Sun Tzu 4 Small Business | Strategy and Tactics, Technology and Leadership, Management and Marketing for Small Business Owners

Join James from Extreme Networks as he explores the tactics and strategies you need to build a fast growing small business. James has grown multiple businesses and now employees 20 people. We look at how Strategy and Tactics play a big part in running any business. James looks that the great generals, the strategies and tactics that they used and what lessons we can learn as small business owners to grow our businesses faster, how to be better leaders and how to win the battles and wars that we small business owners fight every day.

40 - I uploaded our P&L to ChatGPT - Is this the end for Accountants? 12/11/2023

39 - Top 20 Small Business productivity tips 06/29/2023

38 - Top 10 AI tools for your Small Business 03/29/2023

37 - Using AI in your Small Business for Fun and Profit 03/02/2023

36 - The importance of finding someone to take a message to Garcia in your Small Business 09/29/2022

35 - Managing inflation in your Small Business 07/20/2022

34 - Small Business Hiring Tips to grow your team post COVID 05/25/2022

33 - How to manage the Great Resignation in your Small Business 12/22/2021

32 - Lessons learnt from implementing the Rockefeller Habits 10/19/2021

31 - Scaling up with the Rockefeller Habits 07/08/2021

30 - Tips for firing employees 05/16/2021

29 - Martech - Marketing Technology that's free and easy to use to grow your small business 04/19/2021

28 - Free and easy Marketing Technology for your Small Business 02/24/2021

27 - Examples of Small Business Hacking Attempts and how to defend your Small Business 10/24/2020

26 - Small Business IT Security Update 10/03/2020

25 - The week every Small Business became an Entrepreneurial Startup 03/23/2020

24 - The Small Business COVID 19 / Coronavirus Survival Guide 03/13/2020

23 - Small Business Leadership 12/09/2019

22 - Microsoft Teams vs Skype vs Slack vs Zoom - Which is right for your Small Business 09/29/2019

21 - How to protect your small business from Malware and Phishing attacks 12/02/2018

21 - How to protect your small business from Malware and Phishing attacks I recently received a scary email involving my PORN BROWSING HABITS!?!? The email threatened me with everyone in my contacts getting a picture of me along with my browsing habits. WHAT SHOULD I DO? We break down what these email means and how they can start to generate emails that can be really scary and fool people into paying Bitcoin with these emails. One step in looking at these emails is Have This shows you some of the passwords that have been breached. There are 3 layers of defence that youcan use to protect your email. Firstly, a cloud based email system will check for viruses, malware and phishing emails. This means that dodgy emails don't even get to your network. Secondly, a firewall that also checks for viruses and malware. A great firewall means that a lot less viruses and malware emails will get into your network. Lastly, make sure you have a decent antivirus system. We use and recommend Webroot. We would be protecting thousands of desktops, servers and laptops with Webroot. These technologies work well and can dramatically decrease the number of issues that you will have, but they don't stop all of them. We discuss some of the impacts of these emails, loss of productivity, loss of profit, but also the impact on the person who has clicked on a link that they shouldn't have. We created a video with 7 real life examples that I have received in my inbox and we discuss the tricks of the trade to learn if an email is legitimate or not. We also have a system that sends a phishing email to our customers which records who clicks on it and who doesn't and for those that do, they are sent to a web page that goes through some of the training to ensure that they are better equipped to avoid clicking on those nasty emails. If you do click on an email, turn the PC off immediately and call your IT support. Depending on the type of email, the quicker you act, the less the impact will be. When in don't call the sender and verify the email. Lastly, ensure that you have proper back ups and that they have been tested. You need to have confidence with your back ups. If you liked todays Podcast, please rate it and leave a review on iTunes. Don't forget to visit the website and Join the Sun Tzu Army to get the latest tips on building a fast growing company. /episode/index/show/suntzu/id/7772162

