How to Get Back on Track with Motivation & Habits

It happens to all of us: you are going strong with a project, with learning something new, with a new habit or two … and things go sideways. You get derailed.

This is a critical junction. If you let yourself quit, all your time and effort up until now has been for naught. If you can get back on track, things can be great again.

Most people don’t know how to get back on track, and so fail repeatedly.

Today we are going to share a simple method that works.

 

The Key Principle

Here’s the key idea to understand: getting off track and getting back on track is all about mood.

When we get off track, it’s because things that affect our mood as it relates to the project or habit. For example:

  1. We get interrupted because of travel, illness, visitors, crises, etc. This interruption makes us feel discouraged. It’s not the interruption that is the obstacle, it’s the feeling of discouragement that gets in the way.
  2. We get tired because of travel, illness, a lack of sleep, etc. … and the tiredness makes us feel unmotivated towards our project or habit. Tiredness is a huge obstacle, because when you’re tired, you don’t feel motivated, your mood isn’t as good, and you just want to comfort yourself with distractions and food (among other things).
  3. When things aren’t going well, we can get very discouraged — we’re not losing weight on our diet, exercise is harder than we fantasized about, language learning is very difficult, etc.
  4. When things get busy in our lives, we often have to skip the habit, which can make us feel bad about ourselves.

When our mood, as it relates to the project or habit, is bad … we often feel like quitting, and don’t even want to think about the problem. We avoid thinking about it, turn away from it, and seek other comforts.

The Method

So how do you get back on track? Here are the methods that work.

  1. Admit there’s a problem, and ask a key question. We often want to ignore the problem, not even think about it. But this only encourages quitting, and doesn’t help the problem. All we have to do is simply say, “I’m feeling bad about this. I’m discouraged and thinking about quitting.” Then we can ask ourselves, “Do I really want to quit, or is there a good reason to get back on track?”
  2. Take one small, easy step. If you have good reason to get back on track, don’t think about the entire project of getting back on track. That’s too much, and can be overwhelming, which means we’ll never start. Instead, just think of one thing you can do. For example, if you’ve fallen off the meditation habit … can you meditate for 30 seconds right now? 10 seconds? If you stopped listening to your language tapes, can you just do 2 minutes of the tapes today? If you stopped doing yoga or bodyweight exercises, can you just do a few minutes right now? It might seem ridiculously easy, but that’s exactly what you need to do. Something tiny, anything. This is the key step, so don’t take it lightly.
  3. Focus on getting any kind of victories. If you do 30 seconds, 2 minutes, whatever … you’ve had success! This is a victory, and a victory changes your mood. If you’ve been trying to play chess and you’ve been losing and become very discouraged, then focus on doing some tactics training for one minute. That’s a victory! What other kinds of victories can you get? Look for anything: just doing another minute later today or tomorrow morning, doing a little practice on your commute, reading a little about the topic online, anything you can do. Nurture your mood — victories change your mood. Defeats and tiredness can bring it down. So see what you can do to lift your mood up, including talking to someone else about it or making it more social, playing some good upbeat music to make it fun, making some tea or lighting some candles to make it more enjoyable, etc.
  4. Build long-term strength with small steps. If you build little victories, take small steps, and nurture your mood as in the previous steps … you’ll start to have a more solid habit or motivation for your project. After awhile, you become more robust, so that a little defeat won’t really matter too much. You have room for some tiredness now and then. You’ll be strong and won’t need to worry about all of the little mood changes. But it takes a bunch of small steps and victories to get there. So focus on one small step, one victory, at a time. Don’t worry about the long term, just focus on the short term. And the long-term strength will come.

This isn’t a difficult method — anyone can do it. All it takes is a small admission of struggle, a willingness to ask whether you want to get back on track, and a focus on small steps and victories. That’s doable, and awesome.

