The Friendly Takapuna Store Manager

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Small Business, Solutions.

The friendly Takapuna Store Manager, meet Garth!

Meet Garth, BNZ Takapuna’s new Store Manager. He is one of the guys at BNZ that will help you to set your business up right the first time by getting you in front of the specialists. Sidekick can honestly say that we love Garth. Not only does he bring passion and enthusiasm to everyone he meets, but he also looks for the best way to genuinely help the business owners that he interacts with. There aren’t many banking managers that are as proactive and caring as he.
Having grown up in Taupo, Garth fits in with the friendly North Shore atmosphere perfectly. We ask him a few questions about his position, and of how BNZ looks after its customers.

So Garth:

What is your role at BNZ?

I am the store manager in the Takapuna store. I lead a team of 7 banking specialists and 7 front line skilled service experts. I upskill and look for success with my team around our customers and the service they offer to our community, whilst having fun.

What do you believe is something businesses could be doing better?

Up-skilling themselves through the new technology that is out there these days and asking others around them how to be “great”.

How does BNZ help business owners achieve their financial goals?

To help our customers achieve what it is THEY want is our great ability to have strong conversations. Each customer is unique, to make our customers great and successful we have to be able to listen and make recommendations based on what we know about our clients, their situations, and where they want to be. I base myself on being there each step of your journey to become “GREAT” and along this journey BNZ help by pointing you in the direction of professionals to help you grow.
We have specialists who have been business owners, who are trained and qualified to understand what it is like out there in the wider community and market. We are not “just another bank” like you, we are unique.
I live by what BNZ is all about “helping our customers being good with their money”.

What is one of the best tools BNZ have to help their customers?

It would have to be our AWESOME Payclip. As a small business this is designed for keeping your accounts in the green with solid cash flow- you can collect money on the job, and therefore have more freedom to grow. What is it you love about your job?
I love helping. Having that first meeting with a client finding out what makes them tick and where they are wanting to be and wanting to do and setting that plan to get them there is my buzz. Seeing the success for people around me is what I love about my job.

Is there something you really enjoy doing in your spare time?

I am all about the balance. Work and home, so in my spare time I like to exercise at the gym prior to work and then after is my social time with family & friends.

If you would like Garth to help your business, please contact him on 021 834 776 or 09 488 1712, or on garth_reid@bnz.co.nz.

Choosing a Cloud Application – Guest Blog – Link Solutions

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Business Growth, Cloud Software, Small Business, Solutions, Startups.

No matter what background you’re from, you went in to business to do what you love. Not to spend your time on admin. Reuben Sweeney from Link Solutions talks about what your cool, new-age business needs to consider before choosing the cloud software you think will save you time and money.

It’s tempting sometimes to feel like we’ve reached a higher plane of existence with the rise and prevalence of cloud-based business applications built around the Xero ecosystem. You’ll hear it called The New Economy in comparison to the ‘old’ way we used to do business. Globally New Zealand businesses are pioneering the use and development of cloud-based business applications. New Zealand is consistently at the top of the global list for ease of starting a business and thanks to products like Xero, Unleashed, WorkflowMax, Vend and GeoOp it’s easier than it ever has been to start your business globally with competitive systems, lower overheads and less risk. With over 380 add-ons, the Xero ecosystem is busy with industry-specific niche applications that will do 90% of what you need them to do all for a small monthly fee.

In the next five years we’ll continue to see the number of applications available increase but some of the slower names disappear. It’s important when researching cloud apps for your business that you consider not just what the product can do for you (feature/functional fit) but where the product is going, what are their priorities, what is being worked on and how often is it being released? It’s easy to fall into the trap of picking one app over another because one will do 92% of what you need it to when the other only does 91%. It’s easy because that’s the way we used to select business applications back when the platform choice was for life and the apps were static. In a cloud environment it’s not the strong that dominate the weak but the adaptable that will dominate the static.

For the first time as users we’re able to cheaply and easily retrieve business information from our cloud-based business applications and have the minimum expectation that the information is live, timely, mobile and accurate. That’s awesome for a lot of things like planning, forecasting and decision making. These apps are allowing our businesses to act and react quicker than our competitors and quicker than we ever have been able to in the past. That’s just the beginning. These are first-generation apps that will quickly become a minimum standard. We’re already starting to see the emergence of the second generation of apps from companies like Unleashed and Vend. In the new new economy (which it will no doubt be named) it won’t be enough for an app to simply input, organise and regurgitate/dashboard business information to users. They will need to be smarter because the user expectation will shift from demanding information at our fingertips to demanding only relevant, actionable information about our businesses.

The apps that survive the transition (and have already started) into the 2nd generation aren’t the apps that are fighting for the last 10% of function or fit, or the apps that are going beyond and delivering features and functions you didn’t know your business needed. They will be the apps that bring you as a user and based on your user role (organisational roles) relevant, actionable information specific to your identity. Imagine a world where like an individually tailored newspaper bites of relevant, targeted information are headlined, distributed and announced throughout your business. Instead of a retailer asking ‘what sales have we done today?’, logging into their Vend from Costa Rica and finding out they’ll receive a headline like ‘You’ve sold more of product range X in the last week than you have sold to date’. Wow. The difference is subtle but deep. One is starting to tell a story, asking you questions of you and the other is giving you an answer.

We’re seeing the start of this transition in products like Vend where instead of saying ‘What do I need to order for my store?’ you can have one staff member draft a stock order based on your minimum stock order quantities for each product, have a manager edit and approve it and have an email order automagically delivered straight to the relevant supplier. A product like Unleashed lets you achieve a similar result but for a warehouse. ‘What do I need to order?’ become ‘What’s in my Low Stock Alerts?’. A product like WorkflowMax turns the question from ‘How close am I to budget for this project task?’ to ‘These are the project tasks approaching budget with X% remaining’. This subtle change in questioning will define those applications that survive the transition into the 2nd Generation of cloud based business applications. Think about what 2nd Generation business applications might look like as you think about what apps might suit your business.

Save yourself hours of app research by calling Link Solutions on 0800 159 672 or emailing contact@linksolutions.co.nz



Reuben Sweeney 021 774 413 reuben@linksolutions.co.nz