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The 2008-09 tax season is almost upon us and entrepreneurs can expect to get some extra scrutiny this year. MIKE PRESTON and JAMES THOMSON ask a panel of tax experts for their best tips and the best action you can take now to minimise your tax billBy James Thomson and Mike Preston
The administrators of collapsed furniture retain chain Sleep City have announced the company’s 64 stores will be shut over the next six to eight weeks, just days after the company collapsed into administration. The closures will add to the growing number of retail locations that are set to close within the next two years, with major companies including Speciality Fashion, Luxottica and Billabong all announcing plans of their own to close down hundreds of shops. PWC partner...
It’s tough out there right now. This year it seems that every week another business goes under, from big companies like trucking firm 1st Fleet to small businesses like the football and athletic shoe importer Azumah. From tourism industry troubles to construction company collapses and the ongoing downturn in ...
The only certainty is uncertainty: chances are the Australian economy is headed for another topsy-turvy year. But for the nation's small- and medium-sized enterprises, there are good sectors to operate in, and not so good. We've taken the pulse of 15 key industries. Here's SmartCompany's guide to 2012, ...
Australia’s top small and medium businesses have shrugged off the downturn to reveal spectacular growth rates at this year’s SmartCompany.com.au awards held on Friday night in Melbourne, hosted by NAB.Australia’s top small and medium businesses have shrugged off the downturn to reveal spectacular growth rates at this year’s SmartCompany.com.au awards held on Frid...
One of the most important aspects of business leadership is the creation of a strategic vision for the business. Rapid technological change, increasing complexity of the business landscape, global economic factors outside your control all contribute to create a largely unknown future world. So in that context how do you create the vision for your business? Well, here's the thing. Your vision is a creative activity and works best when you disrupt your current reality to imagine how you wa...
The economy is slowing, but don’t panic – you can still grow in a downturn. JAMES THOMSON reveals 10 tips from companies who sailed through the last recession. By James ThomsonThe econo...
The new chief executive of PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia has banned staff from holding internal meetings between 10am and 4pm, a move backed by business performance expert Ed Robins. Chief executive Luke Sayers claims meetings at these times distract employees from attending to clients, according to a report in The Australian Financial Review. His move is part of a wide-ranging push to increase billable hours at the accountancy firm, which yesterday announced pla...
We all know that the internet has had a huge impact on Australia's economy. Now we know just how huge. The Australian internet economy was worth $50 billion in 2010, according to a new report, The Connected Continent, produced by Deloitte Access Economics for Google. This figure is equiv...
Time is the only truly non-renewable resource. You can hire and replace people. You can make and lose money. You can invest and divest assets but once a unit of time has gone it's gone forever. Pay people for their time and they'll work for your money, inspire people with deeply shared beliefs in a heartfelt cause and they'll give you their blood, sweat and tears if they share the vision. How can you migrate from one to the other? How can you motivate your people to give you their all? We...
In a previous blog I suggested that CEO's have a performance scorecard. In fact, not just the CEO but all roles should be defined and have performance metrics, or scorecards. The most commonly known framework used in business schools is Balanced Scorecard. I won't go into the theory of a Balanced Scorecard here but I do want to draw a key distinction between performance and results. If you can grasp this then it will take you a long way to proactively running your business. Ther...
A battle looms over the future of collapsed property trust Prime Retirement and Aged Care Property Trust, after founder and former managing director Bill Lewski appointed his own administrators to the trust's management vehicle. Lewski sold out of Prime Trust in May 2008 for between $60-80 million, but in the last few months Lewski has appeared to be manoeuvring around the Trust. In early August, Lewski regained control of the vehicle which manages the trust – Australian Proper...
Accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers has cut more than 200 jobs from its workforce as the company attempts a restructure that it says will help cut down on service duplication. The redundancies come just a few months after Ernst & Young confirmed it would retrench 24 people from its audit division after making several redundancies over the first half of the year, while KPMG has also scrapped 20 jobs from teams in Sydney and Adelaide. PwC was contacted this morning, bu...
