ZENBUU Blog

ZENBUU is pleased to announce the launch of Business Tune Up (www.businesstuneup.com.au).

Business Tune Up is a collaborative initiative between Australia’s leading Motoring clubs and ZENBUU aimed at helping motoring service providers increase their business performance, grow their businesses, and lift profits by building stronger businesses so that they continue to provide the legendary support services to motorists across Australia.

Partnering with the National Roads and Motoring Association (NRMA), Royal Automobile Club of Queensland (RACQ), Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia (RAC), and Royal Automobile Club of Tasmania (RACT) we have created a unique toolset for owners and managers of businesses in Australia’s Motoring services industry.

This initiative is the third generation of a highly successful initiative initially created by NRMA and the founder of ZENBUU. This Business Tune Up generation now provides motoring services businesses a subscription to a tailored, industry specific version of our ZENBUU platform, and access a much wider range of business support such as webinars, workshops as well as our results focused 90-day intensive support programs.

With the success of Good Pharma – an innovative business improvement / management toolset for existing pharmacy business owners and managers, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia asked us to develop New Pharma.

www.newpharma.org.au is the latest Guild resource to help pharmacists, interns, and students to navigate their way through the often difficult process of becoming a community pharmacy business owner.

We haven’t forgotten all the professional advisors that also help and support pharmacists as they work through the process of buying a pharmacy, taking an equity stake or carrying out a progressive buyout of the existing owners, as part of a succession plan. We created a new level of subscription so that professional advisors can use the tool to support and complement their advisory work.

Consider New Pharma the prequel to Good Pharma. We now have the ability to offer an upgrade path for pharmacists – from start up through to a sustainable mature business.

The StartupSmart awards for 2011 announces that ZENBUU is ranked 23rd amongst the fastest growing start up’s in Australia.

http://www.startupsmart.com.au/startupsmart-awards-2011/23.-zenbuu.html to read more.

For us, this is a great achievement, which wouldn’t have been possible without the great efforts of the management team and directors of Khai, Dan, Dom & Charlie.

As with many start up’s the road hasn’t been easy, but the successes of the past 18 months has shown that we’re on the right track with a much-needed toolset to help owners and managers of small – medium sized businesses drive continuous growth and improvement in their businesses.

We will continue to expand the range of diagnostics, the resources in our knowledge base, and the expert panel of consultants, advisors and specialists to live our tag line ZENBUU = all things business.

Thank you to the judges involved in the StartupSmart awards, and thank you to our dedicated teleservicing, development, and support teams.

Driving continuous improvement and growth in a business is a very difficult challenge for many business owners and managers. Why? Primarily because, in our experience, business owners and managers lack aspects of the following:

• Lack of time. Those that are working in their business find very little time, if any, to work on. Striking the balance between working “on” versus working “in” is made more difficult when the pressure is on for more sales and profits.
• Lack of skills. We know from experience that business owners and managers in a small or medium sized business need to wear on many hats – sales person, marketing manager, finance manager, IT manager, HR manager and so on. Generally people are strong in one or some of these areas, and this is where they shine. But the weaknesses in the other areas end up being the aspects of the business that slows growth and improvement.
• Lack of knowledge. Not everyone knows everything, and it is even harder to know about something you don’t even know! In larger organisations the combined skills, knowledge and experience is a great asset to ensuring you maintain high levels of productivity, innovation, and energy. In smaller business this isn’t the case – and so limits in knowledge and experience does have an effect.
• Lack of resources. Larger businesses can afford to bring on expertise and fund activities that are aimed at shifting the business in particular directions. Smaller businesses don’t have unlimited resources (money, people, time) to do this.

Having worked with owners and managers of small to medium sized businesses for the past 10 years has resulted in the development of this Continuous Improvement methodology that strikes the balance between working “in” the business and working “on” the business.

The methodology is supported by a subscription website (www.zenbuu.com) as a management tool to help reach that balance and build management skills and knowledge, and plug gaps in your resources to help you achieve continuous growth and improvement in your business.

This paper brings together the key features and resources that subscribers have access to, to help you implement a practice for continuous improvement in your business. Here we step you through the Review process, the development of a 1-page Strategic Plan, the completion of a SWOT, and the development of a 90-day Action Plan.

Following these four steps on a continuous basis, with the right people involved, will support you in achieving the results you are looking for from your business.

ZENBUU announces that the Good Pharma re-branded site, www.goodpharma.com.au, now has over 35% of the Pharmacy industry sector using our diagnostics, tools, resources and following our 90-day continuous improvement methodology to drive growth and improvements in their businesses.

Wow, we are so close to releasing the major user interface upgrades due early to mid October. Khai,  Dave and Teeshi you are powerful men – its been a solid month’s late night skyping and 2am finishes.

The Dashboard has been completed and we are currently “ironing out the bugs” the major benefit of the new dashboard is the ability to add/update  actions due this week and move around it more easily

The Diagnostics in the review section are sleeker and faster, usability has been enhanced dramatically with the ability to not only select actions but add/assign to users or add new users on the fly.

The Plan section  has been overhauled with some fantastic AJAX functionality that allows you to run your work in progress sessions online, adding new actions, assigning dates to be completed, who must complete them and updating the status effortlessly.

Good old IE 6 (every web developer’s nemesis) is driving us wild with some AJAX features at the moment but we will get there.

Hmmmm Google  stopped supporting it didn’t they- watch this space on that one.

Looking forward to closing the loop on the long list of to do’s  next week and starting every developers agony – end user testing.

For a sneak peek go to our prototype at http://zenbuu.com/2010/

ZENBUU just hit 2500 subscribers!

With the relaunch of the new user interface due in late September/Early October the future is bright for ZENBUU and its community of users.

We hope you all continue to get more and more value out of the application as we continue to develop it. Please don’t hesitate to email us your feedback or start a discussion in the forum if you have any ideas how we could make life better for you as a user.

ZENBUU is pleased to announce its first “white labelled” version tailored exclusively for the Pharmacy industry sector. Good Pharma  (www.goodpharma.com.au) is a collaborative initiative between the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, the Department of Health, and ZENBUU.

NSW Department of State and Regional Development, now known as NSW Department of Industry and Investment, ran a Stepping Up Advance program using ZENBUU during 2009, and following this very successful program they are now planning to deliver another Stepping Up Advance – Grow your business program using ZENBUU!

This is a fantastic opportunity for a small- medium business, based in NSW, to take advantage of the 50% grant (subsidy) that would go towards a business subscribing to the ZENBUU Assisted program.

We, and our partners, will be looking for participants from March onwards. So if you’re a business owner and based in NSW, get in touch with us and maybe with the NSW Industry and Investment’ help save you 50% of your ZENBUU Assisted fees.

We are just about to kick off another in-take of the highly successful Business Tune Up program, a partnership between ZENBUU and the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland (RACQ).

The Business Tune Up program has achieved some fantastic results across their network of contractors, such as helped contractors:

• Lift profitability by 100%
• Increase margins by over 20%
• Every business has lifted their diagnostic score results
• Recruited new staff
• Improved cash flow
• Reduced debtors to nil, from an average of over 120 days
• Increased revenues by 20%
• Lifted productivity by 200%

We’ve got a few case studies in our Clients page