Success Enterprises Consulting Quarterly
Hi #firstname#, Welcome to the 3rd edition of Success Enterprises Consulting Quarterly. In this edition: Who is in charge of your business and your cash anyway? Good News: And the winner of the A$85,000 prize is .... Strategy: Losing the Pitch – How asking the wrong questions will get you nowhere – and what you can do about it Here's to your success! Steve Wood Director	"Reduce your Cash Burn Rate"
Who is in charge of your business and your cash anyway?    How easy is it to forget the basics? Like cash for instance – and even who is in charge of your business? It might seem obvious, but some companies just like to take each day as it comes and then see how it goes. This is fine when work is flowing nicely, but what happens when the flow of work starts to dry up, and then the cash balance in the bank account starts to shrink? What do you do? A client asked us this question recently. “How can we get focused so that our new business has a chance of success?” We worked with Sarah McCully, the MD, and helped her to think through "What are the options that I need to take to the board and how can we set the business up to survive the next year?" Read more ...
Good news: And the winner of the A$85,000 is ...  We all love a good news story. This one is great. How would you feel if one of your team was able to win a scholarship, worth over A$85,000? Damini Singh applied for a MBA place at Cranfield School of Management in the UK, then applied for the Cranfield Australian Alumni Scholarship, won her MBA place and went on to win the scholarship too. Read more ...
Strategy: Losing the Pitch – How asking the wrong questions will get you nowhere – and what you can do about it.  Anecdotal evidence over the past few months indicates to me that there are two types of business. The first are those that are really benefiting from the change in economic environment – although I must say that these are the exception. The second group, the majority group, are suffering from a reduction in sales revenue as a direct consequence of their clients deciding to cancel or defer spending. With this in mind, firstly we are sharing an experience in how someone we met Lost the Pitch – even before they had got to know us. Secondly we are offering a free white paper on “Winning the Pitch”, which will help you to focus and win some of that lost business back. Read more ... Reduce your cash burn rate. Go from having 6 weeks left before money runs out, to over 6 months money in the bank   The MD of this start-up sales, marketing and advertising business was concerned that although the business had started well, the business had stalled and needed clarity on direction and focus. The business at the time had such a high cash burn rate that it only had 6 weeks of life left before running out of cash. We helped the MD of the business to gain clarity, focus on the important and take decisive action. Outcome The business now has a properly nominated and authorised MD, the directors have clear and defined roles, the process for winning and delivering business is clearly defined and the fixed costs have been dramatically reduced The cash burn rate has been dramatically reduced so that the business now holds cash to the value of a minimum of 6 months costs in the bank account, and is better able to cope with the variation the business climate Sarah McCully, the MD, said .... “Steve’s almost instinctive insight into our business provided Beachside with the clarity and strength to take us to the next level of growth. He provided us with very clear objectives that needed to be achieved if Beachside was going to survive. I would certainly recommend Success Enterprises Consulting to anybody that is serious about wanting to make their business work.” **** Thank you Sarah Return to Top And the winner of the A$85,000 prize is ...   Damini Singh.    This is an outstanding achievement for the 26 year old, IT architect from National Australia Bank. Cranfield School of Management, ranked 13th in the world by the Economist, is a tough business school to get into. This year the Cranfield Australian Alumni Scholarship had three finalists - Damini Singh from the NAB, Vanessa Goodall from the Australian Federal Police and Vicky Au from PricewaterhouseCoopers. The winner gets to go to England and study for their MBA, full-time for a year. They also win A$20,000 cash. Last year the winner also received complementary flights, thanks to the kind sponsorship of Virgin Airways. LTR: Vanessa Goodall, Damini Singh, Vicky Au For those of you who are thinking, “so what is all the fuss about?” let me explain. This prize is hard to win. Cranfield School of Management only admit about 100 candidates a year and once there you have to work hard too. They do not give the degree away. You get to live and study overseas. You meet a whole bunch of really nice people, many of whom are smarter and more capable than you are. That in itself is a humbling experience. Then when you are done, a range of doors open for you. Past candidates have returned to their existing employers and won a promotion on the way. Some start your own business. Some join another business or go into consulting. The list is long and interesting. The inaugural winner, Sarah Nicholson who started as a mining engineer at BHP Billiton in Newcastle, is now working in London as a business analyst within the aluminium business for BNP.  Well done Sarah. If you’d like to read more and see more photos of the award dinner go to http://www.cranfieldalumni.org.au/ LTR: S Wood, A Chapman, V Au, D Singh, V Goodall, J McFarlane Return to Top Strategy: Losing the Pitch – How asking the wrong questions will get you nowhere – and what you can do about it   Winning the Pitch is all about regaining lost revenue and getting back into growth again. When clients decide to hold back spending for whatever reason, your job becomes more difficult. It is no longer enough to work with a business as usual mentality. Something has to change.   The one big thing that we would recommend you have a look at is your questioning process. If you can get this right, then you are well on the way to being able to provide your client with a solution  that will meet their needs. It will be what they want, delivered how they want it, when they want it AND at a price that they are willing to pay. But first an example for how NOT TO DO IT. Losing the Pitch. A true story. A chap came up to me recently at a business networking event. He was a complete stranger to me. Within 30 seconds he had asked me for a business card and proceeded to thrust one of his under my nose. Then he proceeded to tell me how fantastic he was and how he could do great things for me. In the next minute, he indicated to me that it had been good to meet me and that he thought that it would be a good idea for us to speak later about how to we could do business together. I hardly had chance to speak – he just kept talking. I was simply completely put off by this guy. So I put it down to experience and continued to mingle. The next day I received an email from him, which is ok, but I did not like the contents. I had met this guy for 2 minutes and now he was selling to me. “Wonderful meeting you last night! I'm following up now to offer you a half hour complimentary session of my work .....” I was not impressed at all. I did not need what was on offer, I did not ask for what was on offer and had no interest in the offer at all.   So I replied: “Hi, an observation and one question. The observation. You do not know me. You do not know what I do. You do not know what I am trying to do. You do not know what I want. You do not know what I need. In fact, other than the business cards we exchanged, unless you have gone to look at my website and unless you have specifically asked others about me, then you probably know nothing about me. So the one question. Why are you selling to me? Apologies for the directness. No offence intended.” My response was perhaps a bit rude, but it was 100% genuine and accurately portrayed how I felt. So I’ll leave this with you. Ask good questions and you’ll end up with good business. And finally, for those of you that wish to receive the free white paper, email me on steve@success-ltd.com with Wining the Pitch White Paper in the subject line, and I will email it to you. Return to Top
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