Being Small Business Friendly

Being small business friendly is about enhancing the operating environment to help small businesses thrive. This is achieved by actively engaging with small business to understanding their challenges and opportunities then taking action to reduce barriers and align support. Our simple Five-Step Approach to Being Small Business Friendly can help to get you started on your journey to be small business friendly. This process should form part of your broader economic development strategy.

The Five-Step Approach To Being Small Business Friendly

Accelerator

The Accelerator is a set of self-support tools and guidance to help members create a simple and powerful action plan to help their organisation be more small business friendly.
It provides a framework to identify your priorities, build support and create an action plan.

New SBF Program members are required to use the Accelerator to create an Accelerator Action Plan (your first plan) within six months of joining the SBF Program to guide their initial small business friendly activities.

Existing members are encouraged to use the Accelerator to identify priorities for action and create a Small Business Action Plan (your ongoing plan) each financial year in line with their organisation’s broader economic development strategy.

Collaboration is essential to putting people at the centre of your effort to enhance the operating environment for small business. You should actively collaborate within your organisation and work together with your small business community.

How to use the Accelerator

Building on the five-step approach to being small business friendly, the Accelerator gives you the next layer of actions, set within an overall plan that you can communicate up, down, across and outside your organisation.

No matter where you are on the journey—whether you’re starting out or needing a refresh, the Accelerator will help you make progress fast. It contains a series of tools and guidance materials to help you on your journey.

The Small Business Action Plan should be established early with clear objectives for each financial year. This should form part of your broader economic development strategy.

If you get stuck, please contact the QSBC for additional support.

The self-support suite

The Accelerator includes a self-support suite to help you navigate each of the five steps to being small business friendly. The self-support suite includes five tasks:

Reveal your blind spots using the Blindspot Assessment
Share and engage using the Engage Wider Framework
Do a stocktake using the Capturing Improvements Method
Take action by creating a list of Priorities for Action
Get involved by showcasing and reinforcing

Each of the five tasks may take time to work through and you will identify priorities for action along the way.

These priorities for action are then added to your Accelerator Action Plan (your initial plan) or your Small Business Action Plan (your ongoing plan).

STEP 1

Reveal Your Blind Spots

Objective

Know where you’re starting from and where your organisation needs to focus for greatest impact.

To reveal your blind spots, use the Blindspot Assessment Template to help you get the mandate for change and improvement and support your SBF Program commitment. Linked directly to the charter, this assessment process acts as a benchmark, helping you to gain clarity on where your senior leaders believe you are today and the gaps to focus on.

Why is this important? Without a clear and shared awareness of your gaps, there can be little desire to change where you are today. This assessment helps you to get being more small business friendly on the leadership agenda and open discussions on how this can be achieved.

When considering your plan, make sure you allow time for this crucial step. It gives you a reference point to reflect on each year to see how far your organisation has come on your journey.

Who should be involved?

The Blindspot Assessment is primarily used with the senior leadership level of your organisation. Depending on the size and complexity of your specific situation, you may choose to extend this to other leaders in your organisation, but it’s not intended for front-line staff.

Outcomes

The Blindspot Assessment Template helps you to quickly gain clarity on where you are, engages the senior leadership team on the journey ahead and gives you some initial support to create change.

The benchmark it provides is directly linked to the charter commitments and sets the mandate for being more small business friendly. From this assessment, you will have three priority areas for action.

The Blindspot Assessment

1

Blindspot Assessment

Familiarise yourself with the assessment which is used to assess where you believe your organisation is now. Complete the template yourself before helping others.

2

Set up a meeting time

Arrange meetings with your council, your senior leadership team, relevant frontline staff, and your small business leaders. Doing at least four groups of assessments helps you identify differing perspectives and areas of unity. You will need about 30-60 minutes, with the overall intent of benchmarking their individual perspectives on where your organisation is today on the small business friendly journey.

