Most textbook business planning is unsuited to the realities of small business.  Expecting detailed financial projections in 3 to 5 year's time is totally unrealistic when a small business can barely see 6 months ahead. Instead of planning methods developed for large and fairly stable big businesses, we have developed a flexible, low workload, business planning system for small business. It is based around a financial quarter GamePlan where you decide what to achieve in this quarter.  Generally, a small business can see three months ahead and have some hope of projecting financial ..read more

Just like an iceberg only shows 1/8th of its mass above water, your accounts have many more things they can tell you if you go looking. But many analysis tools assume a fair degree of experience and management and accounting training.  That's not common with small business owners. So 12Faces has developed several tools that can give useful insights to your accounts but are easy to use and understand. For example, we have tools for; 1. working out how much to increase your prices to counteract the costs of inflation in wages and inputs to your business - a Gross Margin Ratio analysis 2 ..read more

It is often hard for business Founders to "brainstorm" business issues with others. Friends and family may not have much business management experience.   It might not be appropriate to discuss some topics with staff.   Professional advisors can be helpful with their specific skill area but maybe less so with whole-of-business issues like business planning.  And they can be expensive. 12Faces fills this gap with three services.   First there is our wealth of useful articles and our training packages.   Second, our Business Diagnostics System helps you identify soluti ..read more

Up to 1 in 5 businesses are failing at any point in time. This is a sad loss of time, money and effort and generates a lot of stress on business' owners. With small businesses, the owner is generally good in the area of their professional skills but may lack business management experience. Every manager that ever there was started in this position. 12Faces has assembled a DIY and self-paced business training to help business owners with their turnaround. We call it Turnaround90 or T90 for short.  Specialist advisors will generally only offer advice in their particular area.  This ..read more

Local Services Businesses are those that draw customers from a few towns or suburbs around the business's office location.  Examples include building trades like plumbers, health professionals like dentists and professional services like lawyers and accountants. These business face different major issues when growing from Solopreneur though Micro Business (1-4 staff) to Small Business (5-19) staff.  This video introduces the typical issues at each size step and headcount. Especially early on, these are critical as up to 50% of startups fail in the first year.  That means a pe ..read more

Most business owners and managers have nagging issues in their business that they are not sure how to resolve; so they tend to just stay there and build up. The 12Faces Business Diagnostics system is a user-friendly way to narrow down the problem and arrive at possible solutions. This is just what a doctor does when you visit. At the start, you just pick the option that seems to best express the nature of the problem.  You click on that and drop into a second set of more specific options related to the first chosen one.  You choose the best in the second layer and drop into a thir ..read more

Anyone who might become your client moves through several stages in what has become known as the Buyer's Journey.  Your marketing needs to cover each stage so that you get the best outcome from your marketing. We say the stages are;  Awareness - thinking about starting to buy Consideration - choosing what product to buy Deciding - what supplier offers the best arrangements Retention - after the initial purchase, you want to keep the new client for as long as possible and, Advocacy - getting reviews and other social proof from your customers to be used as a marketing asset in the ear ..read more

Many businesses draw customers from a catchment area around their location.   Example business include building trades, health professionals, lawyers, architects. This podcast introduces Local Area Marketing as part of a series on how to grow this type of business.  The Local Area Marketing series covers ways of boosting sales in your catchment area systematically and with long lasting success.  Local SEO is covered in detail in the series. Youtube: https://youtu.be/NUw-lls6BIs Transcript: https://www.12faces.business/local-area-marketing-blog ..read more

The Mission of 12Faces is your Sustainable Business Success!  This podcast introduces our approach to your Success and how to make that Success Sustainable.  ID31 Read More: https://www.12faces.business/nugget-31-sustainable-business-success-transcript ..read more

Although a sales funnel is a very busy place, you can dramatically improve sales while reducing your consumption of time and other resources by identifying and focusing on just one part of the Funnel. Listen for more.  ID18 More Info: https://www.12faces.business/dtn1-1-2-2/https://www.12faces.business/dtn1-1-2-2 ..read more