The 4 Keys to Learning Anything

Learning something new can be exciting and scary at the same time. It is an important life skill to learn how to learn. But if you keep running up against a few key problems below, keep reading for the solutions:

  1. Becoming overwhelmed. The more you learn, the more you see there is to learn. The beginner doesn’t know how much there is to study, but as you start to explore, you find new caverns, and they are immense. Then as you explore those caverns, you find even bigger ones. It can become overwhelming, and lots of people eventually give up because of this feeling.
  2. Failure feels bad. If you want to learn to play chess, you’ll lose a lot at first. Then you get better, and lose a lot. In fact, no matter how good you get, you’ll probably lose a bunch of times. This happens not just with games, but with learning languages, physical skills, academic subjects — you’ll fail a lot. There are ways to set it up so that you rarely fail, but then you’re not really learning much.
  3. It can feel like you’re just treading water. In a fantasy world, you’d learn at a breakneck pace, downloading new skills and knowledge into your brain like they do in the Matrix. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. You read and read, or practice and practice, and a lot of the time you barely get better. Other people seem to be learning at twice your speed! Sometimes it seems like you’re not learning anything. This can be really discouraging.
  4. There’s always a strong feeling of uncertainty. Humans don’t like the feeling of uncertainty, for the most part. We avoid it, become afraid of it, get angry or frustrated. But when you try to learn a new skill, it’s almost all uncertainty. You constantly forget things, you don’t understand anything, or when you think you do understand, you try it and it turns out you didn’t understand at all. This feeling of uncertainty causes a lot of people to give up.

OK, so we all want to learn skills — new languages, programming skills, physical skills, history, math, writing, games, so much more. But these four problems stand in our way.

Let’s take them on. We’re going to discover four keys to overcoming these four problems, so that we can tackle anything we want to learn.

First Key: Small Focuses

Yes, it’s true: there’s a vast amount of things to learn, and it can be overwhelming. But that’s true of life itself — there’s so much to see and do, and no one can ever do it all. All we can do is one step at a time.

So we have to not focus on all the innumerable huge caverns that have yet to be explored … but the ground right in front of us.

What small area can we study right now?

What small focus can we conquer? What little area can we explore?

Ignore all the vast uncharted territories for now, shut the rest of the world out, and just be in this one place. Just study this one thing. One small step at a time, a few small steps each day, and we can explore a lot over time.

Second Key: Flip Failure on Its Head

We don’t know that our knowledge is wrong until we test it out and see whether it works. We can’t truly learn something new until we try and fail a bunch of times.

We all learned to walk that way … wobbly, falling down, until we got the hang of it. That’s also how we learned to talk, to feed ourselves with a spoon, etc. Sure, we had the benefit of being able to see examples of doing it right, but we had to try and fail a whole lot of times before we got it.

Unfortunately, at some point we start to fear failure, but that fear is just holding us back. Failure is really the learning process. Every loss at chess, every falling down when we’re learning a backflip … those are lessons.

So instead of looking at failure as “bad,” we have to flip it on its head. Failure is a lesson, an opportunity to get better, a wise old teacher telling us where we need to focus our learning efforts.

When you fail, smile and say thank you for the lesson.

Third Key: Find Enjoyment in the Process

It’s a tough thing when we feel we’re not making progress, that things are moving too slowly. We want to get to expert level (or at least “advanced beginner”) as quickly as we can, and when it takes five times as long, we can get frustrated.

The answer is to forget about the pace of our progress, but just focus on enjoying the process of learning.

It’s like when you go on a hike, and you’re fixed on getting to your beautiful destination … but it’s a long journey, and you get frustrated by how long it’s taking. Instead, focusing on the journey itself is a better way of traveling. Enjoy the scenery, the exertion, the beauty of each step.

When we’re learning, instead of focusing on where we want to be, we can enjoy the particular focus we’re studying right now. We can be grateful for where we are, for having the opportunity to learn at all. We can enjoy the falling down, and any progress we’ve made so far.

Whenever we find ourselves wishing things were moving faster, that’s a good sign to change focus to where we are.

Fourth Key: Learn to Relish Uncertainty

I think the uncertainty of learning something new, of being in such a foreign place, is probably the most difficult thing. We don’t like that uncertainty, and we usually shy away from it.

With conscious practice, we can change our feeling about uncertainty. We can start to find the joy in this place of not knowing, of not being in complete control, of not having solid ground under our feet. That might sound weird, but it’s possible.

