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Small
business must be offered a seat at the table in order
to save the next 10 years of the NSW economy
Decisions
are being made every day for and about the vast small
business community, yet no one’s asking small
business what they think, what they would do or crucially,
how they would steer business out of this economic
mess.
Let
me begin by stating up front that the small business
community understands and accepts the public health
issues and the response by the Government of New South
Wales. However, there is more to this current stage
of the pandemic than biologic and scientific health;
there is our economic health to consider, which will
have far-reaching consequences beyond us being out
of lockdown.
What
is the state of our economic health? This is something
completely missed at the daily 11:00am briefings.
It frustrates the hell out of the small business community
who it affects most, and they feel it’s being
missed in every decision that’s being made on
their behalf.
Small
business is the biggest contributor to the economic
health of NSW. 98% of all NSW businesses are small
business and when I say “businesses”, I
mean people’s jobs, people’s livelihoods,
their retirement and the value of the business they’ve
worked for their whole life.
In
an average year, 210,000 small businesses go out of
business in Australia. NSW accounts for 34% of the
country’s small businesses, which means that
across this state nearly 1400 small business close
down a week in a “normal year”. No one needs
me to tell them that the last eighteen months have
been far from normal. The frightening question these
stats raise is: how many small businesses have gone
to the wall as a result of this pandemic? How many
businesses have caught the business virus? These are
numbers people ought to know.
In
crisis cabinet the government has been looking at
one aspect – public health – that was important
last year and it’s still important now, however,
we’re a lot more mature going through this cycle.
We know more about the effects of lockdowns. We know
the effect it’s having on mental health, on suicide,
depression and the breaking down of communities.
We
get the public health issue, but it cannot be divorced
from the economic health, the two are bound together.
This is why this needs to be addressed. This is why
I say this: you’re missing something, Premier,
and the small business community are available to
offer help and experience.
Small
business citizens of this state need a seat at the
table. What they can bring to the table, is what they
do best, what they do 365 days a year: they boot-up,
suit-up and get on with the business of energising
business. It starts with communication. The small
business community just need to know that they’re
being represented. Who is there right now, listening
for, speaking for and advocating for small business?
There are incredibly smart, capable and intelligent
people in the small business community who would be
a great resource to work with the government on this.
It’s a mightily switched-on and resilient group.
We need a task force of maybe three people representing
the regions and metropolitan Sydney. Arm them with
the statistics, look at the key industries that are
going under, break up New South Wales into different
areas to get a clear and localised picture, then report
back to the government as to what’s actually
happening on the ground in real time, real locations
in relation to the economic health of the small business
community. How has lockdown affected them? Finally,
the most important element: the much-needed road map
to help small business recover.
Premier,
you and the government ask the small business community
to hang on, and they will. You say “trust us”,
and they will. But they must be given hope and that
hope comes from the small business community knowing
that they are an active part of the solution to the
problem that’s devastating them. This because
is no longer just a public health issue, it’s
a rapacious and greedy economic issue.
This
is no longer just a current issue, it’s about
our great state’s future, our kids’ future.
This is not just about today, this is about the next
10 years and the stakeholders want a say in their
destiny.
-Mark
Bouris
News
Mark
Bouris on why everyone in business needs a tough mentor
- 1st April 2019
Celebrated
businessman Mark Bouris says it takes balls to step
outside your nine-to-five job. But you need more than
just bravery.
Good
business people need a good mentor. Source: Supplied by
Mark Bouris, The Mentor The
kind of people who are brave and ballsy enough to step outside the nine-to-five
comfort zone and go it alone in business tend to be confident personalities. Believe
me, you need some self-belief to make it, but one big mistake that a lot of people
make when starting out is believing that they know it all, because nobody does. Sure,
you might have read a few books, done your research, even got a degree, if you’re
the kind of person who thinks that’s going to be useful in the real world,
but the fact is, you don’t know it all, and that’s why having a mentor
is so vital. Two
heads really are better than one, and when one of those heads sits on the broad
shoulders of billionaire Kerry Packer, as it did in the case of my mentor, you
can be sure you’re going to know a lot more when he’s done with you. I
spent several fascinating, and frankly sometimes frightening years working with
Kerry, who was a major investor in Wizard Home Loans early on. And that meant
he was, shall we say, motivated to make time for me. The
people who say that Packer was a hard old bastard are typically those who never
worked closely with him, because if you had you’d know that “hard”
is too brittle a word for how tough he really was. I
met with him every month, for six years, and every single one of those meetings
was like an examination, a stern going-over from his incredible business brain.
And every one of those meetings helped me to grow.
Don’t
imagine that Kerry was the type to sit you down, put an arm around your shoulder
and let you in on the secrets of how to run a successful business. Nor did he
ever tell me what to do.
Legendary
Australian media magnate Kerry Packer served as Mark Bouris’s business mentor.
Source: The Daily Telegraph
No,
Kerry didn’t give me answers, what he gave me instead were questions. Lots
of them, every time we met, and I always had to have my answers ready, because
he would never forget what I’d said the month before, or two years earlier,
because he had an unbelievable memory.
But
it was his questioning, the problems he put to me and the solutions he sent me
out to find, that helped to make me a success. I
know that I was very, very fortunate to have had a mentor like Kerry Packer, but
the fact is there are many, many good mentors out there, who can help you to learn
from their experiences. You
just have to find the right one. That’s
why I want to start a global movement for business owners, connecting people to
mentors. Mentors that can act as subject-matter experts, or even just hold you
accountable for what you said the previous month. Mark
Bouris, AM, is an Australian businessman and the founder of Mentored.com.au,
which gives online access to Australia’s greatest business minds | @markbouris 
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