The new 3 Rs
of Business Growth
Over 60% of Queensland businesses say the biggest barrier to growth after COVID is the ability to attract and retain suitable employees.
What are the 3 Rs?
Recruit
Attracting talent to to work in a small business hard. Too hard, and most simple give up.
Retain
Even if you find talent, you need to develop their skills to keep them engaged.
Raise
Now they have specialised skills, your team can do the type of work you need to prosper.
Is this new?
Not a new idea, and has worked for the last 100 years:
The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. — Henry Ford, Founder, Ford Motor Company.
What are future "Skills"?
Hard and Soft skills were coined last century. Modern businesses look for Thinkers, Action-takers, and People people.
Which one are you?
Thinking Skills
Innovation, Adaptation, Innovation, and Critical Thinking
Action Skills
Collaboration, Problem Solving, Digital Technology, Customer Focus, and communication
Personal skills
Initiative, learning, Cultural Awareness, Ethics, and Empathy
Learn more
Take the quiz and find out what you have to offer as a business owner, job seeker, or even a contractor looking for work.
Skills Matching
Take our free skills strengths quiz to find out if you are a a naturally a thinker, a people person, or an action taker, and set a workforce plan to fill the gaps.
recruit
Find your ideal candidates and build trust. Let them know from the onboarding process. Start developing there Action skills by doing productive urgent work using tools from our online small business induction 4 week course.
Retain
After completing the induction, keep talent engaged learning what is important to your business success. Developing their thinking skill to help you create innovative solutions and adapt your growth strategy using our tried and test critical thinking tool.
raise
now your team knows what's urgent and important, they can help take more work from you. Letting you get back to doing what you love, and the reasons you got into your own business in the first place.
Even Richard Branson started small too, selling records above a shoe store.
QLD back to Work Support payment Onboarding
You could get $15,000 funding from the Qld Government just for putting on someone with life experience who hasn't work over a year. Or $20,000 if they are under 25 yrs old as youth boost funding.
The catch is, they need to want to hang around for a year, but you get the first part of the funding if they make it through the first 4 week? Sound fair to you?
This funding requires eligible employers to demonstrate a genuine commitment to ongoing employment of the employee. Want to find out how the 40% of businesses in Qld do that?
We've developed a pay-as-you-go process for small businesses that don't have a HR department to recruit and onboard new employees.
Includes:
1. Workforce Planning and Marketing Growth: We'll help you identify skills gaps and develop a three-month marketing growth plan that aligns with your business goals. This strategic approach ensures your workforce is equipped for success, maximizing your business's potential.
2. Recruitment Made Easy: Crafting compelling position descriptions, creating impactful job ads, and offering recruitment and selection advice are all part of our expertise. We'll guide you through the process, streamlining your hiring efforts and saving you valuable time and resources.
3. Seamless Onboarding: Retaining employees is crucial, and our online induction program ensures that new hires are seamlessly integrated into your business. By fostering a supportive environment, you not only increase employee satisfaction but also secure your funding installment.
4. Performance and Capability Assessment: As part of the probation period, we'll conduct thorough performance appraisals and capability assessments, ensuring your employees are engaged in productive work that drives your business forward.
Our experience
Tap into a combined 100 years of small business knowledge and experience from our program developers
Dennis Hall
Owner of the Business and Jobs expos, with a passion for micro-business development, and sees no reason to retire anytime soon.
Janeen Vosper
Personal Branding Authority and Sales coach, with over 30 years experience providing business leaders with the know-how to get noticed as an industry expert.
Brett O'Connor
instructional designer and trainer, 30 years experience in starting and running small businesses, specialising in create online business opportunities.
Skills recognition
Inception Network awards digital credentials to indicate the level of skills a person has demonstrated through work experience.
Badges are awarded for capable, proficient, and and specialist levels of performance in real-world work situations. 14 skills across the 3 skill areas of Thinking, Personal, and Action skills.
The badges can also be used to assess the suitability of graduates with a qualification to work in a small business. The badges are a simple way for small business employers to recruit the less than 50% of qualification holders who are considered suitable for job roles and meet the small business needs.
FAQs
The businesses themselves, that responded to Business Chamber Queensland’s pulse march survey. 60% of businesses see attracting and retaining suitable staff as the biggest barrier to growing a business at the moment
Yes. With all the talk about AI taking over jobs, over 80% of ICT jobs advertised get filled. Around 70% of HR and Marketing jobs get filled.