Let’s take a few examples:

  • You’re learning to play Go, and you are playing your first few games. You keep losing, you don’t have any idea where you should play, you worry that every stone you place is a big mistake. This is a place of uncertainty. Can you enjoy this process of trying something and not knowing how it will turn out? Be curious about what might happen when you play your moves? See it as an exciting opportunity to experiment, to explore, to play and have fun!
  • When you’re learning a language, you might be deeply afraid of speaking, because you don’t know what you’re doing (uncertainty). But if you don’t speak, you’ll never learn. So instead of fearing this uncertainty, you dive in and make a complete fool of yourself. Better to be a fool who’s learning than the chicken who doesn’t learn anything new. It’s like dancing wildly with random moves in the middle of a crowd … just have fun being silly! You can do the same thing with speaking a new language — try it, look foolish, enjoy this place of wild abandon.
  • When you’re learning to play music, you can get stuck on the certainty of learning songs from sheet music, because it’s easy to just follow pre-written instructions. But you don’t really learn until you put the sheet music away and try to play the song on your own. And you really learn when you try to play without following someone else’s pre-written music — just playing your own song, riffing and making it up as you play. Of course, it’s much more uncertain, and will probably suck. But so what? Just have fun and make stuff up. Relish this place of creation and uncertainty.

So uncertainty can be enjoyed if we think of it as play. If we think of it as creation, learning, exploration, curiosity, finding out, experimenting, openness and newness. It’s courage.

Be courageous today, and put yourself in a place of uncertainty. And then let your heart fill up with the freedom of not knowing and flying without a plan.

Why Government Valuations Aren’t a True Reflection of Market Value

Written by Chris Gemmell

The latest G.V.’s are out. Here’s some information to help understand them.

  • Legal Framework – Assessing GV’s

In terms of NZ statute law, a local territorial authority (Auckland Council) has the responsibility of preparing and maintaining the district valuation roll data for the Valuer General. The Valuer General under the Rating Valuations Act 1998 is empowered to provide individual Government Valuations for each property on that District Valuation Roll once every 3 years.

The purpose of this valuation is to create a basis for paying rates for Council under the Local Government Act.

There is provision and a set period to object to a Government Valuation either up or down, with the onus of proof on the land owner to provide evidence that the assessed Government Valuation amount is not in line with market value, or if there is a rates postponement due to a different land use. Objections need to be lodged within 6 weeks, that is by 16th January 2018.

  • How are GV’s Assessed?

Traditionally, the former Valuation Department carried the responsibility of updating records of each property within the district roll, where each property was physically inspected once every 3 years and recording any changes to the properties such as alterations, additions or renovations. Of course there are not the time nor financial resources to complete such inspections now and the process has changed to a computer-generated mass appraisal system and methodology. Accordingly, Government Valuations have become more and more inaccurate over time.

This has been exacerbated by landowners whom may have side stepped the building consent process where unauthorized works may have been completed & records are not updated.

  • So how are Government Valuations Assessed every 3 years?

The methodology is relatively simple, whereby the land value apportionment is assessed on an “Unimproved Value” – that is, as if no improvements have been made on the land. If the dwelling spans the title, then they will often value the land content high due to the properties potential of being subdivided if the dwelling was not in place. Accordingly the improvements percentage can be ridiculously low or a nominal value.

The value of improvements is calculated based on building industry accepted replacement costs, depending on size and quality of construction materials used. Then an allowance for depreciation or obsolescence is applied due to dwelling age to provide an added value figure. The summation of both land value and improvement value equals capital value which is the figure upon which the rates are struck. (North Shore used to be rated on Land Value).

The capital values are then arbitrarily indexed up or down by the average percentage gain (or occasionally loss) in the immediate street and wider neighbourhood based on sales records in the preceding 3 years. The computer then spits out the new G.V.

Inaccuracies happen over time. Floor areas can be wildly inaccurate and also G.V.’s do not include chattels (carpets, light fittings, drapes, dishwashers etc) – often resulting in a slightly lower figure compared to a property’s true market value.

As a general rule, G.V.’s are often on the low side, however this does depend on whether market values have increased or decreased since the effective date of valuation and variance factors stated above.

  • So how has your latest G.V. stacked up ?  

Effective 1st July, some suburbs G.V.’s appear to be slightly high now in relation to the slowing real estate market, whilst a number of suburbs the GV’s are on the low-side to the tune of 5-10%.

Sometimes buyers will ask:  What is the latest G.V. for properties that we are selling?  This is to provide some sort of guide, particularly if the property is being sold without a price guide, such as with Auction.  

The more reliable way for buyers to gain an accurate perception of market value is to complete their own market research by attending open homes and auctions.

A well informed real estate agent should be able to provide a list of recent sales in the area, as they must provide an owner with a comprehensive written market assessment prior to listing the property on the market. This is law under the Real Estate Agents Act 2008. Alternatively an independent Registered Valuer can be engaged.

