads promoting your low, low prices? The answer could decide your business’s profitability this year. WHY CHRISTMAS WILL MAKE OR BREAK YOUR BUSINESS Christmas may only be one day, but for many retail businesses that one day (and the shopping leading up to it) can be as much as 35…

Time is precious. And we’re always looking at ways to be more productive in what we do with it. The need to ensure and enhance productivity is a critical business issue. Research shows that New Zealand workers are putting in more time, but output per hour is well short of wealthier nations. We’re running faster and behind at the same time. I think our phones have a lot to answer for. We multitask so much with our phones, that it may be killing our productivity at work. Managing our attention is difficult especially when there are so many objects or things we can focus our attention on. Technology has exacerbated our ability to concentrate with our smartphones providing an endless supply of distractions with bite-sized, attention-grabbing information for our brains…

WORKING MOTHERS might well relate to the ‘trying to look like we can do it all’ sentiment in the opening scene of the novel and film, I Don’t Know How She Does It. The main character resorts to denting a store-bought pie so it might pass for home-made at her child’s school cake sale. A good colleague of mine at AUT, Professor Candice Harris, recently delivered an address to a full house on the working mother conundrum. Candice had lots of women in the audience nodding at some of her own stories about the ‘juggle’ of being a working mother. Candice recalled squeezing an extra 28 cents worth of petrol into an already full fuel tank in order to reach the magic $40 mark needed to secure a Smurf. She…

When someone has a brilliant idea and acts on it, in hindsight it can all seem rather obvious. And that must be the case to a certain point with Perpetual Guardian’s founder, Andrew Barnes, around his work-four-days-get-paid-for-five productivity trial. It generated enormous publicity internationally and domestically and now that it’s becoming a permanent fixture, a quick search on Google has the story showing up globally all over again. So why have so many companies held back in the past? If millennials want a more flexible working environment; working parents need more work-life balance and older workers want more downtime, nobody is going to lose. And people are prepared to work hard for that gift of time so Perpetual Guardian, and any other companies that choose to follow suit, will have…

It’s not surprising A.DO stands head and shoulders above the competition in Tauranga’s hair salon sector – considering its four directors collectively had successful careers across fashion, hair, millinery and interior design, before they all joined forces. Husband and wife duo Jason and Penny Davies started dating back in 1993 and launched the salon three years later. Penny had a fashion design and pattern drafting background, while Jason had already been in the hairdressing business six years. Then Ray and Shelley Pullar came on board in 2016 – Ray from an interior design background and Shelley with experience in hairdressing, arts and millinery. “We felt that four business brains were better than two,” says Jason. “And that we could channel these different strengths to create a truly exceptional salon environment,…

IF THERE is one area of business that most of us do poorly, it is account management – looking after our existing customers. While it’s fine to take your clients out fishing now and then, send them cupcakes on occasion or buy them coffee when you catch up, none of these things ultimately add value to their business. They add value to the relationship – and this is worthwhile too – but it’s not the full picture. I’ve spoken before about the basic mistake people make with marketing; thinking marketing ends with generating a lead, or winning a customer or sale. It’s time we change this mentality and remember that marketing is not just winning business – it is how your whole business is set up to serve your customer.…

The 179 page full report, Regulating Cryptocurrencies in New Zealand, shows how the use of cryptocurrencies in combination with smart contracts has the potential to transform commerce as cryptocurrencies can do considerably more than current technology, which uses fiat currency. “Take the example of smart contracts which can be used to programme how, when and to whom a payment in a cryptocurrency is made, as well as a range of other things as the following example demonstrates, the report says. “A smart contract can be used so that payment is made automatically when a shipment of New Zealand lamb arrives at a foreign port. The smart contract can be programmed to allow title to the lamb to pass at the same time as the payment is made. “In addition, the…

The top technological disruptions identified by New Zealand directors and their global counterparts are big data and AI, a global survey of directors has found. The inaugural survey of 130,000 members of the Global Network of Director Institutes, representing 17 national organisations, was led by the Institute of Directors in New Zealand. It analysed and presented the findings that capture the current climate for global governance. The survey found that 65 percent of global directors see big data as the top technological disruption compared with 55 percent of New Zealand directors. The second technological disruption identified was that of artificial intelligence with 60 percent of global directors and 55 percent of New Zealand directors citing it as a concern. The Institute of Directors CEO Kirsten Patterson said the global report…

ALMOST EVERY morning I listen to an inspirational TED talk or YouTube podcast as I apply my makeup. I consider it a kind of active meditation, and because I don’t pay for the premium YouTube, I’m often interrupted by advertisements. Some of these ads are from larger corporations selling some kind of consumer product, but a far greater number are from online marketers who, I think, are trying to sell me a way to make money online by reselling products bought on Amazon. At least, I think that’s what they are selling as mostly I wait the required three seconds and press the “Skip Ad” button. But those three seconds give me an insight into the person on the screen who is trying to sell me the lifestyle of my…

People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons. – Zig Ziglar One of the cornerstone ideas in marketing is around connecting to customers on an emotional level, which has been shown to provoke a customer response of extreme loyalty. With modern-day tech advances, we have seen widespread quality improvements for products across the spectrum, making competition based upon performance more cut-throat than ever before, and connecting emotionally to customers is the best way to achieve greater sales and long-term profitability while also creating longterm customers. Unlike other aspects of marketing, gauging emotions is a more complex process. When you factor in that different emotions come into play with the purchase or selection of different services and products, or how different age groups respond emotionally, it becomes even…