Greatest Asset

For many small and medium-sized organisations, without your staff you don’t have a business.  They are the people who:

§  Keep the business operating

§  Hold specific knowledge about different aspects of the organisation

§  Know your suppliers and customers intimately

§  Continue to serve your customers well

§  Maintain relationships

§  Bring in new business

§  Train new staff and pass on knowledge

§  Bring a variety of skills, ideas and experiences to your organisation

Have you ever stopped to consider the wealth of knowledge they hold?  Your team is your greatest asset and your competitive advantage.

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Value the Knowledge of Your Team

How to measure the enormous value that people bring to an organisation is a growing conundrum for traditional accounting, and it’s getting some serious scrutiny the world over.

While you can value plant and stock, the “intellectual capital” of an organisation is mostly overlooked.  The intellectual capital includes all the knowledge and experiences of your staff, either learnt in formal training sessions or picked up along the way from informal discussions with colleagues.

How to harness the knowledge is another problem.  Knowledge is hugely powerful to an organisation and academics say the management of it – how it can be shared around and stored – is one of the biggest issues facing organisations today.

So why are knowledgeable people so important to your business and what strategies can you implement to create an environment where staff feel motivated to stay, and contribute and share that knowledge?

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Knowledge is extremely valuable

Almost any successful business can be franchised as long as the business process is bulletproof, there is a demand for your product or service, and enough revenue can be generated from the business to satisfy both yourself and the franchisee.

The key to franchising is the business process. What you sell is important – people have to want it. But the real value is in the intellectual property – the knowledge you have accumulated into creating an operating system that can be replicated over and over again and continue to produce the same successful result.

This is what the McDonalds restaurant chain did so well and where modern-day business format franchising has its roots. The restaurant developed an extremely efficient operating system, which licensed operators were able to replicate, for a sizable sum, in restaurants all over the world.

The success of the restaurants helped to build the hugely recognisable McDonalds brand, which continues to grow with each new outlet that opens.

Today a wide range of businesses use the business format franchise method, including sports outlets, garden maintenance firms, clothing stores and financial services companies.

For many people, it’s proving an excellent way to do business, but franchising can have its drawbacks. In particular, you are reliant on the enthusiasm and motivation of the franchisee to help build your business. While franchisees do need to work within the terms of the franchise agreement, unlike employees, you cannot tell them what to do on a day-to-day basis.

www.astillhawke.co.nz            Your local Auckland Accountant                                                           31       

Franchising is a Win-Win Way of Doing Business

Fancy your business brand appearing in Whangarei, Wellington or Wanaka?

It’s quite a task to set up outlets the length of the country yourself, but franchising can make that job a whole lot more attractive.

Franchising is an effective way of building your business by licencing others to use your proven business system for a fee. They do the work of setting up the business elsewhere and you benefit from rapid growth, brand development and penetration into new locations.

Naturally, your business focus changes when you develop a franchise. Where before you had control of day-to-day operations, now your role is to support individual franchisees build their own businesses, which in turn helps to grow your business and your brand.

It’s definitely a win-win situation – by working together and investing time, energy and capital, you both help to build, and benefit from, a successful business enterprise.

www.astillhawke.co.nz      Your local Auckland Accountant                                                                      31