The founders of the Lonely Planet travel writing empire have finally parted ways with the business they founded 37 years ago, selling their remaining 25% stake to Britain's public broadcasting and media giant, BBC Worldwide for $67.2 million. The BBC, which bought 75% of the business in October 2007 for $201.6 million, exercised an option over the remaining stake on Friday after a three year transition process that has seen the Wheelers pull back from any day-to-day involvement in the bus...
The traditional approach to getting the best out of your staff is to prepare functional specifications of the job role and then fill it. And for larger institutions this organisational strategy has been tried and tested for many years. Yet I wonder about this for two reasons: Is this big business approach suitable for the small to medium (SME) business environment, and Amidst rapid technological change, and the changing demands/needs of the Gen X/Y workers do we need ano...
Patchy. That was the word that defined the Australian economy in 2010, and could well be the best description again in 2011. While most economists are predicting Australia's economy will grow at a rate of about 3.75% in 2011 – that's just above the longer-term trend – much of this growth will be driven by the sec...
SmartCompany's roundtable brought together 17 entrepreneurs and experts to to identify the next 10 multi-billion dollar industries – and create an action plan for developing an entrepreneurial Australia. By Amanda Gome, James Thomson and Colin Benjamin
Ten retirement villages that are owned by the listed Prime Retirement and Aged Care Property Trust have been placed in the hands of receivers after banks including National Australia Bank and Suncorp Metway lost patience with the group. While Prime Retirement and Aged Care Property Trust are not in receivership, the board expects to appoint administrators from PwC as early as today. Suncorp appointed receivers from Ernst & Young to Prime Trust's retirement villages in Bundabe...
Not every SME is going to look great on paper, and certainly can’t sit back and wait for the phone to ring if they need a capital injection or want to sell. EMILY ROSS finds our how to maximise your chances of finding a great investor for your business.
One of my biggest bug bears in small business is just how few small businesses prepare a strategic or business plan and work at implementing it. If you know what you're trying to achieve it makes it so much easier to implement and chose from a vast array of alternate strategies. What floors me is that the professions of banking, accounting and capital raising all insist on business plans, but for the primary purpose of raising debt/equity funding. This is where we differ in opini...
Revenue for the accounting services industry is expected to grow 5.6% over 2011-12 to reach $15.8 billion. Over the five years through 2011-12, industry revenue is expected to grow an average 2.74%. Overall growth was marred by the global financial crisis, which caused revenue to decline in 2008-09 and 2009-10. During the globa...
A winery and restaurant in the Victorian regional centre of Geelong has been put up for sale by receivers, a month after collapsing with debts estimated at $16.5 million. Pettavel, which has a vineyard, restaurant and cellar door in the town of Warun Ponds, was placed in administration in late April after directors Michael and Sandra Fitzpatrick had been tried unsuccessfully to sell the business for some months. Secured creditor Rabobank, which is owed $11 million, subsequently p...
There is a growing resentment among retailers as a new breed of shopper emerges in Australia. A good deal is increasingly important to shoppers, who are more than happy to wander into a retail store and seek advice from staff as they try on jeans, get fitted for a pair of sneakers or sample a few of p...
Gerry Harvey has reluctantly expanded the company’s online operations into a new website that will sell directly import video games, saying the move is a response to the sheer number of sites offering discounted goods. “If you can’t beat them, join them,” Harvey said yesterday. The move comes just weeks after JB Hi-Fi announced a direct import model for camera equipment, and also comes alongside profit downgrades from Billabong and Kathmandu. “We’re not d...
25. Atlassian
Smart50 rank: 17 Revenue: $35.50 millionGrowth: 74.50%Founders: Mike Cannon-Brookes, 28; Scott Farquhar, 28Based: New South WalesEmployee...
Hitwise made successful forays into internet ratings long before anyone else had a clue. Founder Adrian Giles talks to AMANDA GOME Adrian Giles, founder of Hitwise, talks to Amanda Gome. Hitwise is one of Australia’s few global technology success stories. It will soon list on the Nasdaq, reportedly with a market valuation of more than $400 million.
