Is money making or money spending biggest in your business?

Last week I told you about the problem I had with my administration seven years ago.  Admin was determinedly growing and spending my money and I was running both operations and marketing by myself because the guy I brought in with great credentials to help with operations was less than competent and actually preferred to add to the admin load.  An interesting dynamic and it was good to review it again.

The other thing is that recruitment is really a marketing exercise where you let prospects know enough about what you are and are not about, to attract the right people and repel those that are unsuitable.

1.    I see so many businesses like this.  You should have three main sections to your business, Operations who bring in the money and work with your clients are the most important followed by
2.    Marketing with the job of attracting the right clients to your business– and I did say marketing rather than just sales.
3.    Admin is just there to provide support and billing.  Admin tends to generate the most paper, files and waste in a lot of business who come to me for help.

If you run a small or micro business, you need to be spending more than 50% of your time effectively marketing.  Your main job is marketing so that you have customers to work with.  Simplify your admin, including accounts.

One thing I had real trouble getting my self styled “Office Manager” to understand was that so long as there are not big or regular discrepancies in petty cash, it does not make sense to spend $60 worth of time chasing 25cents petty cash discrepancy!  This is crazy priorities.

Put your effort where the money IS and that is customer service.  Make sure your procedures are based of the high risk areas of your business and do not include 3 pages about how to balance the petty cash or something equally trivial.  Make sure you know what all your staff actually do and where they put most of their time and effort – their wages are your money.

I am not advocating only going the online and virtual way I mostly work of course.  It suits me and my business but it has cost me over $300,000 to set up all my online training systems.  It certainly would not work for all businesses.

Your take away message here is loud and clear.  Put your effort and controls where your risks are greatest.  Make sure that the money making and marketing sections of your business attract the most attention and keep your admin slim and low paper.

This is what I teach you to do in my training programs, whether you choose the coached group courses or the self paced do-it-yourself options.  Stop wasting money with unbalanced effort now!

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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A national farm safety researcher says farm accidents and deaths are costing the agricultural sector more than $1 billion per year.

While there is a decline rate of deaths from farming accidents, the cost is still significant.

The fatality rate for tractor accidents has dropped markedly in the last 10 years, since rollover protection bars were made compulsory and quad bike accidents are the most common cause of deaths on farms.

Apparently the mining industry has sparked big improvements in farm safety in recent years as people return to work on farms, with quite a new outlook on the way that safety is conducted within business.  The agricultural sector is seeing the efforts that the mining industry put into preventing injury in their business.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Options for the production of energy from waste are taking on greater importance. But before recovering energy from waste, high energy components like aluminium, steel and plastic first recovers the embodied energy present in those materials, avoiding the energy used to manufacture new products.

Then the reminder of the waste stream can be sorted to go to: anaerobic digestion, landfill gas recovery, and thermal treatment technologies.

But there are emerging technologies, like pyrolysis of waste under heat with little or no oxygen, and gasification, a thermal and chemical reaction between waste and a gas (oxygen and/or steam and /or hydrogen).

Sydney’s first anaerobic digestion facility for source-separated food waste, Earthpower, has been operating since 2003. It accepts solid and liquid food and organic wastes and produces methane as well as a fertiliser product for which there is a healthy market demand.

• Compared to landfill technologies, the facility is complex to operate, leading to greater potential for process failures and sub-optimal operation and it cannot currently compete with landfill prices, and to be commercially viable requires a gate fee higher than landfill. The NSW landfill levy has improved viability considerably.

The process does not handle contamination well, so continuous education of customers is required in order to reduce contamination in incoming waste streams. .Oganic wast from council household bins is simply too contaminated

Landfill gas recovery like the Woodlawn Bioreactor is able to use mixed waste streams and newer ‘wet’ or ‘bioreactor’ landfills, has dramatically increased the potential for energy recovery from landfilled waste. Woodlawn commenced in 2004and uses anaerobic digestion to produce methane which is captured and converted to renewable electricity.

Technical challenges have included the effects of waste settlement, leachate recirculation techniques, corrosion of pipes, and the site-specific effects of acid production from the sulphur-rich geological features of the former mine the facility is using.

The Woodlawn Bioreactor led to the following conclusions about advanced methane capture from landfills as a waste management solution for Australia:

• Bioreactor landfill technology is robust, in that it is not sensitive to mixed waste inputs and contamination;
• The technology for collecting methane from landfills and converting it to electricity is well proven and widely utilised;
• There is currently a healthy end market for the electricity and renewable energy certificates produced by these facilities, and the greenhouse gas benefits are comparable to those of more complex and more expensive alternative technologies; and
• Bioreactor landfill technology does not maximise the recovery of recyclable materials from the waste stream.

