BUSINESS INTERVIEWS

I am about to start my business interviews with the owners of micro, small and medium business enterprises.  Generally they will be located in and around Canberra but the occasional one in other cities is also likely, as I tend to travel a bit and sometimes people visit Canberra.

But before I start to blog the interviews, I need to set the scene because I ask them to complete a very short survey and to complete a “chart” of their business’ “rhythm” over time and these need some explanation.

Here are the survey questions:

1. In what Year did you start your business?

2. What did you do to prepare yourself for starting and managing your business? [you can select more than one]

• Born into it
• Courses and Training
• Experience in Other Small Businesses
• Experience in Big Business
• Mentor
• Family
• None
• Other

3. Do you have a written business plan?

• No
• No but it is in My Head
• Yes

4. Do you follow the business plan?

• Don’t Have One
• No
• Sort Of but not Strictly
• Yes
• Yes but Don’t Really Review it Much
• Yes and Review Regularly

5. Have things turned out the way you thought they would?

• Yes
• Pretty Much
• Not Really
• Not at All

6. What do you believe are your biggest business challenges?

7. What do you believe are your biggest personal challenges?

8. In what direction do you wish grow? [you can select more than one]

• Don’t really want to
• Revenue
• Turnover
• Geographically
• Export
• Other

9. At what point do you feel you will get rid of the business? [you can select more than one]

• Never
• To Children when Ready
• Retirement
• Sale at Price Goal Achievement
• Go Public
• Sale to Business Partner
• Other

10. If you could give one piece of advice to a prospective business owner – what would that be?

My intent is to publish the graphs of consolidated results at various points in the future ...say at 10 interviews, 20 interviews and so on.  I am really quite interested to see what the responses are.

Also during the interview, I ask them to draw the “rhythm” of their business against the following four graphs:

Each of the graphs has a positive and negative vertical dimension with the years they have been in business going from left to right.  I don’t put scales on the axis as the amounts are not important.  The trends are what I seek.  They will use a big red texta to draw their rhythm.  So what do I mean with each graph:

• Success.  This is about their success from their perspective no matter what that success criteria might be – financial, satisfaction, growth or a combination of course.
• Motivation/Desire.  How has their motivation and desire for the business and working on the business been?  It will be interesting to look at this in relation to the Success graph directly above it.
• Systemisation.  Getting all your business systems in place is very important for some business types and less so for others.  I expect some variations based in the business type (retail, consulting etc) and whether they bought into a business or developed one from scratch for instance.
• Cash Flow.  No matter what your ROI is (see ROI-1 and ROI-2), you need to make money.  Cash flow is so important that I believe it deserves a graph on its own.

Over time, I hope to draw some correlations with various business issues ... what .... I am not sure yet and don’t wish to pre-empt the facts.

If you would like to participate in some way, feel free to contact me of course.

Lukim All