3

Prepare

Ensure you have somewhere to record additional ideas and discussions. Make sure to have a couple of extra copies of the Blindspot Assessment Template handy.

4

Run the session

Use our suggested meeting outline:

Introduction – the purpose and expected outcomes
Expectations – honest self-assessment of the organisation as a whole
Assess – read the charter elements, then circle the statement that best reflects where they believe the organisation is today (gut feel over deep analysis is best here)
Capture – thoughts/reflections in the space provided on the template
Discuss – once everyone has completed the assessment, facilitate a discussion to examine the elements that are aligned or common and the elements that are not
Prioritise – what priority areas emerge from the assessment and discussion? Each person needs to capture these in the space provided. These then form the basis of the mandate for change and future actions.

5

Collate the results

At the end of the session, gather the assessment sheets so you can revisit and review the perspectives. Capture any strategic priority actions in a spreadsheet so that they are catalogued.

6

Close the loop

To keep momentum going, follow-up to thank participants, provide a summary of the key actions identified and outline the next steps.

The Engaging-Wider Framework Tool

1

Prepare to share the outcomes of your Blindspot Assessment

Collate your assessment and priorities for action. Your focus is on raising awareness and understanding of where the organisation is on being small business friendly and what each person can do to contribute. When planning:

Agree communication channels to reach the wider team (e.g. video, lunchbox sessions, EDM, flyers)
Set and agree key messaging with your senior leaders ahead of time
Use the Five-Step Approach to Being Small Business Friendly as a guide for your communications and a way finder for staff.

2

Collate your key messages to be shared with the wider-team

Make sure to include:

Introducing the Five-Step Approach to Being Small Business Friendly
Key findings from your Blindspot Assessment (positive and negative)
Your strategic priorities for action (the three or more key areas identified)
The next steps you intend to take.

3

Create your communications plan

Identify channels, frequency, and follow-up. Ensure key messages are clear, that there is a call to action, and that an invitation is included to Understanding Stakeholders sessions.

4

Run Understanding Stakeholders sessions

A suggested outline for the session is:

Introduction – the purpose and expected outcomes
The role of the organisation – the enabler for our stakeholders
Why the focus on small businesses?
How to engage with your staff
Who are our small businesses?
What do they need?
What do we need?
The need for Small Business Champions and their role
Next steps.

5

Recruit Small Business Champions

Within the session, garner expressions of interest for joining the Small Business Champion group, charged with taking the initiatives forward for the organisation. Capture the names of the interested parties, ensuring the key areas of the organisation are represented. Once compiled, review the EOI and recruit those team members you believe to be passionate, energetic, and connected with your small business remit and goals.

6

Close the loop

To keep momentum going, thank participants then introduce them to the organisation’s Small Business Champions, summarise the key actions and outline the next steps in the journey.

STEP 2

Share and Engage

Objective

Share your commitments with the entire organisation and empower the team and stakeholders to help you fulfill them.

To share and engage effectively, the Engaging-Wider Framework is used to engage the entire organisation on your journey to being more small business friendly. This includes all functions and levels within the organisation.

Creating awareness of small businesses and their needs, where you currently sit on the journey to being small business friendly, and the actions you need to take to get you there is crucial to success.

Without the wider team on board, the journey to being more small business friendly may fall short, lack energy and make little headway for change. This step helps you to share your current position and commitments, engage the wider team on the journey and recruit Small Business Champions that will take your initiatives forward with purpose.

The framework includes three primary activities:

Sharing the outcomes of your blind spot assessment and your priorities for action

Delivering understanding stakeholders sessions to improve awareness of small business challenges and opportunities

Recruiting Small Business Champions to help drive being more small business friendly

Who should be involved?

The Engaging-Wider Framework is an organisation-wide initiative, designed to engage the wider team on the journey to being more small business friendly. That said, you might like to start with the customer-facing functions, given their existing understanding of and exposure to small businesses.

These may be different depending on your organisation, but can include your customer service teams, compliance teams, business development teams and other service functions that have direct contact with small businesses.

