Mid Market Matters

Scott Iriks is the Director and CEO of Easi, one of the leading and most experienced salary packaging and novated lease providers to some of Australia’s largest Government and private employers. For mid-market business owners, salary packaging is specifically important in terms of what can be done to help your employees package their salary more effectively. More importantly, Scott promotes salary packaging as an essential for employee retention and giving your employees the opportunity to maximise what you pay them.

When pitching salary packaging to small business owners, Scott provides the process as a means to give your employees a pay rise, without incurring any additional costs for the business. Essentially, salary packaging focuses on reducing the amount of tax you pay, by reducing your taxable income. Most commonly packaged is a car, offering the biggest benefit. Yet, the list of what can be salary packaged is extensive, including laptops, airport membership, superannuation, professional subscriptions, living away from home allowance, financial advice, self-education expenses and even groceries.

Scott is dedicated to the financial services industry. He accelerates knowledge, commitment and innovation in his role at Easi, which takes pride in delivering exceptional value for both the employer and the employee. He is an Australian Credit License holder and also runs a consumer asset finance company that is contracted with major insurance providers to provide replacement vehicles and finance to cash settled customers.

Director of Five Feathers Consulting, Nancy Peat, joins this week’s episode to discuss her work as a conflict mediator. In this role, she assists clients when they face communication issues that are having a negative impact on the business with no resolution. Her position is to provide logical, unbiased facilitation to create productive conversation to resolve issues in a financially effective and efficient way. Before mediation, Nancy’s main background was in financial services. She has more than 30 years working in management training, consultative advice, and accounting firms. She also worked in insurance and financial planning, dealing with businesses on unplanned successions. After a career transition, Nancy decided on mediation, as she had effectively been practicing it for years. She obtained her national accreditation in Mediation (NMAS) and started her business Five Feathers Consulting shortly after.

Behaviour specialist, Bri Williams from People Patterns, joins this week's episode to discuss behaviour change. Bri’s reputation has gained her the title of “The Behaviour Explainer”, as she specialises in working with clients to maximise interaction using behavioural economics. People Patterns is one of Australia’s first consultancies to apply behavioural economics to everyday business and personal effectiveness. Primarily, Bri identifies how to get people to do what you want them to do. This not only helps overcome resistance, but also makes business less frustrating and projects better results. Her expertise lies in the knowledge of making or breaking habits, influencing internal stakeholders and investors and delivering better conversion from sales and marketing activities. With an extensive background in finance, accounting, HR and product management, Bri has recognised a through line in all of these fields: psychology. However usually, this dimension is overlooked. She claims that at the core of every challenge we face in business is changing someone’s behaviour from what they are currently doing, to what you want them to do. This lens brings human resistance to the fore so you can easily identify the issue, and how you are going to address it. Bri’s experience lies in the best and most efficient way to accomplish this.

Joining the podcast from Michigan, engineer turned sales expert and CEO of the Re-Wired Group Bob Moesta introduces the topic of demand side sales. Consistently, he has found the number one issue professionals face is sales, despite this being at the cornerstone of every business. What's more, most professionals find the selling process extremely uncomfortable. Bob insists helping people find the fit between your product and your service is key to sales, in addition to the notion of serving people, rather than selling people. This understanding of why we buy to improve sales skills is discussed in depth in his book, Demand Side Sales. Bob has helped launch more than 3,500 new products, services and businesses across nearly every industry including defence, automotive, and financial services. He is a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Entrepreneurship, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and The Harvard Business School. His book is an Amazon #1 seller in the Small Business Sales & Selling category and a sequel is in the pipeline proposing to spotlight the practical side of sales, articulating from a marketing and customer success perspective.

After 30 years’ experience across professional services fields of engineering, urban development, ecology, mining, planning, surveying and landscape architecture, Roger Collins-Woolcock is an expert in his field of business development and organic growth. Over the past three decades, he has taken on many roles, from founder to business owner, organically growing businesses in both regional towns and capital cities across Australia. In this episode, Roger discusses the significance of client relationships, and the continuum between price and relationships in business. He claims if you’re not growing your business, you’re not creating opportunity for your people, and if you don’t provide opportunity, they will find it elsewhere, with other companies. For Roger, this growth that creates opportunity is the key, and this is the domain in which most of his work resides.

Michael Gorton is one of the Founders of TelaDoc, the world’s leading telemedicine company which has gone on to save thousands of lives during the Coronavirus pandemic. He discusses the demand for Teladoc in 2020 compared to the countless challenges and adversity they faced when starting out in 2002. Michael also converses his work as the CEO of Back to Space, a transmedia company designed to encourage future generations to develop an interest in engineering, science and space. He is a 13-time Serial Entrepreneur, and from this experience recalls the key to being successful with your business is planning, people and persistence. Michael has several decades of experience building companies in the music, telecom, energy and healthcare industries. Not only a successful entrepreneur, with his start-ups creating more than $3.4 billion in wealth, he is also a best-selling author, a 3rd degree black belt in karate and has completed a bicycle adventure across the US of about 5,000 miles.

In this episode, Brad Giles discusses his work as a leadership coach and his passion for growing mid-market businesses. His interest has led him to uncover the crucial differences between a good CEO and a great CEO. Brad goes through the five results that define a great leader, which include having a higher percentage of top performers, higher retention, higher productivity, and consistent growth and results. Brad also advocates the importance of getting a professional, high quality business coach to own the strategic planning process. This is vital for business growth, as it allows a different, highly experienced set of eyes on the business which will push the business as a catalyst for growth.

In this episode, host Craig West is joined by Michel Clifton, who has 20 years of experience in trade and defence appointments across North Asia, primarily in Greater China and Japan. Michael shares his intelligence dealing with Asia, trade, export and finance. Phillip Volk, key partner in Succession Plus in Victoria also joins the discussion. For business owners seeking to improve relations with China and the Greater Asian economy, Michael advocates the key is to engage with a boarder network, may this be Chambers of Commerce, banks, lawyers or peak organisations. He recites there is rich experience, knowledge and endless sources of support out there, and businesses need to be more prepared to extend their hand in search of it. Michael has worked directly with the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade), is fluent in both Chinese and Japanese, is the president of the Australia China Business Council in NSW and the Principal of MJC Asia Consulting.

Michael Masterson, Managing Director for EverEdge Australia and New Zealand, speaks about the importance of valuing the intangible assets of your business. In this episode, he recounts how to identify and build value into these assets, underlining the key issue being that intangible assets are often ignored because you can’t see them. He advises that you can’t value what you don’t know or understand, so works in identifying and leveraging these assets to build a competitive edge. Michael promotes that you need to identify the strategic value of your intangible assets by not only considering what they are worth to you, but what they are worth to someone else.

What impacts your business impacts you!

Mark Napper, Business Adviser with over 25 years of experience in senior management roles, describes himself as a business alchemist. Mark understands that business owners and their businesses are heavily intertwined. Owners often become enslaved to their business instead of having their business serve them. Mark strives to change this by focusing on positively transforming and impacting his clients’ lives when transforming their businesses. Mark does this through acting as a fresh pair of eyes to his clients who provides stimulus and guidance when old strategies no longer work or when experiencing unfamiliar circumstances. He also delves deep into what business owners aim to extract from their business and works with them towards achieving this goal; he tailors his clients’ business vision to fit this personal vision. In turn, this helps move businesses from a stagnant phase to a continuous growth phase. In this episode, Mark also shares the key ingredients for a sustainable business recipe. His number one tip for business owners is to look into the future – answer questions such as what you want to accomplish, where you want to be and look at what’s coming.