| Date | Title | Description |
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| Dec 20, 2011 | Having insight into insight | Have you ever noticed that entrepreneurs never put an “out of office message” on their email?
John Stokes said this to me while we were having lunch at the soon to be demolished Rosati Restaurant in Flinders Lane. John is a British entrepre... |
| Dec 18, 2011 | The value of entrepreneurial partnerships | A group of Scandinavian entrepreneurs caught my eye this year. So when I was in London the other week, I decided to look them up, as they have a local office above a shop in the fashionable shopping area around the Bond Street tube station.... |
| Dec 6, 2011 | How to be a successful moderator | I have probably moderated around 100+ events for the Churchill Club over the last couple of years, and have realised that I now have a bit of experience moderating panels, which can be hard to come by.
Although I believe I have nothing on N... |
| Nov 29, 2011 | Diasporas and LinkedIn | I read a nice article in The Economist last week entitled “The Magic of Diasporas”. And since I was in London going to an “Australian Business UK” function, it made me feel even more connected to my fellow Aussies. Diasporas are described b... |
| Nov 22, 2011 | How do you communicate with your staff? | A friend of mine has a beautiful house outside of Geelong. It sits on an acre, has an orchard and chooks in the backyard and started off life as a church. It was while looking out at this view and drinking wine on a hot day recently, that I... |
| Nov 16, 2011 | The principles of war | Around the start of my career in the late 80’s, Eastern thought was very big in the workplace. There was a growing awareness of Japanese solutions such as Kanban and Keiretsu. Management books such as Miyamoto Musashi’s – The Book of 5 Ring... |
| Nov 10, 2011 | Top 10 start-up meet-ups in Australia | The demise of start-up networking group The Hive after nearly four years of facilitating socialising and guest speakers across Australia shouldn’t be concerning for budding entrepreneurs looking to meet like-minded souls.
After all, as Hive... |
| Nov 8, 2011 | Natural ceilings for bad management | An odd thing I noticed a long time ago when I was in the Army was that most of the Lieutenant Colonels I met used to give me a really bad time, and were unpleasant to work with.
I accepted this as I assumed that as a young Lieutenant, I was... |
| Nov 1, 2011 | How to undermine governance in four steps | Earlier this year, I stepped down from a board role in a not-for-profit environment. I felt that the board had a very strong CEO at the table combined with a weak chair, and in my opinion, under the guise of good process, we were slowly win... |
| Oct 25, 2011 | Calendars for international travellers | From my point of view, doing international business is one of the most enjoyable things you can do during your career. And if you are going to spend around 90,000 hours of your life working, why not have fun?
I said this to someone during t... |
| Oct 18, 2011 | Killer boards for small businesses | I hadn’t ever had a formal board before, and my father was experienced as a chairman of public companies.
So as CEO I decided the other founders and I, who were the directors, should meet quarterly with my father chairing the lot of us. Uns... |
| Oct 11, 2011 | Success, failure and the space in between | I had a coffee with a friend yesterday that got shafted at work. She had been working on an exciting new agenda for some months, got sign-off at every level and was ready to transition into the new leadership role that came with her plan.
U... |
| Oct 4, 2011 | Sales, marketing, processes and lemmings | A popular misconception about lemmings is that once and a while they all suddenly run off a cliff to commit suicide.
Unfortunately it’s not a misconception when talking about sales and marketing processes in a professional services environm... |
| Sep 27, 2011 | Spotting fools and liars | I can’t stand dealing with fools and charlatans. It drives me mad. The only resource I have that’s finite is my time and I will never get back every second wasted with idiots and liars.
Every day I meet or contact any number of new people o... |
| Sep 21, 2011 | Five tips to creating new habits | I used to have an employee called Tim, who would dash over to a customer’s site the moment they had a problem and fix it for them. Great customer service!
Unfortunately, it was terrible customer service for the other clients whose sites he ... |
| Sep 13, 2011 | Revenue model innovation for services companies | I have been buying and selling services for around 20 years, and during most of that period, have only ever seen two pricing models – fixed rate or hourly rate. Each with a couple of tweaks that are normally of benefit to the supplier, not ... |
| Sep 6, 2011 | Tweaking break-even points for fun and profit | The difference between a good business and a great business is normally just a tweak or two.
