Upcoming Event News

International Women's Day 2011 - join us for the SCBWN premier breakfast of the year

One of Queensland’s favourite female columnists Frances Whiting will join the SCBWN for breakfast on Tuesday, March 15 as part of our International Women’s Day celebrations at the Hyatt Regency Coolum. 2011 marks the global centenary year for International Women’s day and the SCBWN are proud to welcome someone of Frances’ calibre to share her stories and experience with women from across the Sunshine Coast at what is sure to be a fantastic breakfast.

Frances's column has become a weekly part of reader’s lives – one that makes them smile, cry and on occasion, fall out of bed laughing. While Frances is known for entertaining her audiences through her humorous column, she is also highly regarded as a senior feature writer and assistant editor contributing about the more serious side of life. Last year, Frances published her own book ‘Oh To be A Marching Girl’ a collection of some of her best and most loved columns which was a runaway success, debuting at number one on the bestseller list and remaining on that list for several weeks.

Before become a journalist Frances was a primary school teacher and continues to enjoy an active interest in education, speaking at schools throughout Queensland and mentoring young would-be writers. Also actively involved in charity work, Frances gives her time to organisations such as Kids Help Line to promote the wonderful work they do and to help spread the message about this work.

Event details:
Date: Tuesday, March 15
Time: 6:30am for a 7am start
Venue: Hyatt Regency, Coolum
Cost: $55 member, $65 guests, $550 for table of 10. This includes welcome glass of champagne on arrival and delicious 3 course breakfast.
Bookings can be made via the website www.scbwn.org.au and must be received by Wednesday 9th March @ 11am

Event Sponsor

Sunsuper is proud to sponsor the Sunshine Coast Business Women’s Network International Women’s Day Breakfast.
Founded in 1987, Sunsuper is one of Australia's largest superannuation funds. Sunsuper continues to grow with around $16billion in funds under management, more than 70,000 employers paying into the Fund and over 1 million members.

Regional Manager, Dave Murgatroyd, has been assisting clients in the area with their superannuation arrangements for over a decade. The services provided by Sunsuper are highlighted at the employer and member education events hosted during the year. If you would like more information on all of Sunsuper services, including our next round of public member and or employer information seminars visit www.sunsuper.com.au or contact Dave directly, phone 5479 5399 or email dave_murgatroyd@sunsuper.com.au

Professional Development Lunches

SCBWN Professional Development Lunches are an excellent networking opportunity for you and your business. Please remember to bring your marketing material and business cards as you will have the opportunity to speak for 5 minutes about your business. The dates are available on the events page of the website www.scbwn.org.au/html/events.php

There dates for March are:

Wednesday 9th March
Venue: See Restaurant Mooloolaba
Host: Michalle Faulkner
RSVP: michalle@eastcoasthr.com.au
Phone: 0418947296

Friday 25 March
Venue: Le Baroque Restaurant Cnr Glouster Rd and Main Street Buderim
Time - 12-2pm
Host: Nicole Sylvester
RSVP: nicole@nicolesylvesterconsulting.com.au
Phone: 0413160260

Member offers - Valid until 30th April, 2011
Members Offers are designed to encourage you to "shop locally" and support Sunshine Coast women in business.

Offers are available for viewing on the SCBWN website http://www.scbwn.org.au/offersview2/offers_list.php and must be accessed with a current membership card. Current offers will be valid until 30th April, 2011.

20% off retail price of art and homewares - GO ARTY

1 hour FREE Franchising Feasibility consult - SHIRALEE WILSON

FREE month’s telephone answering service - PIKKI STREET CORPORATE CENTRE (valid for February only)

One complimentary ‘With Yin’ VIP Membership (Valued at $150) - YIN HEALTH

Staff Package discount - St George Bank

15% off 1st purchase - KINDRED GIFTS

Two work- life balance consultations for the price of one. Their investment $150 - BRIGHT LIFE COACHING

Editorial

When I think about International Women’s Day and what it means to be a woman I must admit I feel a little tired. I know I am not alone when I say this but some days your feel as though you have run a marathon and get up to do it all again! As a mum to three little kids, the littlest being my baby girl Matilda (she is a complete bundle of joy but is at that age, 16 months, where she is into absolutely everything and is totally in love with her mum. Yes this is gorgeous and lovely but I would just like 5 minutes to sit on my own or be able to walk without a baby appendage hanging off my leg!