Naturally if you would like any more information about G.V.’s or market values in your area, please do not hesitate to call or e-mail me.

Do you want more quality leads in your business?

Are you ready to grow your business, but you aren’t sure where to start with lead generation?

Does it seem like sometimes it is feast and sometimes it is famine when it comes to sales leads?

What if I told you that there was an exact step by step road map that you could use to assure a steady stream of leads for your business?

Well there is! And the best news is that you can download it for free!

Get your copy of the 15 Point Road Map here.

Why do you want it?

The road map gives you 15 actionable ways to obtain a consistent flow of quality leads. They are proven to work for any business type and are known to attract the right kind of people to your brand.

Many you can put into place with little or no advertising budget.

The 15 points are designed to take your ideal client through a journey of prospect to paying customer. They will position you as an expert in your field and make your ideal client realise how much they need your business.

You will also be able to join an online community filled with likeminded business owners who share information and support. This community is run by myself and 4 other carefully selected experts in lead generation, social media, content creation, systems and graphic design.

So whatever your question might be, we can answer it!

Don’t miss out on the chance to grow your business.

Download the 15 point road map today and your ideal clients will be beating down the door to work with you.

How You Can Effectively Use Blog Posts To Grow Your Business

Writing blogs or articles can be a great way to gain exposure for your business, but they also prove that you truly are an expert in your field. But how do you write one and use it effectively?

Well, there are a few key ingredients that you need to include to make the article valuable and worth reading. Once you have your piece written, you need to work out where you are going to use it for maximum exposure. Then you need to follow it up with another article, and then another – consistency is key to staying front of mind with your clients.

So let’s look at how you can create a valuable and effective blog or article.

What Are The Key Ingredients Of A Good Blog Post?

There are several elements that you need to include to make your blog a good one. They are…

A Catchy Title:

People will decide whether they want to read an article based on its title. So make sure you pick a catchy one that tells your readers what the article is about.

Great Images:

Words on a page are boring, but if they are enhanced with an appropriate image then they become a lot more interesting!

Hook Them In

Grab your reader’s attention with a bold statement, a question or something that is going to compel them to read more. You can then use great storytelling to keep them interested in the rest of your article.

Use Headings

People tend to scan when they read, so break your text up with headings and subheadings. This will allow your readers to look at the parts that interest them.

Useful Information

Choosing the right topic is vital for a successful blog. Then, within your content, give your readers actionable steps that they can take to solve a problem. There must be some key takeaways that they can use going forward.

Keywords

You want your content to be found online, so use appropriate keywords that are popular and relevant in your industry. But in saying that, your first priority is that the content reads well for an actual real-life human, not just a search engine.

Have a Goal

When you write, have an objective in mind. Do you want to build your sense of community by encouraging your readers to take action? Ask them a question, or ask them to comment on your blog. Do you want to inform and educate, or promote a new service? Make sure your writing falls in line with your marketing goals.

Call To Action

If your reader has taken the time to read your whole article, they are obviously interested in what you have to say. Don’t let them slip through your fingers. Instead, recognise your blog’s lead generation power with a call to action.

Where Should You Put Your Blog?

Now that you have this wonderfully crafted goldmine of information, don’t let it go to waste. You want to use it in as many places as you can, to reach as many prospective clients as possible. The main idea of a blog post is to gain exposure for your business, so don’t scrimp on the shares.

Share it in these places:

  • On your website
  • Link it to your social media sites
  • Include it in your regular newsletter
  • Add it to your marketing collateral
  • Use it in your sales or pitching documents
  • Print out an attractive hard copy and hand it out at networking events
  • Get creative and see where else you could make it available

Consistency Is Key

On average, someone will need to see your brand 5 to 7 times before they are likely to remember it. So one blog post is a great start, but it is only the beginning of the journey. You need to produce consistent content to be remembered by cold leads.

We recommend that you have a consistent content marketing plan in place. Having a plan makes it easier to know what you are going to post, and when you are going to post it. You can devise a targeted marketing approach with a series of articles that build on each other. Together they form a comprehensive package of client problems you can solve and show how you can best serve your clients.

If you love the sound of this marketing technique but aren’t sure when you would find the time to write one blog, let alone 5 to 7, then let us do the hard work for you. At Big Rock Communications, we will work with you to devise a fantastic content plan that will showcase your business. Then our talented writers will create the content on your behalf. Each bespoke article is written specifically for your business and is not available to anyone else.