About 20 years ago I remember sitting in a lecture thinking that the concept of Break Even Analysis was just a little too basic and boring. Account... |
| Aug 30, 2011 | Having fun going global | Everyone wants you to “go global” if you are not already “born global”.
It’s fashionable because in a global economy it means money flowing in Australia and increasing wealth through the multiplier effect. But despite it being great for Aus... |
| Aug 23, 2011 | Competing with lower prices is stupid | The other week I said, “Cutting costs and only competing on price is a death spiral. Always has been, always will be.” I then got asked why a couple of times, so I thought I might expand on this point a bit.
I don’t want to give a lecture, ... |
| Aug 17, 2011 | Privacy and sausages | Saturday afternoon I made some sausages with a mate – pork and fennel, chicken with Tuscan seasoning and lamb with rosemary and honey. And as always when we finish making the sausages, we BBQ them up for our families. Delicious. If you make... |
| Aug 9, 2011 | Let’s stop giving grades | Can business schools stop giving people marks from A to F or zero to 100 please? Just give them pass or fail, so they are prepared for real life.
One of the things I completely abhor, is business students fresh out of school with grandiose ... |
| Aug 2, 2011 | The reality of online retail | I read today that Myer intends to do away with shipping and handling costs for its online store, to stop the leak to internet shopping. Apparently “Commonwealth Bank estimates that Australian consumers spent $9.5 billion online last year, w... |
| Jul 19, 2011 | Saving your job through data visualisation | Most Churchill Club events start with an idea, something I have noticed that then sits in the back of my head weeks, months or years until I understand how it “fits” as a good event.
An example of this is data visualisation, or the way that... |
| Jul 12, 2011 | When promotions turn bad | I was given a pack of promotional pens the other day by one of my clients.
Half of them disintegrated on use.
I had a friend sit in my lounge last Friday and pull out a promotional pen he had been given a week before to find it had run out ... |
| Jul 5, 2011 | Why finance isn’t just for the end of the financial year | I had breakfast the other day with Scott Kilmartin of Haul.
I like talking to Scott about the retail market because he has heaps of experience and quality insight.
He felt that the small independent retailer was on the wane at the moment an... |
| Jun 21, 2011 | Solving conflict with a single question | At the end of the day, I lay my head down on the pillow and asked my wife, “So how’d it go?”
“Great,” she said.
My wife had been having problems with a senior employee who had stopped doing certain tasks because they weren’t on his specific... |
| Jun 14, 2011 | Getting paid twice | How do you make a $2 profit from every $1 sale? That was the guts of a fabulous speech by Goran Roos last night at the Churchill Club. It’s hard to put Goran in a box, but he is a management consultant, entrepreneur, Professor, Chair of the... |
| Jun 9, 2011 | Change your values to suit your location | Twenty one years ago, when I left Perth, I planned to return in two years because that was where my home was. Despite not being born there, I had become an adult in Perth and it was where all my “forever friends” are. You know, the ones you... |
| May 31, 2011 | Are you device independent? | Sometimes I wake up at 4:30 in the morning and ponder over things. I don’t want to, I just can’t get back to sleep. On the weekend I was pondering over whether technology was making my life easier or harder.
Certainly I seem to be working a... |
| May 24, 2011 | Venture design: The four fundamentals | Over the last 25 years I have started one commercial lighting retailer, three IT businesses, one marketing business and a social venture. Unfortunately, I’m nowhere near as wise, clever or as wealthy as I aspired to be, but then again, I do... |
| May 17, 2011 | What kind of entrepreneur are you? | I spoke at the Startup Weekend last Friday night on building valuable networks, but got asked by three people before the event – “who is the target audience of the Churchill Club?” The simple answer is entrepreneurs, but the real answer is ... |
| May 10, 2011 | eBay based pricing models | Buying some kayaks was phase one in the plan to spend more time outdoors with my family. Phase two was buying some kayak carriers to mount on the roof racks, after discovering that two kayaks are just too wide for the average roof racks. So... |
| May 3, 2011 | Are they members or customers? | I quit the Naval & Military Club when they decided that members should have a minimum spend at the Club each quarter, or simply be billed it anyway. This completely brainless revenue-raising scheme accelerated the downfall of the Club, ... |
| Apr 27, 2011 | Follow the signs | About 10 minutes into the trip to Eildon Dam for a picnic lunch on Sunday, we realised we hadn’t put the sat nav in the car. Bugger. It’s not that the map book doesn’t work, it’s just that we feel the sat nav is a higher authority, ie. we d... |
| Apr 19, 2011 | Five steps to becoming a great networker | I sat there one Christmas and watched the sales people walk in with baskets of goodies and bottles of whiskey, and wondered why there was nothing for me.
