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Benjamin Franklin once said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
Sadly, recent events have made it difficult for many business owners to think about growth. Instead, they’ve been focussed on fighting fires or playing catch up after lockdowns, struggling to regain the momentum they had just a few years ago.
This can be a difficult state to navigate, as it causes business owners to stay focussed on the situation they want to move away from – dwindling cashflow, rising competition, or low motivation – rather than what they want to move towards, such as new customers or innovations.
Great business leaders across time have always told us to begin with the end in mind. To always be working towards a vision that excites us, instead of becoming bogged down by challenges or preoccupied with the minutia of daily work. Put simply, a business’s vision is its lighthouse and should always be a focal point…especially when seas get rough.
Over the past 9 months, we’ve been celebrating RSM’s 100-year history by taking a journey back through each decade. You can only imagine the challenges the firm faced in that time (several wars, recessions and a Great Depression to name a few), yet commitment to its vision remained an enabler of growth regardless of external circumstance.
Growth through innovation and determination
One of RSM’s strongest periods of growth came at the turn of the century, when partnerships near doubled and gross revenue grew by 175%. While 29% of this growth was due to acquisitions, an impressive 71% was organic – aided by an increasing customer base, new service lines, and successful innovations.
I remember the year 2000 especially well as it was the year I became a partner with (what was then) RSM Bird Cameron. The threat of Y2K had passed somewhat uneventfully, and the Australian Government had just introduced GST as a replacement for several other taxes that applied to businesses at the time.
GST was a big change for business owners, and one we were proud to help our clients make sense of. One of our innovations was to provide GST training for the business community – delivering countless seminars nationwide, including 160 programs in rural WA alone. For this we received accolades from many organisations and individuals (including politicians), and were named the preferred training provider for several large institutions.
This knowledge-sharing approach has remained a mainstay in our business, and is something our clients frequently call out as an unexpected benefit of working with us. It's initiatives such as these that also saw RSM Bird Cameron win the BRW Client Choice Awards in its inaugural year (2005), and go on to win the award for many consecutive years after.
In addition to national growth, the decade of the 2000s served to further cement the firm’s affiliation with RSM and its continued international growth. The affiliation had begun in the mid-1990s when Bird Cameron leadership decided to expand into Asia, and has gone on to give our people access to a collective of accountants, auditors and consultants in more than 120 countries worldwide.
What is your vision for the future?
Growth means different things to different businesses. For your business, it may mean focussing on acquisitions for rapid expansion of staff and services. Or it may mean growing your customer base by targeting new clients. Or, it could mean innovating with new products and services that delight existing customers.
The demand for advice in navigating the adoption of new technologies has led to RSM also introducing a raft of new services over the past five years including cyber security, data analytics, ESG consulting and managed IT services.
If you find it difficult to unearth new opportunities, don’t underestimate the value of working with a business adviser. They can be a great sounding board for ideas, and are skilled at developing practical roadmaps to take you from where you are now to where you want to be.
To further emphasise Benjamin Franklin’s quote, we can take a leaf from George Lucas who said, “Always remember your focus determines your reality.”
Stay focussed on the future you want to create and the vision you have for your business – you never know where it could lead you.
Join me later this month for our final piece in this centenary series as we remember the 2010s, and explore what’s next for RSM and business in Australia.
