Peer Solutions
Experience collected over too many years to remember suggests that, in order to be successful in business, you must do something nobody else can do or something nobody else wants to do. If you have a ‘me-too’ business you must find out what distinguishes you.
You can employ someone else to write your business plan, research opportunities endlessly and never understand the real process of successfully running your business - critical things such as meeting your wages bill, keeping up with ever changing legislation, responding to real customers and finding and keeping good employees.
I have found that almost invariably some of the best advice comes from your peers, ideally those in non-competing businesses who you trust and are already operating from the trenches.
With this in mind, we have set up one such group following some tests over the last few years – Peer Solutions (see document attached). I am very pleased with the success of PeerSolutions and planning to form some more. Read the document to get a flavour of the benefits participants are receiving – their words say it much better than I can!
Should you be interested in PeerSolutions or would like me to come around and learn more about your business, please contact me by emailing trevor.sargeant@pmhc.nsw.gov.au or phone 6581 8660.
And they are doing it already...
Recently I met with three entrepreneurs, each with their own business in the creative industries sector. Bron Purdy from Spiritual Fitness, Leanne Prussing from Prussing Art and Bruce Thompson from Port by Night Tours.
Besides their outstanding individual abilities, what really interested me was their commitment to meet every fortnight to court each others advice from another entrepreneurial point of view. They leave each meeting with a set of goals that they agree to act upon prior to the next meeting. This is an outstanding example of businesses who are now collaborating on growth issues rather than concentrating on survival. .
Bron offers a fitness for fun program (www.spiritualfitnesswithbron.com), Leanne is an awesome artist www.leanneprussingart.blogspot.com and Bruce is a highly entertaining host and creator of Port by Night Tours.
The two legs of economic development...
One leg involves infrastructure which is the comparatively easy task as it just involves mere money. The much tougher second leg is about building business capacity. This rarely receives attention as the work is done at the coal face, can be intensive and rarely involves 14 point headlines. It seems to me that the very best infrastructure in the world will always be a poor investment without high quality businesses able to effectively use it.
I have never yet heard a politician discuss capacity building - that is, assisting businesses to become investor ready, growth ready and the practical application of new opportunities such as we discuss in the BiG program . Ask your candidate this week about his or her policies regarding building business capacity. …..??