Your back-office teams will need to be engaged in due course for the organisation to become truly small business friendly, but the customer-facing teams are a great place to start.

Outcomes

The Engaging-Wider Framework tool helps you to quickly gain awareness and support for your journey across the organisation. Sharing the onus for success with both the customer-facing and back-office functions quickly makes small businesses, everyone’s business. The more support and engagement you can garner, the more successful, far-reaching, and long-lasting, your improvement efforts will be.

STEP 3

Do A Stocktake

Objective

Assemble a cross-functional team to identify what is already being done, check alignment with commitments, analyse gaps and promote what is working.

Do a stocktake by using the Capturing Improvements Method. With the cross-functional team on board, you can now collate the improvements you have in motion, or need to get in motion, to be more small business friendly.

The Capturing Improvements Method helps put a structure around completing the stocktake. There are often things already happening in your organisation that most others are not aware of—this process brings those to the surface.

Who should be involved?

Undertaking the Capturing Improvements Method is best suited to the person or team responsible with bringing the SBF Program to life in your organisation and the cross-functional team of Small Business Champions.

Outcomes

Once you have completed this step, you will have used the Accelerator Improvements Spreadsheet to catalogue improvement initiatives already in place, identified gaps, and recorded new ideas—all set within your overall priority actions.

The Capturing Improvements Method

1

Download the Accelerator Improvements Spreadsheet

Familiarise yourself with it as this will become a living document and you will reference it throughout your journey.

2

Set up a session with the Small Business Champions

Host a brainstorming session with the group to identify existing actions, using sticky notes to capture each initiative and input these to the Accelerator Improvements Spreadsheet as ‘existing’ improvements.

3

Host a follow up to examine gaps and generate new ideas

Generate new ideas to fulfill your charter obligations and ways to address your three priorities for action (your gaps) identified in the Blindspot Assessment. Input these SMART actions into to the Accelerator Improvements Spreadsheet as ‘new’ ideas.

4

Consolidate the list

Work with your champions to refine the list to gain clarity on the possibilities for now and the future. Review the list and begin to group similar items and remove duplicates. At this stage, do not rule out any ideas as this will happen collaboratively in the step 4.

5

Promote the great work already being done

Use your internal communications channels to highlight specific people or teams from this stocktake exercise. While you may have a long list, highlight a few improvements currently in progress and some possibilities for the future. Sharing this information will educate and help maintain momentum by energising your organisation.

The Prioritising Action Approach

1

Set up a meeting with your Small Business Champions

Ahead of this meeting, make sure that each person has a copy of the current Accelerator Improvements Template and have had time to familiarise themselves with the existing and new improvements captured.

2

Host a prioritising action meeting

Set aside enough time for this, depending on how many actions you have captured. Share the Effort- Impact matrix with the team. Work through it collaboratively on assessing whether it is high or low effort and high or low impact for each action.

3

Prioritise the Improvement Actions list

The Accelerator Improvements Spreadsheet will categorise each action for you in line with the Effort-Impact Matrix:

4

Check your three priority areas identified in the Blindspot Assessment

From your list of Accelerator Improvements, choose three to five actions under each of the three agreed priority areas. You can add the priority areas as section headings in the improvements catalogue if you want to keep it all in one place.

5

Communicate and share the actions for implementation

Now that you have a focused list, communicate it back to the senior leadership team and out to your wider organisation to highlight your intended actions and close the loop on the process.

6

Meet with your Small Business Champions regularly

Now that you have a list of actions for implementation, ensure that you meet regularly to track progress and maintain momentum. Once you get close to completing your actions, prepare to revisit the improvement cycle again.

STEP 4

Take Action

Objective

Engage with internal teams and your small businesses to create, refine, and prioritise your action plan—then take action to start implementing your improvements.

