Blog Entries for Boss Lady

Why the banks are missing a big SME opportunity

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 01:21:36 +0100

Last week at a LeadingCompany roundtable I was surprised and shocked at the attitude towards banks by some of the owners of Australia's largest private companies.

Apart from HSBC, which got a huge rap from one of the entrepreneurs, there wasn't a nice word to be said.

And yet these companies with about $400 million revenue and thousands of staff would have been a banker's wet dream in the 1990s.

Yeah, we all know the world has changed. But there is a major opportunit [...]

Women on the podium

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:25:50 +0100

Just think. Six Australian women have just won gold at the Olympics*.

As we see these women pump the air, fall to their knees and kiss the ground, we seek out stories on what they have achieved and how they did it.

And by the end of the Olympics it will be clear: it is the women who are the stars. Like it or not, women now run the country and win the sports medals. Women are no longer chasing achievement. They are on the podiums, sharing their tips.

And this reflects [...]

FEDERAL BUDGET 2012: The vision thing seemed to go missing

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:24:50 +0100

For two years our Treasurer has swanned around the country, claiming his was the new party for small and medium business.

Central to this was the often repeated promise to introduce company tax cuts (down 30% to 29%) that were supposed to kick in in just six weeks time for companies with less than $2 million turnover.

The Government thought we were all dingoes by dovetailing it to the introduction of a mining tax. But we are all grown-ups who do budgets too, and we kno [...]

Big vs. small is just silly

jthomson@smartcompany.com.au — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 01:10:09 +0100

Wow. As if things aren't tough enough. Just as small business gets a glimmer of attention from political parties after decades of being ignored or receiving lip service around election time, the knives come out. This morning, small business owners received an unexpected walloping from flat earth economist Judith Sloan.

In a column in The Australian this morning she takes issue with the Greens for suggesting they might block company tax cuts for big business and wave through cuts for [...]

SmartCompany turns five

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 01:24:56 +0100

Well, they said we would never make it. A publication for small and medium business owners? It will never work. Many people better than you have tried and failed, I was told.

Yet here we are celebrating our fifth birthday. So rather than go through all the mistakes we made and the lessons we learnt, I asked my editor (even bosses have editors in media) if for once, I could share with the readers the ways I think we have changed our world for the better. Knock yourself out, he told m [...]

Your new best customer in 2012

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:02:28 +0100

Five years ago when I started SmartCompany I had a challenge on my hands. I knew that women were not big readers of the business press. Back then the AFR was lucky if more than 25% of its readers were women. And BRW wasn't any better. That always struck me as ridiculous and I felt it was very important we get women reading the business pages.

But convincing people to change their reading habits can take time and I assumed it would take me years to build a strong female readers [...]

Swan's surplus gamble

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:20:15 +0100

Just as well it's Australia Day tomorrow. Time to sit around after the barbeque and digest the very different perspectives streaming our way about the economy and figure out whether any of this should affect our planning for the remainder of 2012.

The International Monetary Fund, not known for hubris, spooked the world last night announcing that the world will face a "1930s moment" of the kind that brought on the Great Depression unless money can quickly be found to support nat [...]

Applauding the real job makers

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 01:29:36 +0100

The job layoffs are just beginning. And the Gillard Government should expect them to get a lot worse this year before confidence begins to improve towards the end of the year due to a pseudo stimulus package (carbon tax refunds pumping money into the economy) and lower interest rates.

Companies are busy finalising their first half-year numbers while looking ahead to the next six months. No surprise that they are feeling less and less confident they are going to get anywhere near the [...]

Lessons from a disaster

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:21:11 +0100

I don't speak a word of Italian. But there is something grimly fascinating listening to the dialogue and reading the transcripts of the Italian Coast Guard officer, who with increasing desperation, pleads, demands and then threatens with the captain of the sinking ship to go back on board and save the lives of women, children and those with special needs.

What we understand is that it took about an hour to evacuate the cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, which was carrying more than 4 [...]

Why I’m optimistic about 2012

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 01:29:24 +0100

Right. Here is my pre-Christmas vow, and it has nothing to do with drinking less wine.

I am going to avoid having lunch with anyone before Christmas who trots out a gloomy assessment of next year. Not because I have my head in the sand. It is simply that people are stuck in the same groove. They are using trend lines of the last few years to try and forecast the future. And they are using old news (yes, Europe is yesterday's news) and they are missing the growth story that will unfold n [...]

