Events

Elevate CA hosts regular events for business owners - including the monthly Business Owners Forum events which alternate between Auckland and Whangarei venues. A big part of the Elevate CA ethos is to share our knowledge and skills with the business community that allows us to thrive.

In line with this ethos, Elevate CA events are always free of charge - and have no strings or sales pitches attached.

Below is a full list of events hosted by Elevate CA, or events where we are involved as sponsors, supporters or presenters.

Monitoring your Business Performance

How do you keep your finger on the pulse monitoring the financial health of your business in real time rather than waiting for historic financial statements?

If you need to know the answer to this question, this Whangarei event is for you! The 18 February Business Owners Forum event will be an information-rich panel discussion delivering some practical techniques for monitoring your business’ financial health in real time.

This event will be hosted at the newly opened BNZ Function Centre on the corner of Bank Street and Rust Ave, Whangarei on 18 February 2010 from 5:30pm (sharp) to 7:00pm.

This is a Business Owners Forum event, so as usual discussion will be driven by those who attend on the night – and the panelists will keep things moving along quickly. Panelists will include:

Dean Subritzky – a director of Elevate CA Limited

Geoff Grigg – Partner at BNZ Whangarei

Roger Taylor – owner of Pacific Motor Group, Whangarei – who will give some practical tips on these issues from the coal-face.

The panel will be chaired by Michael Masterson, director of The Bottom Line Expense Reduction Limited.

Format is casual over pizza, beer and wine. Business Owners Forums are always lively events – and are targeted to owners of businesses with $1 million turnover and more. There is never a “sell” – these events are hosted as a forum for business owners to discuss issues of relevance with peers – and without having to fend off advances from people in the room seeking to push agendas, products or services.

Business Owners Forums are supported by ElevateCA Limited, BNZ, The Bottom Line Expense Reduction and Webb Ross Lawyers. The ethos of the Business Owners’ Forum supporters is to give back to the business communities which support us. In line with this ethos, Business Owners’ Forum events are always free of charge.

If you would like to be invited to this event, please contact ElevateCA.

Fraser Hurrell is one of three directors of Elevate CA Limited, Chartered Accountants & Business Advisors in Whangarei, New Zealand.

The Art of Networking

A big thank you to the 40 or so guests who participated in the Business Owners Forum event at the new BNZ facility on Queen Street on 4 February. There was plenty of quality discussion around the topic “The Art of Networking”. And judging by the show of hands at the end of the evening, everyone walked away with at least one useful connection or action-plan item.The panelists yesterday were:

Michael Masterson adopted a pragmatic view, and discussed ways to make use of tools like Linked-in, OutLook and Plaxo to make life easier rather than harder. Michael is a great fan of “eliminating the noise” – and stressed the point that networking tools can often create complexity and unnecessary distraction rather than increasing productivity and connectivity as they are intended to do. He conveyed some great tips to make sure these tools work for you rather than against you! Michael can be contacted here >>> for anyone who would like to continue the discussion with him in person.

Sarah Lochead-MacMillan discussed some practical techniques for getting face to face and cultivating a mutually beneficial network. Sarah advocates “connecting” rather than “networking” – and not only does she walk the talk, but she has also written a book on the subject entitled “The Naked Networker” which is available on her website here >>>. Sarah is an advocate of working your network not so much for your own overt benefit but to connect people within the network to each other for the long term benefit of everyone involved.

Myself – Fraser Hurrell. I opened the session discussing my own experiences in using social media tools such as twitter and facebook to drive leads and sales to two businesses – Brightmind LABS >>>, which sells a product online – and ElevateCA, which sells services. Whilst I am by no means an expert in this area, I have had some successes and failures in using social media tools – and this was the basis of my discussion. A summary of my presentation is available right here >>>.

A big thank you to Brian Watt, Alexis D’Orsi and Fiona Bendall from BNZ for their kind hospitality – this event was held at the newly opened BNZ function facility on 80 Queen Street, and it was a great venue

The next Business Owners Forum is in Whangarei on 18 February, and that event will be a practical and information-rich session on monitoring your business financials featuring Dean Subritzky (Elevate CA Director) and Geoff Grigg (Partner at BNZ Whangarei) on the panel along with a yet-to-be-announced client giving a coal-face view of this topic.

And the following Business Owners Forum will be back in Auckland on 18 March discussing shareholder current accounts and some of the tips, traps and tricks available to protect these, make them equitable between shareholders – and tax efficient. Our guest panelist for that event will be Damien Grant, a liquidator from Waterstone Insolvency, who will no doubt alarm the room with tales of how bad things can get for shareholders when they go wrong. But the focus on the night will be steps to prevent these horror stories from unfolding.