Thermal treatment solid waste is common in Europe, with the main examples being mass-burn incineration, thermal treatment of hazardous wastes, and combustion of refuse-derived fuels in cement kilns, incinerators and power stations but very limited in Australia.

This is because of:

• The uptake of thermal technologies in Australia has been limited by the following factors:
• Perceived air quality issues
• Perceived waste of resources
• Lack of regulatory certainty and focus in this area by federal and state governments, leading to reluctance to invest and regulatory hurdles when trialing waste types as fuel.

Currently there are large amounts of wood, plastics and paper, being landfilled. These resources are left in the waste stream after the easily captured portion is separated for recycling, if recycling is viable at that point in time.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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The Marina Industries Association of Australia (MIAA) are celebrating Australia’s first Level 4 Clean Marinas. These marinas have passed the Clean Marina Association requirements with an independent 143 point check assessing environmental facilities, practices a procedures plus they have ISO 14001 certification.

I was involved with the MIAA in the development of the Clean Marina Program and I trained 6 marina operators in environmental management systems. Two of the three marinas are my clients and the third was helped by one of the marina managers that I trained. Definitely a day to celebrate!

In fact there is a fourth marina that has ISO 14001 and was in fact the first one certified and that is Riverglen on the River Murray – and another of my very favourite clients.

As these four very well managed marinas are all in South Australia I guess I had better start communication with those in other states.

Cape Jaffa is the latest certification so congratulations Lindsay Gilchrist. In the next few days I will add a story about them to my case studies

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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On Monday I went to a lunch where the guest speaker was Dr Lynn Arnold AO, CEO of Anglicare and definitely one of my favourite clients.  That entire organisation has adopted “AngliGreen” and head office and two of the larger nursing homes will be third party certified shortly.  What I love about them is that they work with “clients” who are people they are not beds or cases and that is actually quite different to some organisation.

The nursing and retirement facilities send all their waste food to worm farms and they are just starting an Australian first – composting nappies.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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We have three big problems that could be solved easily
•    non academic kids are looking for relevant subjects to study
•    We have a huge joyriding and unlicensed driver problem because kids from low income families cannot afford to get proper diver training, licences and cars
•    We have problems getting taxi drivers and end up mostly with foreign students

Why on earth don’t we train kids to drive at school and give advanced training to those who would like to become drivers of taxis, trucks, delivery vans etc.
And the other problem helped is hopefully the youth road toll if we have well trained drivers!

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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You hear that one all the time. Well, this week the China Daily reported that China “is set to begin domestic carbon trading programs during its 12th Five-Year Plan period.” Starting in 2011.

I can’t belive the way Australia is lagging behind the rest of the world!

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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I am currently moving both home and office and while it feels like chaos among the boxes, bags and bins, I did sit down first and draw up a quality plan to avoid affecting any of my clients adversely. d sit down first and draw up a quality plan to avoid affecting any of my clients adversely. It actually is organised although this newsletter is briefer than usual and late

I will have both locations for an overlap of two weeks so that I can prepare all the connections and get the old place cleaned up. One impact so far is a late newsletter!

I spent last weekend going through old files, sorting, re-archiving some and shedding others. Reviewing the past has been a good experience. While I have always kept things simpler than others and Hagen Stehr made his comment in 2003 that……

“Jean Cannon’s approach to ISO systems was straightforward and no bullshit. She understands how industry works. This is the best effort I’ve seen at simplifying what some people have made an art of complicating.”

- that was Version 2 and every version since has been further simplified and we are up to version 7.

“If it ain’t simple, it ain’t gonna work!” That is my experience and my motto.

If you want to know more about how I can help your business, book in for a Quickstart Blueprint Consultation, or simply join my next group which starts in arounf ten days time

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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I picked my six year old grandson up from school today and he had a bandaged finger.  I asked what happened and he said “nothing much but I got a tiny scratch playing and there was a huge fuss.  The teachers all rushed around complaining about blood and there was not nearly enough to fuss about.  What was the panic Gran?”

I simply told him that there are some people who have germs in their blood that we can catch and while they don’t show up for a while they can be very nasty.  Always a good idea never to touch anyone else’s blood darling.  What a world we live in!

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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In today’s world you cannot be like your competitors in this day and age when the global financial scene is far from stable. Your business needs simple and effective management systems that saves you time and money

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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