Australia loses a great entrepreneur

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:06:55 +0100

On Tuesday night Diana Gribble passed away. You may have heard of her; certainly if you worked in the arts and media where she achieved icon status.

Diana sat on a number of prominent boards often as the lone female director in a sea of suits. But it is her role as one of Australia's most successful female entrepreneurs that I want to tell you about today.

Imagine this. It is 1975.Still very much like the Mad Men days. Women in their mid-30s were married, had kids and put wo [...]

Christmas disaster looming

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 02:10:43 +0100

Expect a bloodbath of business failures by Christmas unless the government steps in, drops its fixation with a surplus and produces a small business stimulus package immediately.

The tax loss carry-back proposal doing the rounds today is a good start but this is a big issue.

I am not an alarmist. I run a small business and share with other small business owners around the country a sense of pride in standing on my own two feet.

During the past few months I have been [...]

Five weeks to create something special

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:43:33 +0100

In July last year I almost had a revolt on my hands. I had just told my staff that we were going to launch a sister publication to SmartCompany on September 1.

"Five weeks??," they squealed. "It's impossible. You can't build, design and launch a new publication in five weeks."

"You can't set targets, develop an advertising brief and get the sales team selling advertising partnerships in just five weeks."

"You can't find journalists who can write fantastic content, set up [...]

The age of leadership

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:58:30 +0100

How ironic. On the back page of a national newspaper there is a story about people over 50 being deemed too old by recruiters to recommend for jobs. The same day a survey appears from the Leadership, Employment and Direction (LEAD) which asked 2,600 respondents whether they have any skills shortages and where the shortages are. From a list of 16 potential areas of skill shortages the survey found that leadership was second (after technical areas) and management was sixth.

LEAD chief exe [...]

Quotas are not the only answer

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:18:13 +0100

Gee. Mention board quotas and the army of men who prefer to maintain the status quo start squealing. The spluttering rage expressed in the comments section following the Governor General's comments that Australia may need quotas to force more women onto boards reminds one of the outrage expressed by any ruling class sniffing the unpleasant winds of change.

But why all this focus on boards? Sure. Introduce quotas. Name and shame boards that have no female representatives. There is no ques [...]

What a year!

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:38:11 +0100

What a year! Exhausted? I am. I've already had too much sparkling and it's not even Christmas. I'm about to clock off for the annual holiday: three weeks at the beach, which is just long enough to give you the unnerving feeling - fleeting I should add - that maybe the holiday is never going to end.

It is not all about lying on the beach with a book. I spend a fair bit of time driving teenagers around looking for the best waves and shopping for hordes of boy-men who empty our fridge in [...]

A lesson in perspective

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 01:15:41 +0100

The news business is a brutal mistress. News is continuous, the deadlines are ruthless and the pressure to produce the latest surprising, insightful and deep content that is factually correct is a daily - in fact hourly - challenge.

It is also a highly addictive profession because we love what we do. We can spend long hours talking on phones, chasing stories, bashing out copy - much of it at our desks, looking at screens and keyboards. The temptation is to eat hurriedly and badly, skip e [...]

The spend or save debate

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 01:18:22 +0100

It's the new dinner party conversation.

It starts with the weather, how unseasonal it is and how unfair that we have to suffer it at Christmas. It then moves onto Christmas shopping, the conditions of retail, how truly awful Australian retail websites are, the great deal we just got overseas buying online and then, there it is: the big question of Christmas 2010 that no one knows quite yet how to answer. Will Australians keep saving next year?

It is something we all want to know [...]

The billionaires' distraction tactics

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 01:08:46 +0100

Let's get this straight. About a year ago retail billionaire Gerry Harvey told SmartCompany that online retail sales were a dead end, prompting a huge number of our readers to write in telling Gerry that his website was so bad, they purchase their electronic equipment elsewhere.

Now Harvey and fellow retail billionaire Solly Lew are up in arms demanding the government do something about online retailing which they claim is creating an unlevel playing field and sucking away their livelih [...]

The tipping point

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:32:00 +0100

My sales director was looking pretty spivvy the other day in a smart new business shirt. The collar was crisp, the fit perfect, the tailoring flawless and he looked, as usual, a million dollars.

"Nice shirt, Steve," I said.

"Yeah. I got them hand tailored, three for $120," he told me. "They do great ladies shirts too. I'll give you the brochure."

He left it on my desk at lunchtime and I spent a minute looking for an address before I noticed that the brochure was for a UK [...]