Contact me if you’d like an invite to either of these events and are not on the regular e-mail list.

Fraser Hurrell is one of three directors of Elevate CA Limited, Chartered Accountants & Business Advisors in Whangarei, New Zealand.

The Art of Networking

The first Business Owners Forum event for 2010 will be on “The Art of Networking”. We have delayed this a little from the usual “third Thursday of January” to get past the holiday season. This will be a repeat of the Whangarei December event featuring a panel discussion on “The Art of Networking”.

This event will be hosted at the new BNZ Auckland CBD office on level 8, 80 Queen Street from 5:30pm (sharp) to 7:00pm.

As always with BOF events, discussion will be driven by those who attend on the night – and the panelists will keep things moving along quickly. We have three great panelists, and here’s what you can expect to be covered over the hour and a half:

Fraser Hurrell, a director of ElevateCA Limited will talk about his experience with using social media tools such as twitter, facebook and blogs to drive leads and sales. He has some good practical advice from the coalface on how to get results networking online without letting these tools become counterproductive and consume your time.

Michael Masterson is a born networker – and has used his skills in this area to quickly pull quality engaged teams together from scratch in corporate roles – for example as CEO of SalesForce when establishing and quickly growing a New Zealand presence from zero. Michael’s presentation on The Art of Networking is humourous and packed full of practical tips and advice.

Sarah Lochead-MacMillan, author of “The Naked Networker” says that entering a networking event for the first time can generate the equivalent feelings as attempting to socialise naked. She will give some tools and techniques to get past these feelings – and enable you to form and drive a sustainable network. *Spoiler: There will be no naked networking at this event*.

Format is casual over pizza, beer and wine – and Business Owners Forums are always lively events! These events are targeted to owners of businesses with $1 million turnover and more.

If you would like to be invited to this event, please contact ElevateCA.

Social Media for Business

Here’s a summary of my presentation at from yesterday’s Business Owners Forum. I’m no social media expert – but I do use Twitter, Facebook and blogs to generate interest in two businesses – one is here at Elevate CA, and the other is BrightMind LABS, a business that develops psychological tools wrapped in computer games for kids with mental health issues. Elevate CA sells services, and BrightMind LABS sells products online. We have had a mixed experience with using social media tools to drive leads and sales, and that’s what I’m going to discuss here.

Twitter
It’s easy to dismiss Twitter as almost pointless, and a complete time waster, right?

Perhaps wrong.

Consider Dell, who have a successful Twitter presence. Dell posts daily specials promoted only through Twitter – and has nearly 800,000 followers resulting in several $millions in additional sales solely from its Twitter community. This is from one person sitting at a computer manning the Twitter account at Dell head office in Texas.

It’s important to remember that Twitter is intended primarily for people rather than businesses. So, as your business makes its way onto Twitter, you should endeavour to look and act like a human! As a business owner, this opportunity to personify your brand is a great platform to develop a relationship between your clients and your business.

On the subject of Twitter bringing a human face to brands, here’s an interesting story:

Back in July, Australian marketing company Razorfish performed a Twitter experiment with the Pepsi and Coke . The goal of the experiment was to get arch rivals Pepsi and Coke to follow each other. Razorfish posted this tweet:

“To end an old war: Dear @pepsi and @cocacola, why not follow each other on Twitter and be friends”

The results were interesting. Hundreds of people started retweeting the message and within eighteen hours both Coke and Pepsi had exchanged pleasantries online.

Check out the full story on the Razorfish blog here.

So much for Dell, Coke and Pepsi – how about our more humble experiences with Twitter?

At last count this morning, ElevateCA had 2,607 followers on Twitter – many of whom are business owners in our target market of Whangarei, Northland and Auckland. I also pulled out our website referral stats this afternoon from Google Analytics. In the past week, we have had 119 unique visitors referred to this site from various other websites. Interestingly a huge 99 visits were referred from Twitter. Compare that with just 4 visits referred from our online yellow pages listing, and just three from finda.co.nz where we are also listed.

So how do you motivate people to click through and visit your web site from Twitter?

There are probably many ways of doing this, but what we do is write something short (must be less than 140 characters) on Twitter that captures attention – and then provide a link through to our blog which expands on the subject matter. Here’s an example.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this tweet referring to an East European directory listing scam which almost caught us out – I used 94 characters out of the 140 available:

“Looking for quality inbound links? WARNING: Beware the World Business Guide! http://bit.ly/R4glE”

The URL at the end of the message (http://bit.ly/R4glE) takes you through to our blog post which exapnds on the tale – and where of course we are not limited by wordcount in telling the story.