Initially I thought it was because as the accountant, I wasn’t particularly client fac... |
| Apr 12, 2011 | Four tips for avoiding invisible failures | Have you ever noticed how successful businesses tend to have nice biscuits in the kitchen, normally something special, wrapped in chocolate, perhaps with a little dash of marshmallow or jam?
Meanwhile businesses on their last legs normally ... |
| Apr 5, 2011 | Revenue model innovation | Over a decade ago, I made the acquaintance of a CIO of a major bank, and asked him to become involved in my small IT services business which was growing like a rocket ($2 million revenue in year one). He declined, and said, “he didn’t find ... |
| Mar 29, 2011 | Outsource offshore | Finding worthy topics to discuss was the highest priority when I started the Churchill Club five years ago, so I sought advice from a number of quite senior people on what they thought were issues that mattered to the technology start-up co... |
| Mar 22, 2011 | Solving surly problems | Recently, someone said to me, “You’re an interesting contradiction, you genuinely like people, however you can’t stand idiots, which makes you surly most of the time”. Of course I didn’t like that, and promptly got a bit introspective about... |
| Mar 15, 2011 | Creating real life | 3D is fascinating to me at the moment. Not the insipid, headache-inducing versions being pedalled out at the cinema and on new TV’s, but the real life version.
Firstly, I was fascinated with the Kinect. The Kinect, if you don’t know, is the... |
| Mar 1, 2011 | A capital raising romance | Just before Christmas I met with a chap who wanted to raise capital to help in franchising his business (which I will decline to name for reasons that will become obvious soon). I, however, thought it was a bit early to try to raise capital... |
| Feb 22, 2011 | Testing “brilliant” ideas | Picture this:
I am approached by “John” who has been recommended to talk to me about his new venture – but it turns out he wants me to sign an NDA before he can discuss it.
I refuse to sign unless he can give me an outline on what he is pro... |
| Feb 15, 2011 | Turning waste into PR | I went to hear from Tom Griffith of Emma and Tom’s fruit juices at The Hive the other day. Apparently in their early days their minimum production runs were always more than they could sell, which was a problem because their stock was highl... |
| Feb 8, 2011 | The three ‘goals’ to avoid | Last week I was honoured to sit in a meeting of a team that was assured of success. I say this with disgust though, as the group refused to clearly define what they were trying to achieve, specifically so they couldn’t fail. Sadly, it’s too... |
| Feb 1, 2011 | Bespoke manufacturing and brand monetisation | So my Dad said to me, “So you reckon I should order an initial stock of 10?”. I said, “It’s the 21st century. You don’t need to hold stock”. We were talking about a new way of monetising his Greypath brand, because I had just turned my firs... |
| Jan 18, 2011 | Low-tech solutions | When my wife first became pregnant, a much older colleague from Fuel Marketing said to me with a wry smile on his face: “I suggest you invest in yellow and red plastic”. I thought he was demented, but he wasn’t of course. It turns out he wa... |
| Jan 11, 2011 | Some clever queuing | Last week, I was going to take the kids down to the Water Adventure Park in Geelong, but after realising the forecast for there was 20 degrees and a spot of rain, we opted for Fun Fields in Whittlesea instead. After promising the kids a the... |
| Dec 22, 2010 | Personal social media policy | I like the Christmas holidays. Apart from making me feel like I’m a good parent when I take the kids off to do something interesting, it also gives me a chance to reflect on what I have been up to, and what I should perhaps be getting up to... |
| Dec 15, 2010 | Drawing financial reports | A long time ago when I wore an accountant’s hat, I used to work for a multinational engineering group that had a lot of operations in Asia. My boss was a Filipino who lived in the US, had been a managing partner of Arthur Anderson and was o... |
| Dec 7, 2010 | Failing smarter | Last month we ran a fascinating session on failure at the Churchill Club. It was prompted by a comment of a friend of mine who had been the commander of the Australian forces in the Solomon islands a couple of years ago. He said, “Of course... |
| Nov 30, 2010 | The enemies of innovation | Innovation can be a nasty business. It requires energy and creativity, resources such as people’s budgets and time, as well as the need to manage the stress and actions of those that don’t want change. Staff don’t like it as it can threaten... |
| Nov 23, 2010 | Five things I hate hearing | I’m a bit tired and cranky this week from competing deadlines. This generally brings out my more caustic side, so I thought I would share lines I hate hearing and which instantly kill any meeting for me. Most of which I’ve heard more than o... |
| Nov 16, 2010 | The Christmas wishlist | On the weekend I was having a chat by the pool with a friend of mine who is an executive producer at Channel 9.