You will barely have to lift a finger to have consistent, high-quality content that generates exposure and business leads. Check out more information on the bespoke content package here.

5 Steps To Get More Clients

Sometimes it seems like such a challenge to get new clients in the door. You feel like you have tried everything and nothing works.

What if I told you that you could get more clients in just 5 steps? Yes, it sounds good doesn’t it. The secret is to stop fighting over the small percentage of people that are ready to buy now and start focusing your energy on converting potential clients instead. You also need to value your time so that you get a great return on your investment.

So how do you do all of that? You follow the 5 step process of awareness, engagement, subscribe, leads and the result is clients.

Stop Fighting At The Top

The first step to getting more clients is to stop fighting for the people that are ready to buy right now. The market works as a buyer’s pyramid. It starts with your cold leads at the bottom, those that aren’t interested in your products at all, and those that think they aren’t interested. That makes up a whopping 60% of the buyers out there. You shouldn’t waste your time on these people.

The next tiers are those that are not thinking about your product or services right now (30%) and those that are open to it (7%). These are the tiers that you want to focus on. They will take a little bit of work to convert, but in the process of converting them, you build a great relationship of trust and prove to them that you really do know your stuff.

The top tier is reserved for people that are ready to buy right now. But that top tier only contains 3% of the market. Yes they are ready to buy, but everyone else in your industry is clamouring for that 3% too. So the chances of you being able to land them as a client are very unlikely.

You can read more about how the buyers pyramid works in our recent blog post.

The Value Of Your Time

Before you can implement the 5 step process, you need to understand the value of your time. You also need to be able to deduce which are the opportunities worth pursuing, and which you should let slide.

Campaigning hard to win a client that will net you $20 an hour is probably not a good investment of your time. The effort you put in far outweighs the return that you receive. Instead, if you focus your energies on clients that can afford to pay you what you are worth, you will see an excellent return on your time.

Consider the lifetime value of an ideal client and also your conversion rate of turning a potential client into a paying one. If you multiply the two figures together, you end up with your Opportunity Value. For example, if your ideal client was worth $2500 and you converted one in four clients, then each of the sales meetings you attend with these potentials would equate to $625.

When you are considering the leads to focus on, ask yourself if it is a $625 opportunity, or is it something far less? That will dictate where your focus should be.

The Five Step Process

Now that you know who to focus on, let’s look at how you get those clients…

1: Awareness: Begin to build your business presence in the market. Clients cannot come to you if they don’t know who you are. So pound the pavements with networking, build your social media following, post valuable blog content on your website, and just get your message out there.

2: Engagement: Encourage your followers to engage with you and begin building that relationship of trust. That means getting them to like and comment on your social media content. Post great, valuable content that your readers will want to engage with. Prompt them to engage by asking questions.

3: Subscribe: Ask your readers to subscribe to your list. Whether it be the promise of an irresistible lead magnet, the prospect of receiving a regular letter full of useful information, or a free consult. Once they are on your list, you have the authority to email them. Teach them about your business and how you can solve their problems.

4: Leads: Give good service and good quality information via email marketing and then ask your subscribers to respond directly to you. Do this via a targeted engagement email that requires a response from your subscribers.

5: Clients: By taking the time to build a solid foundation with your prospects, they will become engaged subscribers. Engaged subscribers then turn into loyal clients that don’t just buy from you once, but become regular clients that rave about your services and refer you to others.

The Time Investment

The process definitely works, but it takes time to implement and see results. So you need to consider the kind of businessperson you are when it comes to time. Is it your own time that you are gambling with, do you delegate to a team member, or do you prefer to outsource to the experts who know what they are doing?

If you are the business owner that likes to delegate to an expert because you know they will get results, then you need to get in touch with Lara for a marketing consultation. In no time at all, Lara can devise a plan that will help you get a steady stream of clients rolling in the door.

 

Five Key Metrics For Any Business

If you want your business to grow and move forward, it is important to know where you are currently, so that you can see where you need to get to.

Regardless of whether you are taking the journey by yourself, delegating to a team, or outsourcing to an expert, there are five key metrics you should be measuring in your business. They are – attention, leads, calls, profits and frequency. Once you have that information in hand, then you can make a concrete plan for how to reach your goals.