I know I must be sounding like a total whinger and completely ungrateful and maybe I am so I will stop and be thankful that I get to do so many of the joyous things that can come with being a woman, including celebrating IWD at our annual and most prestigious breakfast of the year. Who needs an excuse to dress up and join the most talented, innovative and inspiration women on the Sunshine Coast for breakfast at the beautiful Hyatt Coolum. This year the breakfast will feature one of Australia’s most talented and entertaining writers Frances Whiting and is not to be missed.

So, if sometimes you feel a little tired and are in need of a recharge, join us on Tuesday 15th March for what is sure to be a truly inspirational morning!

Thanks and kind regards
Chelsea
SCBWN Executive Officer

SCBWN SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE

The SCBWN has launched a new range of sponsorship packages for 2011. The packages will include 1 Diamond Sponsor, 2 Gold Sponsors, 4 Silver Sponsors and 6 Bronze Sponsors. If you would like to register your interest please email Chelsea at coordinator@scbwn.org.au.

EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST MUST BE RECEIVED BY 8th MARCH

The 2011 SCBWN Member Logos have gone out and please note that should your designer require details on style guide, please contact Genine Howard, Marketing Chair on 0409 555 955.

Remember to join our Facebook page! Our members are finding our Facebook page a great source of information and tips, and it is an easy communication tool.

We have been working hard on the new and very improved SCBWN website which will be up and running soon so stay tuned ….

Choosing your (marketing) bed fellows
By Carlee Driscoll

As a company that partners with our clients for the long term we are often being asked how businesses should choose which consultants and companies they should work with.

Whether jumping into bed with a media partner or working on a long term relationship with a marketing consultant, business coach, accountant, solicitor and so on you need to be sure it’s going to work for you and for your business…

Is it a good fit? Do they share similar values to you? Your company brand, company values and staff ideals are fundamental to who you are and it is crucial to work with companies that are a good cultural fit. What is important to them needs to resonate with you. Think about what values you want to share… do you want the relationships and outcomes to be dynamic and progressive, do you want them to be conservative and safe, do you want them to be challenging and assertive… Have you checked their credentials? We have all heard horror stories on Today Tonight or ACA of embellished CVs, fake testimonials, overpromises and worse. Luckily, in the real world (as opposed to TV Land) these instances are hopefully few and far between in our professional circles. Reputable companies will be happy to share their staff’s experience and let you meet the team or see examples of their work so you can be confident they are what they say they are. Go and physically visit them in their offices to get a feel and trust your instinct when you meet people – it’s usually right. And keep those credentials in context, people can be very well credentialed but check they have the experience and hands on skills to deliver what you need on a day to day basis. Can they deliver? Do they have the skills, ideas, people power and the resources to do what you need them to do? Do they have strong specialist skills and a team big enough to cope with your demands? Do they have a proven track record in delivering results for clients? Ask those questions of your potential partners. Choosing a good fit marketing partner is just like choosing the right mattress… you should be comfortable and able to sleep at night know you are in safe hands.

Carlee is the Strategic Marketing Planner for Chilli. If you’d like to see how Carlee and the Chilli team can help you grow your business call 5437 7788 or check out www.chilligroup.com.au.

6 Ways to Increase Sales By Melanie Jacobson BA

Do you want to increase sales dramatically? Shift your sales focus from attracting new customers to enticing your proven customers to buy again. The best sales prospect is a prospect that’s already converted – in other words, one of your current customers.

Think of it this way; if your business is located in a small town with a population of 1000 people and you sell a sprocket to everyone in that town, man, woman, and child, you’ve sold 1000 sprockets – and saturated your market. Your sprocket selling days are over. Is it time to pack up and move on? No! If you start focusing your sales efforts on your proven customers, you’ll be able to increase your sprocket sales dramatically. And these sure ways to increase sales will help build customer loyalty, too. Try some or all of these ideas to increase your sales:

1. Set up a sales incentive program.
Give your sales staff a reason to get out there and sell, sell, sell. Why do so many businesses that rely on their sales staff to drive sales have incentive programs in place? Because offering their sales staff the trips and/or TVs for x amount of sales works.