But when it comes to jobs in Healthcare and social services, only around 45% of jobs get filled, and that is dropping further as the unemployment rate drops. It is the industry that employs the most people. Twice as many as construction, so it is the first to feel the effect of the talent pool drying up.
While Small businesses makes up 97.5% of the total number of businesses in Queensland, the other 2.5% employs more than half of the workforce talent pool.
Small business can’t afford to compete for talent with HR departments and recruitment agencies advertising jobs online. And even if they can afford to compete, they are inundated with cover letters written by ChatGPT that make people look eligible but don’t have the personal skills to work for a small business, that is if they even turn up for the interview.
In March this year alone, there were 282,000 Australian jobs advertised in the internet, (according to the federal government labour market portal statistics). And most of them were from big business. Over 43,000 of those were for business Admin and clerical roles, 23,000 jobs for sales people, 31,000 jobs for managers, and 82,000 jobs for professionals
Unemployment at the lowest rate in years, but with the number of job ads each month up around levels like before the GFC, that looks good for the government, and workforce Australia service providers I guess, but a disaster for small business owners. No wonder many small businesses owners have given up looking for help.
In Queensland, there are over 450,000 businesses that employ on average 4.9 people when you divide the number of people employed by the number of registered businesses.
- 2.5% employ over 20 staff
- 97.5% employ less than 20 staff
- Micro-businesses employ 4 or less staff, and make up 25% of businesses
- Sole-traders or solopreneurs don’t employ anyone else, and make up 60% of all businesses
Small Business owners still need to do those four job roles (mentioned in the above section) all by themselves if they want to survive.
Or, let their business fail, and go back to work for someone else, but we don’t want to talk about the mental health issues that causes, now do we.
I personally applaud the Queensland government’s funding campaign to look after a small business’ biggest asset, the small business owner.
As a business coach over the last 30 years, I’ve seen that preventable mental health issues are triggers of the 3 most common reasons a business fails in the first place. With all the talk about AI, there also needs to be conversations about bringing the humanity back into business.
The government measures that. For the advertised jobs in march, the average was 14.6 applications, 6 people with the qualifications they needed, but only 2.4 people were deemed suitable for the job.
This measure is called the suitability gap, which in March was at 60%. Coincidence that this is the same number of businesses that said the biggest barrier to growth was attracting suitable staff… we think not.
It kind of is, but, again, small business owners may not be aware of it, and which level of government is funding it. for example, did you know:
- Back to work is a Qld government funding initiate where businesses in Moreton Bay, Redlands, Ipswich, and Logan Council areas can get up to $15,000 to employ someone who has been unemployed for 1 year. Eligibility criteria’s apply, but basically you can get a first payment of $4500 after 4 weeks full-time employment, which more that pays for our induction course, and would also cover the retain and raise parts of our program too. This is how we can help make sure businesses have staff stick around so the get the other payments at 26 and 52 weeks of employment
- There is also a “small business talent pool” option where eligible businesses can get and extra $2000 to spend on staff development so they don’t have to leave the small business to level up their skills.
We know business owner want the skills, not the qualification, so we’ve design training that get your employees to do their course work on your business, creating marketing and sales plans and business business relationship skills to make you money, not cost you money by taking them out of your business.
It was called the Small Business Expo previously, but now it has grown to attract all kinds of businesses, and people who want to work for the micro-businesses that make up 85% of all businesses today.
Inviting big business into the expo allows job seekers to compare what small businesses have to offer in a completive and changing job market. Particularly when it comes to personal skills development like Learning, Cultural Awareness, Ethics, Initiative, and empathy.
Did you know there are 5 types of empathy used in sales funnels (online and offline) that you need to use to convert leads to customers, and to raving loyal fans? It’s more likely you will get to practice this in a small business, and even learn how to start your own businesses.
It may take you years working for a big company doing low paying jobs before you get an opportunity to move into sales, where the big money is for big business.
We have a goal of creating 10,000 job with Small Businesses through the expo program this year. We know if we can get the right people into small businesses and take away their biggest barrier to growth, that business will be able to afford to keep people on, with the skills to survive another global pandemic if it happens again.