KPMG released good news yesterday . . . Australia’s small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have put the GFC and the mining bust behind them, and are planning for growth.
The bad news is that they are not all executing those growth plans well. That is the message from the 2015 KPMG Private Enterprise Growth Survey, released yesterday.
The survey sought the views of 161 SMEs throughout Australia, across multiple business sectors: More than half of these businesses had less than 200 employees, while at least one-third of the respondents were the owners themselves.
“It’s great to see many of our private business clients are focused on top-line growth because in the aftermath of the GFC, most of them focused very strongly on their cost structures, and what the bank was doing, the prevailing mindset was, ‘how do I keep going?” Rob Bazzani, national managing partner of KPMG Private Enterprise, said. “But they’ve come through that era and in many cases they’ve ‘right-sized’ the business. Now they’re thinking ‘OK, how do we get back to revenue growth?”
“They have growth plans in place and we’ve certainly got many clients that are growing. That’s the positive theme from the survey, but it’s also telling us that both planning for growth, and executing those plans, could be better.”
Of the SMEs surveyed, 76 per cent said they were too focused on the operational aspects of the business or running their internal operation, so they were very internally focused.
A further 17 per cent were focused on customers and suppliers so didn’t have the time to track revenue growth.
KPMG’s survey showed more than 70 per cent of SMEs surveyed had performed a SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats) analysis, defined customer segments and key objectives, yet only 60 per cent had developed their value proposition.
Fewer than half, 47 per cent of surveyed SMEs, had completed competitor analysis, while 29 per cent said they weren’t sure where they should invest their marketing and promotion efforts. A further 24 per cent of surveyed SMEs admitted to concentrating effort on the wrong customers and market.
Source – KPMG News release 23/09/15
Now if your business is not planning for growth or needs some guidance then it is time to connect with the team at Business By Design