Brainstorm to Small Business Success
Many successful small trade businesses today are run by families. The Husband is usually the one who does the physical job and the wife/partner does the books and answers the phone. In Australia, these are the partnerships that seem to work out the best and as the business grows, so too does the staff. Brainstorming sessions periodically are a good idea even if you aren’t considering employing another person. What a brainstorming session will do for you, your partner and associates is bring out the creative aspects of building a business and it also acts as a reminder to tweak those small fleeting memories of “Oh that’d be a good idea” that we all often have but put aside due to more pressing priorities.
If you don’t want to do this with any of your business associates, then consider doing this with a group of fellow business people that you trust. This is where belonging to trade organisations or Small Business Associations can be helpful. But to get the most out of a brain storming session, everyone does need to be able to speak freely about any of their business problems and it needs to be respected as commercial-in-confidence material. These organisations usually provide this confidentiality as a ‘given’ but you need to get to know the people first. It is not something to be brought up or organised at a first meeting.
The best idea is usually to invite a group of 6-10 people for a business lunch that you host. This needs to be a mixed bag of various professional people from various industries and services who will all see a different angle to the problem or idea that you want their input into. If you have a trusted employee who is very familiar with your business, make sure they are invited along too. The morale prestige boost will also be beneficial for employer-employee relations as well as getting their input. Brainstorming is a surprising way to get a lot of information and ideas that you may never have been able to think of on your own and when practised with discretion, can increase profitability to many small businesses.