20 - Advanced Podcast Analytics and Statistics II 11/17/2018

20 - Advanced Podcast Analytics and Statistics II Firstly we looked at some of the equipment we use for doing our podcasts. We use the Audio-Technica ATR - 2100 USB. This is a great directional microphone that cuts down Mackie 802 VLZ4 - We use this mixer to be able to do a mix minus setup to be able to record Skype interviews. It is a little technical and I am no expert in it, but I tried software like Pamela recording and it didn't produce great audio quality. We have 2 sound cards in my PC and I find the call quality is a lot better now. Audacity is the software that we use to record our podcasts. It is great software and best of all it is free. We use Libsyn for our podcast hosting. These guys do a great job of the hosting and statistics that we need to see how many people are downloading the podcast. We then discuss itunes podcast connect statistics. The iTunes data covers only some of your listeners, but it gives you some very powerful statistics that you can use to understand what your listeners are interested in. The iTunes podcasts statistics are really important. It shows how much of a big deal it is to get your Apple listeners to subscribe to your podcast and it gives you the amount of time that each person has listened to each episode. This gives you feedback about how interesting it is for each of your listeners. We then talk about Castbox. This is an app that gives you rough indications of comparative analytics because you can see the data from all of the podcasts out there. In general, 2% of listens are on Castbox, so it is a rough indication of how popular your podcast is. One important thing to remember is that iTunes is country specific as opposed to Castbox which is total audience. We see this with Podcasts that may have a large global audience which does not rate well in iTunes because, for example, Secret Sauce has listeners around the world, so we don't often appear in the Top 100 podcasts because that looks at listens in just 1 country. If you liked todays Podcast, please rate it and leave a review on iTunes. Don't forget to visit the website and Join the Sun Tzu Army to get the latest tips on building a fast growing company. /episode/index/show/suntzu/id/7593158

19 - Advanced Podcast Analytics and Statistics 09/28/2018

18 - How to fly like a Boss with Steve Hui 09/05/2018

18 - How to fly like a Boss with Steve Hui Steve Hui, the Points Whisperer, is the owner of We talk about what the tricks are to using points in your business to be able to fly business class. Business owners have a huge advantage when it comes to Frequent Flyer Points. We recently talked about "" I think it is really important to travel, partially to unwind and destress from your business and partially to be inspired and be more creative in the strategy and tactics that you have in your business. If you are going to travel, you might as well travel in style! There are a lot of ways that you can maximise the points that you have available to you, as well as some traps to avoid. One of the big mistakes that we were making was that our main credit card was limited to 3,000 points per month. We applied for a card that was uncapped, which has dramatically increased the number of points that we have been able to accrue. What is the value of a points upgrade and what is the best way to spend them? Have a think about how much you have going through your credit cards. Can you increase that amount? It is really important to make sure that you are paying off your credit cards every month, otherwise those points that you accrue are really expensive. Some credit cards will allow you earn points on government payments, like tax bills. This can dramatically increase the points that you earn. As a business owner, flying Business Class is pretty important because: It allows you to work a lot easier while flying. It allows you to land refreshed after the flight and adjust to the time zone a lot quicker. You deserve it! I have been lucky to fly Qantas business class a few times now and it is a very civilised way to travel and I find I am very productive when relaxing in the nice comfy seat, a glass a whisky and the Laptop set up. There are no distractions from the internet or the phone and I can concentrate on the big strategic questions in our businesses. I was recently able to reach Platinum with Qantas and one of the great advantages is access to Platinum lounges. These are a fantastic experience, a great place to relax and do a little work. Keep an eye out for the best credit cards and the Double Status credits promotions that airlines run. These can make a big difference to the way that you travel. Contact Steve at I Fly Flat for more information on how to fly like a boss! Don't forget to send us a photo of you on holidays if you've used any tips from the podcast to take a holiday! /episode/index/show/suntzu/id/7007399