Let’s have a look at those metrics in more detail.

Know Where You Are In Your Business

Knowing where you are in your business is really important. Because if you you don’t know what your current position is, how will you be able to set goals and move towards them?

You can assess your current position by checking a couple of things. The first is your financials. This will give you a great picture of your current income, your current costs and what is leftover at the end. You should also have a look at the resources and capabilities you have on hand. Where do your skills lie, what is your business expertise, do you have other team members with special skills that can help you?

Once you know what you have, it is time to look at any gaps in your business. Do you have a lack of knowledge in a certain area, are you missing resources, or is there a lack of funds to do what you want to do? Finally you need to look at what is working well in your business and what could use some improvement. You can build on the positive aspects and ensure you don’t make the same mistakes again.

Once you understand where you are now, you can start measuring the 5 key metrics for business growth.

The 5 Key Metrics

These are the 5 areas of your business that you need to measure and track. By tracking them, you will gain a great understanding of how your business is operating. Once you have all the knowledge, you can use it to your advantage and grow your business.

1: Attention

The first thing to measure is the attention that your business receives. By that I mean, getting your business name and message in front of your target audience. You need to track how much attention your business receives through the various channels of exposure – social media, email marketing, website views, and even offline attention out in the community. This will help you find your most popular channels and allow you to focus on these for even more attention.

2: Leads

Leads are kind of important for business! Without them, you wouldn’t get any new customers. Do you wake up at the start of the month wondering if anyone will contact your business today and if you will have enough work to fill the month? If so, you need to work on your lead generation techniques (which we will discuss in the next video training).

Or do you know where they are coming from? If this is the case, ask yourself how many leads you get each day, each week and each month. Then you can look at what it takes to get each lead and what the true cost of obtaining them is. Don’t forget to factor in your time investment as well as the advertising cost.

3: Calls

The next step is measuring the calls you make to gain appointments that will turn your prospective clients into paying ones.  How many calls would you need to make in a month to book an appointment, and what is the cost of each call?

So, if you had 5 calls and appointments in a week and you managed to convert 1 of those to a paying client, then you would have a 20% conversion rate. If each of those touch points cost you $50, then the cost of your conversion rate would be $250. Knowing your numbers will let you know how much profit you need to make to ensure your lead generation method is viable.

4: Profits

Unfortunately, money doesn’t grow on trees. So, you need to understand your margins to truly understand how profitable your business is. There is a real cost to doing business, therefore you need to know that those costs are covered and you are still making a decent profit.

It is important to know how much you are making for each individual product or service. Then you can focus on the items that give you the highest return for business success.

5: Frequency

The final metric to measure its frequency. How often are your customers returning to you and do you have a path mapped out for them in terms of your business offerings?

Ideally, you want to bring them in on a low priced offer, move them to your medium priced offer and then have them use your highest priced service. But not all customers are created equal. You need to pull back the curtain on your numbers to see who has purchased from you once, versus the customer who keeps returning time and time again.

Where Do You Want To Be?

So, now that you know where you are and you know the aspects of your business that you need to track and measure, where do you want to be?

It is time to set some goals for your business and work towards achieving them. Having a 5 year, 3 year and 1-year goal will ensure that you are always striving for the best in your business. It is one thing to set the goals, but you need to also make a plan on how you are going to realise your goals.

If you need help figuring this out then you should get in touch with Lara at Big Rock Communications. She will be able to use her extensive knowledge in marketing to set a business plan that truly works.

Don’t forget to tune into Big Rock’s video sequence on how you can get more leads into your business. You can watch the first instalment here, and then you can access the second instalment here. Once you have watched the two videos, you can go ahead and complete the questionnaire to see if we are a match for an appointment.

 

Spotlight On Cash Flow Management: Client Case Study

Cash flow is the life blood of every business. And so making sure you have enough to pay your bills, meet your salary obligations and keep up with your commitments to IRD is a constant juggling act. For some businesses though taking their eye of the ball can see them getting into difficulties with cash flow and they fall behind on one or more of their financial commitments. This was the case with a client who recently came to us for help. Despite having a growing business with an impressive annual turnover, they were struggling with cash flow management. Let’s find out more about their situation and how Lock Finance was able to help.

Background

Our client is an Auckland-based scaffolding company. Now, the building industry is still very strong in Auckland and so this client’s business was growing well and had an annual turnover of about $2m with acceptable profit levels.

