Bright Sparks Podcast cover art

Bright Sparks Podcast

By: David Thomson
  • Summary

  • The place where you get one actionable lesson each week to help build your electrical or HVAC business.
    © 2023 Bright Sparks Podcast
    Show More Show Less
Episodes
  • 3 Critical Questions for Sparkies to Ask their Accountants
    Jun 13 2022

    Over the years I’ve had plenty of new clients come in the door who are, frankly, pissed off with their existing accountants because they haven't been told these things until it was too late and also, to be honest there have been a few occasions when I should have been more forward in raising these things with some of my clients - nobody’s perfect.

    In this episode I give you three questions that your account should be helping you answer:

    1. “How come I’m making profits but I never seem to have any cash?”

    2. “Why do I have to wait until the last minute to know what my tax situation is going to be?” 

    3. “What are some simple things I can do to increase my profits?” 

    And If you're not getting answers to these questions, I tell you what to do about that...


    Show More Show Less
    8 mins
  • Choosing and Using Workflow Management Software
    May 30 2022

    I’ll bet that there’s a lot of things about your business that your great grandparents would recognise. Customer service, dealing with suppliers and managing employees. Some fundamental things simply never change. 

    So, what’s a workflow management system for? Well, in a word - efficiency.  That's because the alternative to having a workflow management system is to simply keep all that information in your head, which of course is not a good place to keep it, because it tends to crowd out the things in your head that are much more important - like dealing with customers and suppliers and planning things and actually getting work done.

    The variety of software solutions in the marketplace is absolutely dazzling. There’s:

    • Simpro
    • Tradify
    • ServiceM8
    • Fergus
    • FieldInsight
    • Aroflow


    And the list just goes on…


    Now, most businesses find themselves in one of three situations. Firstly, you might be looking at introducing your first cloud based system. Or, you might already have a system that you’re not happy with and you’re looking to change. Or you might be happy with your existing system but you can see gaps in how effectively it’s working for you. 

    Regardless of where you’re at - I’m about to tell you where you should start when you want to choose, or replace or improve your workflow system.

    This is what you do:

    Find yourself a quiet place for ten or fifteen minutes. Make yourself a list of everything that you want your workflow system to provide a solution for.

    Here’s a sample of ten things that you might find on your list. Your list will be different and probably longer but it will show you what I mean.

    When you’ve created your draft list, take a look at the websites for various software vendors and see what other features are available. There are probably things that you’ve forgotten about.

    And when you’ve set up your list, mark each item as “must have”or “would be good to have” or “not very important”.  Then, if you’re looking at investing in a new system, you’ll have a great starting point for evaluating each of the candidates. And, if you already have a functioning system you should use this list to compare with what you already have so you can narrow down the areas you need to focus on.

    Choosing workflow management software is a big deal, and changing that software is an even bigger deal. And while you as a business owner are on the hook for making the final decision, you shouldn't have to go through that process without help. You should lean on your trusted advisor for help with making the right choice. Your accountant is someone who should be able to bring an independent, fresh pair of eyes to the problem. If they're any good, they’ve probably worked through this process before.


    Now before I wrap up I just want to mention the issue of price. In the past, when I’ve been talking with clients about selecting workflow management software, sometimes the very first question I get when we’re looking at an alternative is “how much does it cost”. Now that’s fair enough, cost is not irrelevant. But I want to make the point to you that your first consideration should be the cost of getting it wrong. A system that fails to efficiently deliver one or more of the basics on that list you made is going to cost you big time.  

    Remember, your workflow management system is something you should be interacting with a lot. It’s a critical tool, and never something you should cheap-out on.

    I hope you found all that useful. If you’re interested in adopting or switching you workflow management, feel free to give us a call. We'd love to help.


    Show More Show Less
    6 mins
  • How to Grow
    May 22 2022

    If you don’t have a plan for growth, you probably won't grow. On the other hand, it’s not impossible. 

    You can be totally clueless about growing a business and sometimes it just happens anyway. 

    But, normally that kind of unplanned  growth will only happen when two things are present – and those are when you've got plenty of spare capacity and there just happens to be plenty of demand. 

    Now just for argument’s sake, let's say you don't have any kind of plan and you end up growing anyway.  What’s that likely to look like?

    Well, it can look like two different things. Either, you’ll get very slow growth, which is generally unsatisfactory, or you’ll get uncontrolled explosive growth. 

    So, If you haven't planned for growth and it just happens anyway, the results are going to be the same whether it's slow or explosive.  The only difference is that with explosive growth everything happens a lot faster. But in the end, you get the same issues whether it's fast or slow. 

    Alright, what are these issues?

    A big business is not like a smaller business except for being bigger. And being bigger does not necessarily mean being more complicated. Although we all know often it does mean being more complicated because there are more moving parts. One thing is always true though, when you get bigger, things change. They get different.

     And what happens when things get different? The answer is that you need to adapt. 

    Let me tell you a story about a client I had a few years ago who grew without adapting. Spoiler alert - it doesn't end well.

     This bloke had a small business repairing trailers for freight companies. It was just him and one other guy. They turned over about $500,000 annually. Then he put in some tenders for some big jobs and suddenly he had $4M of work lined up. Within 18 months he was bankrupt and had lost his house. I was amazed that he even lasted that long. 

     Now let’s be clear.  There was nothing wrong with the tenders - and in fact there were decent healthy profit margins built in there. He didn’t get robbed.

     And when he first told me about these tenders I said to him, “we need to sit down and work out exactly all the changes you need to make to this business, so you don’t fall in a heap”. And his exact words to me were “don’t worry about it - we’ll sort it out as we go along”. And I said, “no you won’t, because when this thing gets started, you won’t have time”. But I couldn’t persuade him to invest the time upfront to avoid the misery afterwards.

     So, what went wrong? Well, virtually nothing that wasn’t totally predictable.

    He went in undercapitalised.  We could have avoided that if we’d sorted his lines of credit before he began the contracts.

     Then he tried to make every decision himself. He suddenly had to employ twelve guys but none of them was a foreman. Chaos took over. The accounts were a mess. He couldn’t handle the accounts payable even though he had the cash to pay - so materials got cut off. Scheduling went out the window. Workflow went from “what do we do today?” to “how do we fix everything that went wrong yesterday?”

     It fell apart. And the old saying applied. “Failing to plan means planning to fail”. So, what can we learn from this?

     Well, we know that humans are psychologically very resistant to changing things that are already working well. But the problem is that when our businesses grow, we just try to do the same thing - but more of it. We stretch ourselves too thin. And we have this terrible tendency to ignore new problems and challenges that we haven’t seen before. We just mentally discount them because they’ve never been an issue in the past and our monkey brain tells us we should just ignore trivial things. But that’s why humans are smarter than monkeys, least many of us are. We have the ability to pl

    Show More Show Less
    7 mins

More from the same

Author

What listeners say about Bright Sparks Podcast

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.