BNI Adelaide

Simon Derek-Roberts

Overview

When Simon first found Space he was working crazy long hours but still couldn’t grow the business to where he wanted it to be. He was bogged down in the day-to-day grind with no time to recruit key staff to enable to business to expand.

Additionally, his young family was being impacted – it really hit home one weekend, where his daughter remarked, “…Dad, you’re always working” – he realised he was becoming a stranger to his family. It was then he knew something has got to change, there must be a better way.

Challenges

He was working 70-80 hour weeks but the business was still not growing – he was busy but not necessarily productive. He had no time or energy to focus on growth strategies or hire key executives to expand beyond his current position.

The admin, payroll, invoicing and the day-to-day grind work he was doing was necessary to keep the business wheels turning but he knew it was not the impactful work that he as a business owner should be focusing on.

He needed more help with his event management – his member volunteers were already becoming disgruntled with the increasing amount of admin work being put upon them with each additional event, which ultimately would impact his customers experience and company growth.

His anxiety was already high, his family was growing with a new baby on the way and the long hours were already causing a strain – he knew he’d be heading towards burnout.

Outcome

His options were simple…

• Hire and train local part-time staff, which would impact his profits and eat further into his precious time.

• Put more work on to his volunteer team and hope they didn’t revolt.

• Scale back the business and be content with a smaller entity.

Simon now has Space – he’s managed to grow his business by 10% whilst working half of the time. His VA saves him over 35-40 hours a week and he is more productive than ever. He’s hired 2 new key executives to his team who are on track to grow the business by a further 30-40% in the next year. He has his weekends back – time with the family – and even does the school pick up when he chooses.

Customer satisfaction ratings have soared to over 90% with further engagement in his events programme. Best of all he focuses solely ON his business growth and is not stuck IN the day-to-day operations anymore.

He often reflects and laughs – as one of his initial concerns was the time it would take to train the virtual support. “…I actually find the Space model of my VA capturing and designing procedures quite liberating, as I can now easily offload tasks that I never want to do again.”

Outside of his business he has referred Space to clients in the Finance, Marketing, Broking and Real Estate sectors. He’s received feedback from those clients where they’ve had similar transformational experiences in their business, through Space, and had a tremendous experience with their virtual support.