We see each other every week as the kids have swimming lessons at the same time. Last week she was thinking about Christmas pres... |
| Nov 2, 2010 | Timing is everything | People talk about price as if it’s the only thing you negotiate. It’s not, obviously, but pricing can have interesting impacts on your business and the timing of your sales. I was at a family function many years ago when an older Jewish rea... |
| Oct 26, 2010 | Syncing mechanics | Last week I talked about how I had come up with a better solution for syncing my calendar and contacts information across a variety of devices, including my windows based computers, iPhone and iPad. But I didn’t go into the actual mechanics... |
| Oct 25, 2010 | Five ways to boost your sales | No matter how good your start-up idea is, if you can’t sell the product or service that it provides you won’t be troubling the Forbes Rich List.
Selling is often considered to be an art but, in fact, good common sense planning, research and... |
| Oct 19, 2010 | Syncing phones, computers and other devices | So here’s the problem I noticed. I was browsing Facebook on the weekend, and noticed a friend of mine had recently purchased one of the new 4G phones, the Samsung Epic 4G. He posted that he had finally managed to be able to transfer his con... |
| Oct 12, 2010 | My very own hotspot | During the school holidays I went down to the Morning Peninsula and spent time entertaining the children. I managed to get a kite up in the air for around 20 minutes, so I felt completely validated as a parent.
While I was away I still mana... |
| Oct 5, 2010 | Super profits from the arcade | I just spent a week down on the Mornington Peninsula with the kids over the school holidays. I tried to keep my mind on kite flying and mucking about at the beach, but I came a across a small business that I found just fascinating in how th... |
| Sep 22, 2010 | Meet the CEO, he’s tall and stupid | The average height of an Australian male in 1995 was 174.8cm (5ft 9in) by the ABS. I am 174cm (5ft 8½in) tall. So imagine my irritation when I met with the CEO of a major ($1 billion in revenue) Australian organisation who was around 188cm ... |
| Sep 14, 2010 | The language of business | I was in the Army when I first heard the expression, “The best way of learning something is to teach it”. Another expression I like is that, “you don’t truly understand something until you have to explain it”. This is especially true when y... |
| Sep 7, 2010 | One hand for you, one hand for the ship | I have a friend who was complaining to me two weeks ago that he couldn’t understand why the press had stopped ringing him for a quote, after he had left his high profile business development role with a multinational business, to work with ... |
| Aug 31, 2010 | What to do with IP | Here’s an interesting thing: the most prolific inventor currently in the world (by number of US patents lodged) is actually an Australian by the name of Kia Silverbrook. Kia runs an outfit called Silverbrook Research out of Sydney.
However,... |
| Aug 3, 2010 | How to monetise anything: part 2 | Last post I looked at the question “how do I monetise this?” and suggested frameworks for monetising, as per the below. In this week’s post I want to look at identifying the attributes of a situation you want to monetise.
Identifying the at... |
| Jul 27, 2010 | How to monetise anything: part 1 | I drink a lot of coffee. Unless I have decided to be completely anti-social I normally meet someone for coffee twice a day. It’s part of my investment in networking.