To get a shortened URL for your blog or web page – so you don’t use scarce characters by having to type a long web address in full – visit www.shorturl.com where you can shorten a long web address for Twitter. It’s free and easy.

Every time we post a tweet linking back to the web site, we get an immediate decent spike in on-line traffic referred from twitter.

Nice. And it takes very little time or effort.

Facebook
Facebook is for kids, right?

Correct – but now it is also for businesses.

From earlier this year, one has been able to create business pages on Facebook. The good news is that like Twitter, these are free. These pages can give your business an identity on Facebook which can strengthen your brand. Current or potential customers can become fans of your page and by doing so they receive the updates that you post to your page. One of the powerful things about Facebook pages is that every time a person becomes a fan of your page, all of their Facebook contacts see that they have become a fan. This often attracts other followers as well as adding to the buzz around your business.

You can use your Facebook page to not only share your company information, but you can also use it to post photos, videos, applications and messages. Any activity that you perform on your Facebook Page is then broadcast into the mini-feeds of your followers. Of course you do need to keep it interesting, as every fan is only one click away from disengaging themselves from your page!

So does Facebook actually work for businesses?

Our experiences say the answer is both yes and no.

Back in April – on the same day – I set up two Facebook pages – one for Brightmind LABS, and the other for ElevateCA.

The BrightMind LABS Facebook page now has over 1,000 followers – all of whom receive our regular updates and many actively contribute to the page. I put plenty of links back to the BrightMind LABS web site on the page, and a lot of people click through, and also frequent the BrightMind LABS website where they can potentially purchase on-line.

One Thousand engaged followers, I that’s better than I expected from the “toe in the water” Facebook Page experiment for BrightMind LABS.

So what about Elevate CA – how many Facebook followers do you think we might have?

I’ll tell you – just TEN!

The Elevate CA directors are three of them. And Rebecca’s relatives make up the other seven. So we have written Facebook off as a dismal failure for ElevateCA.

Facebook doesn’t work for all businesses.

So what have we learned?

Get where the audience is … don’t expect them to come to you cold. Its easier and cheaper to capture your audience where they already are rather than trying to motivate people to visit someplace they don’t already go.

Once you have engaged your audience on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Linkedin or wherever, it’s much easier to entice them to make that one more click through to your blog or web site.

Fraser Hurrell is one of three directors of Elevate CA Limited, Chartered Accountants & Business Advisors in Whangarei, New Zealand.

The Art of Networking

This will be the last Business Owners Forum event for 2009 – and we have brought the date forward from the usual third Thursday of the month to avoid the worst (and the best!) of the silly season. The December Business Owners’ Forum will feature a panel discussion on “The Art of Networking”.

This event will be hosted at the ElevateCA offices on 3 December from 5:30pm (sharp) to 7:00pm.

As always with BOF events, discussion will be driven by those who attend on the night – and the panelists will keep things moving along quickly. This time we have three great panelists, and here’s what you can expect to be covered over the hour and a half:

Fraser Hurrell, a director of ElevateCA Limited will talk about his experience with using social media tools such as twitter, facebook and blogs to drive leads and sales. He has some good practical advice from the coalface on how to get results networking online without letting these tools become couterproductive and consume your time.

Geoff Grigg didn’t follow the more usual banker’s career path from the bottom up through the ranks – he joined the BNZ as a Business Relationship Manager without the benefit of a banking network built up over the years. Luckily Geoff’s past life as a Sales Manager meant that he knew exactly how to build his business network from scratch. Geoff will share some insights and practical tips from this journey.

Sarah Lochead-MacMillan, author of “The Naked Networker” says that entering a networking event for the first time can generate the equivalent feelings as attempting to socialise naked. She will give some tools and techniques to get past these feelings – and enable you to form and drive a sustainable network. *Spoiler: There will be no naked networking at this event*.

Format is casual over pizza, beer and wine – and Business Owners Forums are always lively events! These events are targeted to owners of businesses with $1 million turnover and more.

Business Owners Forums are supported by ElevateCA Limited, BNZ, The Bottom Line Expense Reduction, The ICEHOUSE and Webb Ross Lawyers.

The ethos of the Business Owners’ Forum supporters is to give back to the business communities which support us. In line with this ethos, Business Owners’ Forum events are always free of charge.

If you would like to be invited to this event, please contact ElevateCA.