How Can Discussing Elephants Help Our Business?

There are two really good reasons to discuss elephants - read on and discover!

First up what can we learn from the newborn baby elephant in Sydney's Taronga zoo, initially nicknames "Mr Shuffles". After 4 days of his mother's labour he was thought to be stillborn until he popped his persistent head up and with a little help like a sling under his belly held up by four zoo staff so he was able to drink milk from his mother until his legs got the hang of standing by himself.

He is now a fun little animal and still getting into trouble and a recent news broadcast showed all the other elephants and the zoo staff rescuing him from a pond adventure. Baby elephants weigh around 100 kg but like all of us from time to time, they may need some help.

And so the lessons we learn from Mr Shuffles, who now has a proper name, are that we all, including our businesses, need both a helping hand and a good dose of persistence.

So why is this relevant?

Let me explain..........

One of the best helping hands for most businesses is a simple and effective management system that identifies, then reduces risks, trains your staff to reduce errors, rework and missed opportunities and builds in feedback.

It gives you peace of mind and extra time.

environment, safety and quality management systems all help your business so it does not really matter which one you choose. The best system is one that covers all these risks and is low paper but fully integrated.

The second elephant is the one we pretend is not in the room when we talk about systems. In the case of certified systems, the elephant is what to do about auditing.

I am the first to acknowledge that external auditing can be expensive, especially if you have an integrated system with several standards but there are things you can do.

Some people decide to internally audit their management system but while thio sounds like an easier option, it does not bring the very real benefits and improvement to your system that you get from an external audit.

If you have an integrated system, you may decide to run several systems but only get one audited. The fact that they are integrated means that all the systems will be kept up to scratch at a lower cost.

You can choose your auditing body carefully. I recommend smaller auditing bodies for small business because their costs are often lower - like $1,200 per day instead of $1,800 from some of the larger companies and some of them specialise in working with small business and understand you have simpler systems and don't use the corporate jargon they like to sound important with.

If you need the highly recognised big company logos for your marketing, then your auditing fees are well worth it and much cheaper than many other forms of advert. Every business is different. - If you are a small business doing environmental management you may be interested in a standard called EnviroCert that is almost ISO 14001 but scaled slightly for small business or as a stepping stone to ISO 14001.

Tomorrow walks in for your external audit and you have reached your deadline when the auditor walks through the door. Is your system up to scratch. You will get greater efficiency and reduced stress!

Can you image a world where you no longer need to patch up staff errors or dig out buried errors that have come back to bite hard.

Other benefits are access to tenders and large contracts and logos that help with your marketing.

I have been running audited systems since the late 1980s and it is simply the way I do business. It allows me to run effectively with minimal staff and I fully recommend you have an audited managed system.