2. Encourage your sales staff to upsell.
Essentially, upselling involves adding related products and/or services to your line and making it convenient and necessary for customer to buy them. Just placing more products near your usual products isn’t going to increase your sales much. To upsell successfully, the customer has to be persuaded of the benefit. For example, say you were a company selling sales process training workshops and someone called wanting to book in 2 staff members. Upselling would be exploring whether or not there were more staff members involved in the sales process, and if there were, informing the caller that the other people could attend for little extra cost. The benefit to the client is that it is inexpensive to add a few more people, and now everyone can participate fully in their sales process.

3. Keep your staff accountable.
Make sure you’re on the same page as your staff. If they don’t know what their goals are, or what they should be doing, how can you expect them to achieve the results you want? A good strategy for keeping everyone on track is something we’ve dubbed ‘10@10.10’. At 10 past 10 every morning, we spend 10 minutes getting all staff members to announce the one major task they will complete that day, and how it will benefit the company. It is a surprisingly easy way to keep everyone accountable and on track. However, the tasks need to be specific: instead of saying, “I’m going to increase my sales”, say “I will make 10 calls with the aim to win 6 sales”.

4. Tier your customers.
There should be a clear and obvious difference between regular customers and other customers – a difference that your regular customers perceive as showing that you value them. How can you expect customer loyalty if all customers are treated as “someone off the street”? There are all kinds of ways that you can show your regular customers that you value them, from small things such as greeting them by name through larger benefits such as giving regulars extended credit or discounts.

5. Set up a customer rewards program.
We’re all familiar with the customer rewards programs that so many large businesses have in place. But there’s no reason that a small business can’t have a customer rewards program, too. It can be as simple as a discount on a customer’s birthday or as complex as a points system that earns various rewards such as discounts on merchandise. Done right, rewards programs can really help build customer loyalty and increase sales.

6. Distribute free samples to customers.
Why do so many businesses include free samples of other products when you buy something from them? Because it can increase sales in so many ways. As the customer who bought the original product, I might try and like the sample of the new product and buy some of it, too. Or I might pass on the sample to someone else, who might try the product, like it, and buy that and other products from the company. At the very least, the original customer will be thinking warm thoughts about your company, and hopefully telling other people about your products.

Attracting new customers is a good thing. But attracting new customers is not the only way to increase your sales, and is, in fact, the hard way of going about it. Shifting your sales focus to enticing your current customers can make increasing your sales easier – and best of all, build the customer loyalty that results in repeat sales.

To hear more tips about increasing sales, and other ways to increase your profits, come along to our next free seminar, Turbo Charge Your Business. All the details at our website: www.pjtaccountants.com.au.

The Web Evolution - What is Web 3.0 and what does it mean to Social Media
By Lisa Harrison

Over the last few years social networking sites have become a prominent communication tool; this popularity has seen it labelled as an addiction. The various social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Digg are the most popular amongst the many out there. People have been so glued to the social networking sites that they feel its mandatory to log on to them at least once a day. The traditional morning routine of a cuppa and the morning paper has morphed into a cuppa and logging onto facebook. I know you can relate to that!

It is for these reason marketers and businesses are quickly jumping on the Social Media bandwagon as they use this medium for online marketing and it is here to stay for a long time to come. As businesses we must be aware that for most people being on more than one social networking site is very time consuming. This means that as we get more connected globally one site will emerge dominant in the social networking worldwide. Right now in Australia it seems that this site will be Facebook.

As social media grows up so does the technology behind it, due to consumers wanting even more bang for their buck while online. As we head towards 2012 we will see Web 3.0 come of age. Where we are seeing a lot of updates are being flashed on the users mobile screens by means of SMS, or they log on to these sites via mobile phone. To understand how we got to this point so quickly, here is how the web has evolved:

1996 we had Web 1.0, pre-Google days, Internet users had to know the URLs of websites they wished to visit. Only large corporate brands would have a web presence and information would be skewed toward their brands.

2006 Web 2.0 consumers searched Google and all website were listed from all over the world. This was the start of user reviews, expert opinions, blogs, You Tube videos, and a huge amount of shambolic information...some of it meaningful to the search, some of it not.

2011 In Web 3.0 consumers text or message a friend from mobile devices asking their network things like "do you know a good accountant...can you recommend anybody?" Search engines would pick up on the text and deliver, with the consumers permission, a list of local Accountants and contact info, and testimonials.