The receivers of Elderlie Finance, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, will apply to the corporate regulator ASIC to conduct a public examination into the collapse of the company.   A public examination could involve former Liberal Party leader John Hewson being called to give evidence. Hewson resigned as chairman of Elderslie on 3 June, two days before Perpetual Trustees launched action against Elderslie that led to its
This morning I was lucky enough to hear Virgin Group chief and legendary entrepreneur Richard Branson speak at a Business Chicks breakfast in Melbourne. It was an impressive event, with more than 1500 business women (and a smattering of men) eager to listen to one of the world’s few bona fide business rock stars. Like most people at my table (hosted by our great friends at PwC) my image of Branson is of a bold serial entrepreneur who thrives on risk but I came away from th...
The one thing that will propel your business forward immediately is benchmarking your performance. You don't need elaborate balanced scorecards. You don't even need industry benchmarks or external measures of success. Just start counting stuff. It is much better if you measure what matters, but the very act of counting stuff will raise your conscious awareness of potential blind spots. It will give focus and energy, both conscious and unconscious, to the issues at hand. A funny t...
The manufacturing and retail industries have continued to come under pressure with yet another business entering administration, with furniture seller Sleep City now put under the hands of PwC. The move comes just days after another office furniture manufacturing business, Desking Systems, was placed in the hands of administrators, due in part to a failure to meet a $5 million debt obligati...
Accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers has asked 5000 full-time staff to take up to three weeks of unpaid leave in an attempt to save costs.   Chief executive Mark Johnson said in an email to staff that the requests are a "temporary initiative to respond to temporary times", and that redundancies are a last resort.   "...
In a highly competitive environment success is paramount. Right from our early education we are indoctrinated to pass exams or suffer the indignity of failure. Promotions are awarded on merit. It's all very quantifiable, vey clinical. We are educated by rote learning. We cram for exams, forget life skills, and forget what we crammed some weeks later too. Even in sporting contests a close eye is kept on the scoreboard. The popular parlance in sporting culture is to maintain "scoreboard pre...
The founder of collapsed financial services company Elderslie Finance, Peter George, has filed for personal bankruptcy with debts of $10 million. According to a report in The Australian, George has eight creditors, including law firm Clayton Utz, accountants MGI Melbourne and Nigel Purves, an entrepreneur who was touted as a potential buyer of Elderslie. Elderslie Finance collapsed i...
Retail surge fuels rates speculation... Fast food audits... Retail lease fracas... State/federal funding promises... Reporting 'sustainabl...
Baker's Delight is embarking on an ambitious drive to recruit over 100 new franchisees in the next six months to combat a fall in applications, the company has announced this morning, with Generation Y set as a key target. The company references data released by the PricewaterhouseCoopers Franchise Sector Indicator, which recently found that 97% of franchise systems believe the dropping volume of enquiries is one of the biggest challenges threatening their business. Baker's Delig...
Small business tourism operators need more assistance to cope with their varied tasks, PwC says, as a report shows that labour productivity in Australia fell for the fifth quarter of eight.  A report by the accounting and advisory giant into labour productivity – the output generated per hour of work – shows a 0.2% fall nationwide in the September quarter, driven by falls in Queensland’s mining and agriculture industries. The result is the worst growth since ...
The troubled Australian video game industry has suffered another blow, after international developer and publisher THQ confirmed it has shut down two local studios with 200 jobs lost, as the company moves to focus more on original IP. The closures highlight just how much the local video game industry has suffered over the past few years, with the closure of several studios. A studio in Sydney, Team Bondi, which recently released one of the year's most successful games, has reportedly bee...
Strong growth in the internet and the interactive gaming industry is expected to help push total revenue in Australia's media and entertainment sector up by 28% to $36.2 billion, according to a new report by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm's annual Entertainment & Media Outlook report, which charts the growth of the sector between 2010 and 2014, also shows that the sector came through the GFC in far better shape than the rest of the world, with 1.1% growth in re...
