Smarter Website Design for Business

This is a new blog created as a resource for those seeking some greater undersatnding of what constitutes good design of business websites and why that is important. The articles containe here will generally be the personal opinion of the site editor, Greg Tomkins and attempt to illustrate sound best of breed porincipoals and practices.

Last week I had the pleasure of working with the grade 11 students from AB Paterson school here on the Gold Coast involved in ABW, a business simulation competition. I had been invited to act as a mentor to a group of 10 students who were competing against 9 other similarly sized groups. I had no real idea of what was expected of myself let alone what I might find in the students. I was however looking forward to the experience even though it was with some trepidation. What I was overwhelmed with was a sense of pride in what I witnessed in the group of 15 and 16 year olds with whom I worked. The experience left me so proud of our youth, our next generation of leaders. It also reminded me of the capacity we all have within ourselves yet as adults we manage to stifle with our own limiting beliefs.

A recent survey conducted by some 50 consultants with their clients in Australia and New Zealand revealed that 63.6% of the business owners had a staff member taking home a weekly pay more than they received themselves. Even more alarming is that 61.3% felt that what they paid themselves did not justify the time and effort they put into their business.

An associate of mine has spent many hours discussing with me how important the people factor is in business and how so few seem to understand the real significance of this.

We each share a common belief that if you do not get the people factor right in the business as a priority, then all the work of most accountants and lawyers will be to no avail as the real potential of that business will not be achieved. Quite simply these people do not deal in people, their feelings, ethos and values – they invariably deal in numbers, models, regulations, ratios and law, commercial reality. After all this is their core business and they exist for that purpose. 

The other day I listened to a story told by a very successful business consultant who after a number of years of building his business to the point of $17M turnover sat down with his accountant at year end to be told that he had made $384 profit (no I have not left off any zeros…).

Typically a many businesses are valued on the basis of multiplier of turnover. This however is a misconception that should be viewed carefully as such a practice does not provide a valuation of the business’ ‘true worth’ in the market. This may provide an average indication and should be considered as being just this – an ‘average’ indicator.

Christopher Columbus set out with a vision to find a new world and he was driven by an overwhelming passion to discover an alternative route to the riches of India and Asia for the Spanish King. Columbus challenged the widely accepted belief that the world was flat arguing that it was round and that he could discover a new route by simply sailing west rather than around the African continent. Is your business driven by a similar approach?

At the end of the day the rules for growing your business are quite simple. There are four activities that produce this result.

1. Generate more leads through better marketing
2. Create more sales to your customers
3. Reduce your expenses and cost of goods
4. Manage your resource capacity efficiency

How we actually achieve this will be an entirely separate  matter but lets us leave this aside for the moment. We can quite easily achieve great results with what is so often fine tuning your business in the above four areas.

This article has been written to provide some understanding to why we behave as we often do in organisations without understanding why we do things. How often have you had a response from someone when asked about something they do – “That is just the way we do things around here”, or, that “This is always as it has been and you can not change it”. Invariably these same people can not tell you who created the policy in the beginning.

The other day I had a conversation with a close friend who was talking to me about the frustration she was experiencing with people’s expectations of the level of service she was providing to them and how they were placing unrealistic demands upon her. The problem was it was holding her back from being able to perform her own duties and adding considerable stress to her own life.