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:
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Reveal your blind spots using the Blindspot Assessment
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Share and engage using the Engage Wider Framework
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Do a stocktake using the Capturing Improvements Method
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Take action by creating a list of Priorities for Action
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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).
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
- 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.
The Engaging-Wider Framework Tool
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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
The Prioritising Action Approach
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.
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).