Over five million Australians will own a tablet computer by 2015 and more than a quarter of those will use the devices to watch television, films and read newspapers and books, according to the latest PwC Entertainment and Media Outlook report. The interactive games segment has also been pegged as the next biggest growth area by the yearly report, which predicts revenue will grow to $2.5 billion in 2015 from $1.6 billion, helped along by the growth in gaming designed for tablets. ...
British video game retailer Game has escaped administration but the fate of Australian stores is still unknown as the local managing director scrambles to find a buyer. The development comes as Woolworths signalled its intention to abandon the video game market yesterday, with its Dick Smith chain selling off games and accessories with markdowns of up to 90% in some categories. Both incidents highlight the precarious nature of bricks and mortar video game sellers, even as the ...
The saga at apartment-hotel company Oaks Hotels and Resorts continues, with new majority shareholder Minor threatening legal action against the Oaks board and promising a "very senior role" for the company's founder, the former BRW Rich Lister Brett Pointon. Dillip Rajakarier, chief operating officer of the Bangkok-based Minor, told SmartCompany that Oaks is trying to scupper a deal that Minor has struck to buy a 34% stake in the business from PricewaterhouseCoopers....
John Ford’s branding business The One Centre has some big-name clients, including McDonald’s, Telstra and Audi. But, as he explains to AMANDA GOME, the factors that have made him successful almost sent him under when he sacked a $5 million client. By Amanda Gome
Vanessa Garrard is the co-founder of E3 Style, a Brisbane-based company which is the largest supplier of consumer electronics and accessories to the retail market in Australia. The operation, which turns over more than $14 million a year, has just restructured its business, formally establishing a brand management business called Kreative DNA and an exporting business call...
One of the country's largest steel drum manufacturers has been put up for sale, after its parent company, which is also one of the country's largest plastics manufacturers, was placed into receivership last month. The collapse comes as the manufacturing industry continues to suffer under the high Australian dollar and volatile economic conditions. HP Steel, which is part of the HP Group of companies, has been put up for sale by receivers PwC. The company is one of the larges...
Greenhouse concerns have propelled sales of carbon credits, but the potential is much higher. By KRISTEN LE MESURIERBusinesses trying to sell carbon credits as recently as a year ago would have been greeted with a puzzled ‘What’s that?’ before bei...
Critics of Industry Minister Kim Carr's R&D tax credit scheme have called for the Government to submit the bill to another review, after the Government conceded it will have to wait until early 2011 to get the bill through the Senate. An angry Carr accused the Coalition of using obstructionist tactics to prevent the bill's passage through the Senate, and claimed that R&D would be "stymied" and job creation opportunities would be lost. "The Coalition's deliberate filibuster...
Deloitte Australia CEO Giam Swiegers knows the stakes are high when it comes to gender diversity. Diversity is not something that can be designated as a project for the HR department to deal with. It's not something you simply stamp a name on, and talk up in the marketing fluff that goes out with recruitment campaigns. Nor is it something that relies on a one-size-fits-all approach: merely implementing a blanket-wide mentoring program won't solve the fact that women still ac...
Prominent business people including Gerry Harvey and James Packer, accounting firm PwC and banking giant Citibank have all expressed their outrage at being connected to a new negotiating service that is linked to convicted fraudster Jon McKenney. The new business, called The Negotiator, aims to offer price negotiations for high net worth ...
Another local video game studio has shut its doors, one of several in the past year, in yet another sign the Australian development industry is hurting as publishers of blockbuster titles opt to cut costs. The closure of the Melbourne division of Visceral Games, which worked on the internationally successful horror title Dead Space, comes after SmartCompany revealed th...
It is not too late for larger retailers to expand their online presence and catch up to those smaller companies that have beaten them to the punch in the online retailing world, one expert has predicted. The prediction comes as a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts online shopping will grow 13% this year to be worth $13.6 billion by the end of 2011, with 44% of total online sales being spent on offshore shops. The issue is especially prudent after the Premier Investmen...