Growth Newsletter

Absenteeism in the workplace is a major cost to any family business and if it isn’t brought under control, it can quickly kill a business.

Our youngest son, Fraser, has a part time job in a coffee shop in a major shopping mall in our local area. He is trained as a Barista so, at the ripe old age of 17, whatever your order may be, it’s always “order up”.

Last night, Australia’s Treasurer, Scott Morrison, handed down his second, and this Government’s fourth budget, for the financial year commencing 1st July, 2017.

In last week’s edition of Growth, we talked about the evolution from Technician to Manager to Entrepreneur and how many family business owners are regressing from Entrepreneur back to Technician.

The way I see it, the owners and managers of family businesses evolve in three ways. 

We are witnessing the slow and painful death of an Australian icon right before our very eyes. Most people don’t know that. Some people couldn’t care less. However, owners and managers of family businesses in Australia should pay very close attention to what is happening to Australia’s car company, Holden, right now.

In February, whilst Trish and I celebrated our 25th Wedding Anniversary, we were fortunate to cruise the Caribbean for 7 nights. It was a nice break in between a 3 Day Conference in Dallas, Texas and meeting with my International Mentoring Group in Carmel, California.

In Growth Edition 55 – “N is for Numbers” I talked about the increased advent of computerisation in the finance arm of family business over the past 20 years. However, what has not improved in that time is the ability (or willingness) of the in-house finance team to make use of the numbers to figure out how the business is travelling at a given point in time.

Do you remember Gareth Evans? He was the Foreign Minister in the Keating Government up until John Howard’s crushing electoral victory in 1996. He didn’t cope well after the 1998 election, which Labor again lost. On election night, Evans decided that another term in opposition would be tortuous and famously coined the phrase Relevance Deprivation Syndrome. In other words, no matter how good he thought he was, no one cared and, for the most part, he was on his own. As far as dummy spits go, it was a Top 10 effort.

As most of you know, I spent some time in the USA in February of this year. When I arrived, the new Trump Administration was three weeks in and already there were resignations by key staff and appointments to major posts who either withdrew, or were not signed off by the US Senate. The wheels were starting to fall off early.