In other words, Web 3.0 is intelligent messaging, search or email to anticipate your next thoughts and next steps. It will then attempt to guide you to relevant, highly targeted information in case you decide to move on to next steps. The various shops, banks and other commercial enterprises will be presented according to the web's assessment of how relative their messaging is to your particular situation and, or course, how much they spend with the search engines.

The tricky part in all this is that it must be permission-based marketing. Getting a bunch of annoying pop-ups while you're texting, Facebook-ing or Twitter-ing will likely turn consumers away from those vendors.

Many, many companies are barely investing in the most basic social media strategies and lead generation tools offered by Web 2.0. Marketing departments, or what's left of them, at mid-size and larger companies, are struggling just to learn about using social media for marketing. Most marketing people working for companies are stretched way too thin to even think about the implications of Web 3.0 and are setting their companies up to get blindsided competitors who get it and invests the time and effort to wield it effectively.

The big difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, that I can see, is that in Web 2.0 the user must exert effort to customize the information needed for his/her particular purchase criteria. We now have personalisation with Web 3.0 meaning information is automatically customised for the user's purchase criteria, while connecting using mobile phones or devices.

" Advertorial

It's an EXPONANZA! Event Tickets including the David Koch Business Lunch on Sale Now!

The much-anticipated tickets to one of the region’s premier business events, the Sunshine Coast Business Expo, are now available on-line.

The Sunshine Coast Business Women’s Network is proud to support this two day exciting event to be held on Wednesday 30 March and Thursday 31 March. You can choose from a range of special business events or come along for the whole two days!

Expo events include:

WEDNESDAY
Opening business breakfast with guest presenter, Michael Sherlock, founder of Brumby’s Bakeries. Includes plated breakfast Pacific Volvo Women With Drive lunch with fashion designer, Sacha Drake. Two course lunch and complimentary champagne included A series of morning and afternoon workshops and seminars

THURSDAY
David Koch (in person!) lunch and forum. Includes two course lunch Peter Blasina, aka “Gadget Guy”, celebrity presenter and technology maestro Andrew Griffiths, Internationally acclaimed author and business coach A series of seminars and workshops

Visit http://www.scbizexpo.com.au/tickets/index.php to buy advance tickets NOW!

Queensland floods: how one pair of shoes can make a difference?

Take one woman. Dress her for success. Watch her shine in her workplace or business. It’s a simple formula I’ve been following with my personal and corporate styling clients for almost three years. And yes, watching women light up as her style comes together is incredibly rewarding.

But I’ve been working with the lucky ones. Women who have jobs; women who have budgets to top up their existing wardrobes. But what if your wardrobe no longer existed? What if every piece of clothing – work clothing in particular – was washed away or coated in silt from a flooded river? What if you had to start all over again? It’s a question that friend and Sunshine Coast business woman, Vicki Brown, had been thinking about a lot following last month’s devastating floods in Queensland.

She phoned me a couple of weeks ago with her idea and it’s a good one.
“In time a lot of women affected by the floods are going to need to return to work,” said Vicki.
“My idea is to ask everyone to donate new or ‘as new’ workwear that we can transport to those in need,” she said. “Can you imagine if everyone donated just one piece?”
So, I put my thinking cap on and was trying to work out how we would get these items of clothing to the people who REALLY need them.
And then I read Rebecca Sparrow’s weekly column in the Sunday Mail. She was urging readers to donate to Dress for Success, an organisation in Brisbane that dresses women re-entering the workforce AND they are donating one outfit to women affected by the Queensland floods.
Bingo.

Dress for Success Brisbane is a non-profit organisation established to promote the economic independence of disadvantaged women by providing professional attire, a network of support and the career development tools to help women thrive in work and life.
So, I contacted executive manager Lana Gishkariany and got a bit of a wishlist from her.
1. Good quality work clothing – shirts, trousers, jackets, skirts, dresses
2. Black handbags
3. Black shoes
“No pun intended by they literally walk out the door each week,” she said of the shoes.
I couldn’t help thinking how simple it would be to buy a new pair of black shoes or a new handbag and really make a difference in another woman’s life?
So are you in? Can you shop for a flood-affected working woman this week?

How to donate?
Donations can be dropped to 12 Tandem Avenue, Warana, every Wednesday between 10am and 2pm. If that time and place doesn’t suit, please email me (nikki@stylingyou.com.au) to arrange an alternative. Vicki Brown’s company, Browns Slipway Transport, will be transporting the clothes for free. Please deliver on coat hangers.