First meetings tend to be wider ranging as we get to know each other, and ... |
| Jul 20, 2010 | Need some help? | The other week I had coffee with Chris Stewart who is a Melbourne-based entrepreneur and strategic foresight consultant. Both Chris and I have lots of different skill sets and we both enjoy starting new ventures. We tend to catch up around ... |
| Jul 14, 2010 | iPad on my fridge | I decided I wanted to purchase an iPad. The first roadblock was my wife, the more level-headed of the two of us, she said: “Of course honey, but by the way, what’s your business case?” I didn’t have one other than, a) I wanted it and b) I w... |
| Jul 6, 2010 | Do ya feel lucky, punk? | At a recent Churchill Club function in our innovation thinking stream, we ran a fascinating event titled “Luck”. As part of the panel, we brought up a chap called Jason Bresnehan from Tasmania to talk. Jason is a corporate advisor who last ... |
| Jun 29, 2010 | Planning for good luck | Every win in my career has been due to hard work and great strategies. Every failure due to bad luck. About 10 years ago I won a million dollar a year support contract. It was due to the sensational sales strategy we had in place. Two years... |
| Jun 22, 2010 | Six reasons not to attend networking events | Two weeks or so ago I took part in a panel session on networking for CIOs. It was an interesting conversation, although it pretty much centred around event attendance and using social networking tools like LinkedIn. At the end of the sessio... |
| Jun 15, 2010 | Would you take on Apple? | Like renovating a house, managing your brand online is a journey rather than a destination. From the early days of the web where you may have just been dealing with a domain name or a piece of software, things have evolved very, very rapidl... |
| Jun 8, 2010 | What’s on your alternative resume? | I have this idea I like to play with which I call the “Alternative Resume”.
Everyone we meet in business has a resume. It’s normally a very dry, three to six page document that lists your contact details and all your achievements, in chrono... |
| Jun 1, 2010 | 6 tips for “un-networking” | Imagine this scenario….
You go to a networking event, hovering at the edges of the crowd, desperately searching for someone you know, to talk to.
Succumbing to the pressure to “network” you give up and introduce yourself to a nearby strange... |
| May 26, 2010 | 5 Olympic-sized opportunities | Having recently done a bit of work with people from the City of London, I have suddenly, but probably not strangely, become aware of the next Olympics, set for July 2012 in London.
It’s also come to my attention that a number of Australian ... |
| May 18, 2010 | 10 thoughts on business card design | I’ve just come back from a two week business development campaign with a client where I collected about 100 business cards through one-to-one meetings and event attendance. I then went back to my office and spent 10 minutes scanning every c... |
| May 12, 2010 | Problems & solutions | A few weeks ago I wrote about experience versus wisdom and mentioned different types of solutions. What I was really talking about was solutions from the entrepreneur’s point of view. I have found myself discussing this a bit lately, in fac... |
| Apr 21, 2010 | Five tips for getting NDAs signed | When I was a pimply faced lad and had just received my commission to be an Army Officer, I had my new boss, a senior Armoured Corps Officer held up to me as the example I should emulate. It wasn’t because he was a particularly great leader ... |
| Apr 13, 2010 | Making life twice as easy | Earlier this year I had Keith Ishikawa from TBM Consulting Group speak at a Churchill Club function about applying Lean Manufacturing techniques to software engineering. Keith was one of the original engineering team for Lexus and a major p... |
| Mar 30, 2010 | Experience versus wisdom | I’ve noticed a pattern…
This morning a colleague of mine complained to me that he was confused by the fact that the builder who is doing his house renovations has 30 years experience but appears to be completely useless.
Last week during th... |
| Mar 23, 2010 | Selling services at a fixed price | Recently I had a look at billing time and materials for your services. This time around I thought I would have a look at packaging your offering and selling it at a fixed price.
Packaging up your offering is not for the faint-hearted though... |
| Mar 16, 2010 | Targetting “fans” | It’s not news that social media is big business at the moment, and rightly so, because it’s a game changer. Consider this: if I am interested in raising awareness of my product with the type of person who barracks for Melbourne Football Clu... |
| Mar 9, 2010 | Do “comission only sales” actually work? | Quite regularly I get offered commission only sales work. Rarely though is it ever phrased that way. Normally it’s a discussion about how exciting and lucrative the opportunity is, with a statement at the end like “we don’t pay retainers th... |
| Mar 2, 2010 | Avoiding time wasters | I recently met with “John” at a coffee shop where we were to discuss his business idea that involved sports sponsorship and the internet.