Problems the company faced

The biggest problem facing this company was the lag between invoices being issued and debtors settling their bills. For this company the lag involved was on average 45 days which set up a very common scenario of a lack of synchronisation between weekly and monthly wages, suppliers and IRD commitments and money coming in.

The business owner had already invested all of his personal resources into the company and had no additional ability to raise funds or provide any surety to his bank funders. In fact, the bank had already given the company a $50k overdraft facility, but this was insufficient to cover their requirements. As a result, the business was not able to finance its growth and had started to fall behind on lease payments as well as building up arrears with IRD.

In short, the company had a number of issues which we specialise in resolving:

  • poor cash flow due to an insufficient cash flow facility
  • arrears with suppliers and IRD. By the way, banks do not like to see IRD arrears in particular, and this can have a detrimental impact on any funding application you have with a mainstream bank
  • an inability to raise any further funds to inject into the business.

The solution: Lock Finance

The company was referred to us by their accountant who as well as identifying the problems they were facing, had also recognised that the business was growing and had a good debtors ledger. Lock Finance specialises in setting up lending facilities to provide immediate access to cash against a company’s debtor ledger. This business was, therefore, a perfect match for our specialist help and expertise.

We were able to approve a facility that provided up to $200k in funds to support the business. As a result, the company was able to remain up to date with their IRD commitments and had enough cash to meet their weekly wage and invoice obligations.

With our assistance, this company can now continue to grow and expand, secure in the knowledge that there’s enough cash in the bank to cover all their requirements.

If your business is facing similar issues and you’re struggling to keep the cash flowing, then get in touch with us here at Lock Finance. Cash flow management is one of specialities so contact us today to see how we can help your business.

 

 

 

 

Meet Paul, Territory Manager– South

After leaving the Australian Military, I found my passion in Pharmaceutical Sales. I achieved State and National Sales Person of the Year for Queensland and Australia based on my Territory Performance and Personality.

Relocating to New Zealand, I found my place in Pharmaceutical Sales once again. I then ventured further into Pharmacy Technology which led me to the equipment side with Morton and Perry, allowing advancement with technology which enabled me to personalise for the needs and comfort of the client.

How many counties have you visited?  Which was your favourite? 2 countries visited – Fiji as I enjoy the heat and sun.

Which would you rather do: wash dishes, wash the car, mow the lawn or grocery shopping? Why? Mow the lawn as I like the smell of freshly mowed grass.

What was your first job straight out of school?  How long did it last? Retail, Parents owned a grocery store for 3 years.

Name 4 things that you need in order to produce an epic Sunday afternoon BBQ for friends: Meat, prawns, alcohol and music. Plenty of sunshine.

Football, Rugby, rugby league or cricket? Football, as I been playing since I was 5 years old.

What is your ideal holiday? Fishing, Boating and Beach.

What was the funniest way that you have been injured? None of my injuries have been funny.

If your life was a movie, what songs would be on the soundtrack? Another one bites the dust, I did it my way.

What are 3 things you can’t live without? Family, Food and Friends.

What are three things still left on your bucket list? Don’t have a bucket list.

NEW TA Junior Power wheelchair – Everywhere, everyday

Morton & Perry have welcomed the new TA Junior power wheelchair to complete our TA range, which already includes the front, mid, rear wheel drive and indoor chairs.

The TA Junior, currently available in Indoor and front wheel drive (with mid & rear wheel drive options available), includes all the same functionality and safety features as the larger TA chairs with smaller seating and accessories (available on request) designed to accommodate children.

Benefits of the chair include;

  • extra low hi-low seat function and for safer travelling in a vehicle when the powerchair is occupied
  • smaller seat width of 10” growable to 14” and wider
  • only 22” wide and a turning radius of 18” ensures you get through the narrowest of spaces
  • Fits easily under a school desk with hi-low seat function down to 15” from the floor
  • It encourages easier social interaction and access to school and living spaces with elevated seat height to 26.5” at reduced speed
  • The TA Junior has been safety crash tested in Denmark to give you the same confidence as with all TA powerchairs (many wheelchairs have not been designed for safe occupation when travelling in a vehicle), and compiles to NZ and international wheelchair design safety standards (Reference NZ LVVTA 45-60 ( 2.6) and International ISO 7176-19).

 

For more information, get in touch with your local M&P Area Rep.

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