17 - What we learnt from using the Amazon 6 page memo meeting format. 07/16/2018

17 - What we learnt from using the Amazon 6 page memo meeting format. Meeting effectiveness is a problem in businesses large and small so we tried a new approach to improve the productivity to come out of our meetings. We look at . This is an awesome communications tool, which has a free plan (that is the plan we use). It helps decrease our huddle meeting time, provides an easy way to get information quickly and bring the team closer. It is especially important when you are building teams in different locations. We detailed in experience with the before, and we included a sample of the memo that we've used in one of our meetings. The big issue with the 6 pager memo is the creation of the memo. The amount of work in creating the memo is not a small task and a lot of work and skill is required in creating the memo. The memo was 2,700 words in length and a lot of time and effort, along with research was required to create the memo. We found that the memo format was great from the point of view of getting input from everyone. All of the team members contributed and some of the insights and ideas came from team members who usually don't speak a lot in meetings. For a cross functional team point of view, this was really important. We released the memo at the start of the meeting and gave everyone 30 minutes to read the memo. This meant that everyone read it all and understood what was required from them in the meeting. We discovered some of team had differing levels of insight into the problem. We had 13 people in the team and the meeting went for 2.5 hours. We had a lot of insights that we normally don't have from our meetings and there was a lot of insights as well that were more useful than we normally get. The challenge would be getting other people with the capabilities to write the memo. There is probably 8 hours or more involved in writing the memo. The number of people in the meeting was too many and that is why the meeting took so long. We had a lot of great action items coming out of the meeting, so we started putting those action items into the Our quote for the episode is from Carl von Clausewitz. "Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is very difficult." That sounds exactly like running a small business! /episode/index/show/suntzu/id/6815257

16 - Application Development for Small Businesses Part II 07/04/2018

16 - Application Development for Small Businesses Part II Creating bespoke software for your small business has never been easier or cheaper than it is today and it can make a fundamental difference to the productivity and profitability of your business. We look at Google Analytics. Do you know how to use Google Analytics? It tells you some key metrics for your website. Most small business websites get around 500 to 1,000 visits a month. Where are they coming from? What are they looking for? Is the site mobile optimised? What content do they look at? For App Dev, we use a cut down version of agile development. We look to build a series of minimum viable products. This is something that you can get in front of customers. We look at inputs, outputs and processes. Inputs. How does information get in? Outputs. How is information displayed in the app? What are the reports? Processes. What are the business processes in the application. We like to think about these for long enough so that people really understand the inputs/outputs and processes for an app. We will often do this on butcher's paper, or in excel. These are easy to do and through away as you realise that you have made a mistake. The more time that you spend with this before coding, the cheaper the application will be to make and the quicker it will be to create. Applications can be great at bringing together silos of data and cutting down on double and triple handling of data. I hate human interaction with data because it can introduce human errors into the system. Apps can make these processes in your business faster and more accurate. We talk about getting the data that you have in your business and creating data Komodos. We discuss the agile manifesto and how it works with application development and the minimum viable product. The application development process is often a journey and building smaller iterations enables an organisation to learn during the process and this makes a better final product. /episode/index/show/suntzu/id/6774241

15 - How to take a holiday as a Small Business Owner II 06/27/2018

15 - How to take a holiday as a Small Business Owner II If you can work for 1 or 2 hours a day every couple of days, you can spend a lot longer away from your business. We look at the technologies that we have within our companies so that we can work from anywhere, anytime. Firstly, with have a Microsoft Windows Terminal Server. That gives us access to our accounting system, internal files, and all of our internal applications. Confluence - confluence is remotely available which means that we can access workflows and projects. We used to use Skype all the time, but a lot of our comms now is done through . - This cuts down on emails, and enables us to have conversations. It may be between 1 person or between a team. We have a HotLeads channel which our sales and marketing team work in. We have built workflows within the teams around slack communication. IP Cameras - some of our customers use their cameras to monitor their staff. There are privacy issues that need to be worked through and it can be really useful for some companies to be able to see what people are doing in the company. Telstra Roaming. This is a really good way to get access in the countries that you are travelling in. We visited 5 countries on our holiday, and we were able to get data in every country. This meant we could get an Uber or a Grab very easily. Google maps worked and we had access to emails. Digital Dashboards - these give us the ability to monitor progress for the team, some of it in real time. This enhances accountability, performance and execution. Power BI. We use Microsoft Power BI to grab data out of some of our line of business applications and present it to the team. Everyone has access to it and we it really helps us to drive performance. These technologies underpin our 3P Approach to taking a holiday. Process, Profits and People. Get these 3 right and you can take a holiday. Set the goal to take a holiday and work on the 3Ps so that you can take the holiday that you always wanted to. :) /episode/index/show/suntzu/id/6748760

14 - How to take a holiday when you own a Small Business 05/01/2018

13 - Your competitors are offshoring - Should you? 01/29/2018

12 - Application Development for Small Business - Profiting from your Bright Ideas 01/23/2018