Having a long list of ideas can become daunting and without prioritisation you could be working on the wrong improvements. This step helps focus your actions for improvement using the Prioritising Action Approach.
A quick and easy way to prioritise your improvements is the Effort-Impact Matrix. The actions that are low effort-high impact should be at the top of your list. Actions that are high effort-low impact should be further down your list.

Assess the existing and new actions in your Accelerator Improvements Plan from step 3 using the Effort-Impact Matrix. While it may be subjective, performing this activity with your Small Business Champions will improve efficacy and buy-in.

Who should be involved?

The Prioritising Action Approach is best suited for the person charged with bringing the SBF Program to life in your organisation working with the cross-functional team of Small Business Champions.

Outcomes

At the end of this stage, you will have a prioritised list of actions for improvement. You will have selected three to five achievable actions per agreed priority area to be the focus of your efforts for the current financial year. You will also have a catalogue of opportunities ready for the next cycle of improvements and an internal process for continuous improvement.

STEP 5

Get Involved

Objective

Be an active member of the SBF Program by showcasing your achievements, sharing your experience, and learning from other organisations on the journey.

This step is about showcasing and reinforcing. This is an important, yet often overlooked part of the process to being more small business friendly. By sharing initiatives, wins and outcomes both internally and externally, you will begin to create the forward motion and traction needed for long-lasting impact.

Without the discipline or process for capturing, reporting, and celebrating your efforts in being more small business friendly, you may find your team quickly lose momentum, motivation, and focus. Small businesses will also quickly forget the efforts you’ve made on their behalf, reducing your impact, undermining your goals, and risking your reputation. Sharing your initiatives and wins through the SBF community also creates opportunities for learning, development, and collaboration.

When sharing your showcasing and reinforcing efforts, be sure to create a simple process that is not tedious or time-consuming. Getting your team engaged and excited, and motivated to share their efforts, will help create the momentum you need for longevity and impact.

Who should be involved?

Showcasing and reinforcing is an ongoing, organisation-wide effort, requiring the entire team to contribute to the journey to being more small business friendly. A fundamental shift is required to ensure all levels and departments take ownership for being small business friendly. While it is likely that most initiatives and good-news stories will initially come from the customer-facing teams, the expectation is that back-office teams will soon come to the party, sharing initiatives and improvements that impact small businesses.

Outcomes

Showcasing and reinforcing helps you to gain traction and engagement for your journey at all levels of the organisation. Celebrating individuals and teams who show initiative and energy to improve the small business experience, helps create energy and excitement to become involved and join the effort. The more you can own your desire to be small business friendly, the more your team will engage in your story and come along for the ride.

Showcasing And Reinforcing Steps

1

Share the Small Business Friendly Showcase Template

Challenge the whole organisation to showcase their efforts. You might:

Create introductory text to explain what the template is for and how to use it
Ask your Small Business Champions to present the template in department meetings
Include a link to the template in your internal newsletters and on your intranet.

2

Create a catalogue of initiatives

Ensure it can be updated by your Small Business Champions and wider team, including:

Updates to processes that improve the customer experience
Department improvement plans
Grants submitted to help small businesses
Large initiatives implemented or started that will help small businesses
Small business feedback or stories received about the impacts you’re making
Award submissions and results
Collaborations or initiatives with other organisations/industry.

3

Agree on a series of communication channels

Create a communication plan and using various channels regularly, including:

Internal intranet posts, electronic direct mail, and awards
Traditional media
Electronic direct mail
Face-to-face using Small Business Champions
Social media channels
Your website (including priorities, progress reports and Showcases).

4

Gather social proof from your small business community

Capture stories, quotes and testimonials from small businesses who have benefited from your initiatives and showcase them on your website and in your communications channels.

5

Engage with other members and the QSBC team

Showcase your efforts, share ideas, brainstorm, problem-solve and learn from others’ efforts. Visit the QSBC Showcase page to learn about other successes.

6

Close the loop

Showcasing is an important deliverable for members under the SBF charter and a great way to celebrate your progress.

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