John put down his crisp manila folder on the table and we introduced ourselves as we ordered coffee. J... |
| Feb 23, 2010 | It’s often not the answer that matters but the question | My son, like many children, had his birthday around the cut-off date for entry into primary school. So my wife and I had a choice: do we send him a little earlier, or a little late? My position on the matter was: “Give me one good reason we... |
| Feb 16, 2010 | Selecting your start up funding source | One of the things that drives me up the wall is hearing the local start up community complain that the venture capital market in Australia isn’t like the US. Of course it’s not, we are in Australia, a much smaller market, with a completely ... |
| Feb 9, 2010 | Some initial thoughts on the iPad | Once again Apple will export California-chic to the rest of the world. Certainly Apple is likely to carve out a “new” niche with style and an interface that just works with its new iPad.
The success of netbook has proven that most users don... |
| Feb 2, 2010 | Time & materials versus fixed price billing | Just before Christmas I had one of my coffee/mentoring sessions with a vibrant young Victorian entrepreneur and an interesting question came up around how she should invoice her services.
Although not an expert in the area of pricing models... |
| Jan 20, 2010 | Keeping smart, productive people | So after last weeks post on looking after smart but lazy people, I got some interesting feedback from a friend who’s a Human Resources Manager in a national organisation with a couple of thousand employees in what seems like hundreds of loc... |
| Jan 12, 2010 | Cherish smart but lazy people | So last time I posted, I discussed dealing with lawyers – lessons learnt from my long lunches with a barrister/army friend.
Another interesting discussion we had was around the need for stupid or lazy people. Ian’s point of view was that in... |
| Dec 22, 2009 | Six lawyer lessons | I once spent two weeks living inside an armoured vehicle with a guy who was destined to be a lifelong friend, despite (much to my disgust) he later became a lawyer. The week we spent together was in 1990, and since then we catch up roughly ... |
| Dec 15, 2009 | Four keys to deploying social media | Last Thursday the Churchill Club ran an event on using Social Media for Sponsorship and Fundraising. It was a great evening with perspectives coming from Peter Williams (CEO Deloitte Digital), Jeremy Kann (General Manager, Sales & Comme... |
| Dec 8, 2009 | A checklist for solid business plans | Pretty much on a weekly basis I get sent ideas, business plans and/or information memorandums for capital raising. Everyone who sends me one, tends to think it’s an expertly crafted, zero-risk proposal to achieve a massive return with a wor... |
| Dec 1, 2009 | Scammers, spammers & spivs | I got an email yesterday from a journalist who wanted to know about scams and dodgy websites. Basically the question was: “Is there a resource you use to understand whether something is right, wrong or just a scam?”. Well there isn’t any pa... |
| Nov 24, 2009 | A look at the MindX mind mapping tool | I had coffee with an entrepreneur last week. As an aside, it appears from the relationship I have with baristas in a variety of locations, that I spend half my life drinking coffee with people.
Anyway, he and I were discussing open source t... |
| Nov 17, 2009 | The invisible bee sting | Last weekend I staked out my spot in the shade at the skateboard park. Got out my book, biscuits and water bottle and prepared for a relaxing hour while the kids went completely berserk. It seemed like only two minutes later when all of a s... |
| Nov 10, 2009 | Innovation by walking through mud | Over the Melbourne Cup long weekend (yes, I know it wasn’t a real long weekend), I took my family and another family over to Lakes Entrance for four days of fun and frivolity. One of the activities we organised was a bush walk/navigation ex... |
| Nov 3, 2009 | Seven lessons in email marketing | I got an interesting email the other day, by someone signing up to the free Churchill Club newsletter. He hadn’t received a username and password for it and wanted to know why. I explained by email that it was a free newsletter and you didn... |
| Oct 26, 2009 | It’s the great ideas I want, not just the good ones | Last week it was my parent’s something or other wedding anniversary (north of 45, south of 50). I got my daughter to give her Grandmother a call to say “Happy Wedding Anniversary, thanks for making me possible”.
Anyway, my daughter and I go... |
| Oct 20, 2009 | A quick story on warranties | This happened to me a couple of years ago, but nothing much seems to have changed so I thought I’d share the story.
I purchased a rack mount server (one of the skinny ugly computers) from Dell as well as some software and assorted other bit... |
