Power Pieces
These power pieces are an opportunity to hear from some people with specific expertise in their area of business.
Craig Bugden
James: Craig’s actually my personal accountant – I’ve known Craig for almost 10 years. I thought I’d bring Craig on to share from an accountancy viewpoint of where things are at, what he is noticing with his clients, and to give us some gold nuggets and strategies in relations to tenancies and landlords particularly fellows in the real estate space.
Craig: So look from what I see the big issue that pretty much all of my clients and every business owner is going through at the moment is uncertainty. They’re not quite sure how long this coronavirus thing is going to be. They’re not quite sure exactly how it’s going to affect their businesses. The big thing for me for virtually every business is to get some certainty and some clarity around your cash flows.
Your cash flows are the lifeblood of your business and they’re the thing that’s going to get you from here to there. You need to have enough working capital so that when you come out the other side you’ve got enough working capital to be an effective business going forward so that your sales cycle still gets taken care of in terms of available cash. One of the things that I would really recommend you do is you do a budget for your business – I’ve just done it for six months because that’s how long the prime minister has been sort of talking but you can do it for as long as you like but if you do a budget for six months in terms of what you can reasonably expect your business to look like had coronavirus not happened and then the second part of the spreadsheet does it says okay we’re going to experience a drop in revenue of X and it’ll spread that out we’re going to receive the job keeper payment from the government and we can talk about that we’re going to receive some help with our rent from the government we’re going to be able to get a loan from the state government or you know any a number of those different stimulus packages we need to plug those in and then determine where your business is at so basically you can have a look at what your business is going to look like once the effects of the coronavirus shutdown have hit your business and also once we’ve plugged in all of the stimulus from the government so that you can get some clarity around what your business looks like from a cash flow perspective. Once you’ve done that then it might look really bleak – it actually may be but you’re much better off knowing that it’s bleak than digging, putting your head in the sand and not knowing because at least if you have the information you can then seek help and I’m happy to help.
When this all returns to as normal as it’s going to get, it’s about being able to have the working capital and the cash flow behind you to get your business back on to its normal trajectory as fast as possible and the best way to do that is to project and make decisions around your cash so that that’s really the main point that I wanted to make today.
Joanne Johnson
Jo: I started a business with my husband 11 years ago and we were fortunate enough to sell it at the back end of last year and it gave us both opportunities to move on into new circles and pursue our own areas of interest and for me, that was very much about working on areas that I had identified in my life as a stylist that I felt weren’t necessarily being done as well as they could, in particular working with vendors and real estate agents to help their vendors get the properties presented at the very best.
I was getting lead after lead during some great sales meetings going around visiting a lot of agents that I dealt with in my previous career and getting a lot of really good interest and traction. Obviously with Corona coming in, there has been a bit of a change in that regard in the sense that people are probably less willing to take on renovation projects without knowing whether or not they’ll be able to finish them or where you know where they said or is they not going to sell now and all those sorts of questions so there has been some hesitation in the market.
I found when I turned my focus away from you know the fear of what all this meant to how can I actually help and how can I give back then it sort of started to take its own course. I started to think about what are the areas where people do need help. What can they be doing now whilst they might be at home. I started to dissect the different areas with regards to selling a property and who was some of the people I can speak to within the relevant industries and get their expertise and impart that knowledge to to my clients, and for them to send to their clients and the longshots of that is a series of interviews and an e-book which I’ve been communicating to my clients I’ve been communicating on social media and I’ve had a lot of success with that first video that I launched beginning of this week.
Matty Clark
James: The last power piece today is a good mate of mine the guy who keeps me in shape, in check – Matty Clark from CrossFit Eora
Matty: I’ve been the founder of CrossFit Eora. I established that in 2000 late 2011 early 2012 with a now ex-business partner. I have been operating every day since. It is quite a comfortable little business operating with a client base peaking at around about a hundred and five hundred and ten the capacity.
We had the mandated close on the 23rd of March. It’ll forever be a day that I will remember I’m not going to say with great fondness but certainly a life-changing day. Being a fitness facility being a gym obviously you know our operations is face to face 99.9% of the business involved. With the change happening and really there being no notice it was very much open the door for a few hours and then BOOM it’s closed. To be quite honest the health and fitness industry is full of I’m going to say experts – everybody’s got an opinion and I’m sure this is rife in every industry out there. We offer all of our training tips our training product our philosophy via our website and our social media channels, I mean they’re all for free but the piece that we can’t give away for free or that’s not obtainable for nothing is that tangible feeling that you get when you walk into the facility you know it’s the contact point whether with myself or my staff and again that constant feedback loop. With the doors being closed on the 23rd, we had the face to face operations removed. I adapted very quickly. My skill set prior to opening across the gym was a video and at-home DVD fitness presenting so I had a digital media skill that I put to the wayside as I opened my own facility. I’m a bit of a geek at heart I love technology anywhere from music engineering and music mixing to drone racing and that’s a story for probably another day so what I found was an opportunity here to essentially take two pieces of two industries or two things that I spent a little bit time with and merge them together.
I was still going to be invested to my best capacity for my clients. We lost one hour of operations. We closed the 23rd at lunchtime at 5:30 p.m. I opened the facility for three hours and I said to everybody whether they were an active paying member or a non-active paying member was all of this equipment here needs to go that was essentially a fire sale and I asked everybody to come down in the evening and grab whatever they needed in order to do something and at the end of that I didn’t matter what they took or how they took it I guess you know we were going to have something in place very quickly. It was literally hey there’s all the gear and at 6 o’clock the next morning – guys we’re going to do a Zumba class and we’re good to go and I’m gonna say the rest is history. It’s been a I’m gonna say probably the longest three weeks of my life in the sense of I’ve never been busier. The platform is unique in its sense that I can deliver information much more promptly even though my facility is not the biggest place on earth.
Learn more at https://www.jamesshort.com.au/