12 - Application Development for Small Business - Profiting from your Bright Ideas In Tech Focus we look at Microsoft Power BI. We have been using Power BI to pull information from line of business application. At Extreme we can see who has been entering their timesheets, who has been working with which customers and what billings each engineer has. This updates in real time and display it on one of our monitors that is mounted on the wall. This means that everyone can see how the team and each individual is performing. We look at the processes we use for both developing applications internal and for our customers. The costs of software development have dramatically decreased and enable completely different business models to thrive because investments are so much lower. The process involves: Off the shelf vs custom built - Of the shelf is generally cheaper but it will have functionality for a whole range of business and some of your business process will need to change to match the off the shelf software. Custom built or bespoke software will match exactly your business processes. Phone apps - are they worth the effort. A lot of consumers have app fatigue. They may find it in the appstore and install it, but a lot of apps get used once and the app is never opened again. Middleware - Breaking down the silos between your databases. Your customer database, marketing database, financial database. It can be very power taking data from one type of software and putting it into another. Business Process apps - taking the way that you run your business and putting it in the app. This automates things, cuts down on user error and allows for automatic reporting. These are some of the most powerful apps that small businesses build. If you have great processes, you can sell your application with your IP. For a plumber, they may service a 25km radius. If you sell plumbing company software, it could be a global opportunity. Failure in app development. Not being sure of what you want or what your business processes are. Look at the track record of your developer. They should have shipped decent sized processes. We have built a booking system for Restaurants that is used in 11 countries and taken over $25,000,000 in bookings. That gives our customers a bit more confidence that we can do what we are saying we can do. Make sure the application is made by a team, business analysis, design and development. Who can build the application for you: Fiverr - get a dev for just the process. Insource a developer - hire them for your team. If you have only 1 developer and little experience in app dev, it is hard to manage your application development team. Hire a development team. Either onshore or offshored, get the skills and the resources you need for the project. Look at the risk and the size of the project to see which path is right for you. If your company relies heavily on IT it might be worthwhile to building a team. App Dev can help you to fundamentally change the way that you work and the profitability of your company. Some companies develop software and end up making more money by selling their application than out of their original business. It is a great way of monetising your intellectual property. Quote - Patton - Never tell people how to do things Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. /episode/index/show/suntzu/id/6178392

11 - How to market a boring Small Business - Part II 11/20/2017

11 - How to market a boring Small Business - Part II In Tech Focus we look at our new Acer Acer Veriton M6640G. Straight out of the box it supports the 4 monitors that I need to drive. Pretty much silent and driven by a super power Core i7 CPU bringing a lot more power for the video editing and other work that I do. Public Relations - we look at some strategies that you can use to work better with journalists to help get some public relations. Redefining your marketing strategy. We think IT services are boring and hard to market, so we market different things that we do. We talk about how you can redefine the stories that you tell potential customers. We use Ice Cream trucks, Ferraris and drones as a part of the way that we have redefined our story. We talk about ways you can market your business in 2018 - you could do a podcast. That is a lot of effort, but the next speed back is Facebook Live video. It is live and scary. Facebook advertising - We using targeting to create really tightly targeted ads. It can be very powerful in reaching the right people. SEO and your website. Google Analytics makes SEO a lot easier than it ever used to be. We discuss the secret to SEO and why you really need to understand it and how you can use it to your benefit. Networking - Old fashioned network in conjunction with your new exciting online methods can make a big difference. It reinforces what people have seen online and gives them an opportunity to talk to you. We use Social Media as a conversation starter as well as one trick I use to stand out in a crowd. Marketing Automation - We look at automatic ways that you can do online marketing. This is really powerful because it is marketing that happens 24 hours a day without any work for you. What data do you have and how are you surfacing that with your customers? Test and Measure your marketing. You can learn so much just by looking at reports in Facebook and Google Analytics about your customers. This makes it a lot easier to craft a story that resonates with prospects. We finish with a quote from Jim Barksdale. If we have data, let's look at the data. If all we have is opinions, let's go with mine. /episode/index/show/suntzu/id/5961785

Sun Tzu 4 Small Business | Strategy and Tactics, Technology and Leadership, Management and Marketing for Small Business Owners

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