Successful and lovely creative business

A while ago I came across a video project called Fifty People One Question that made me simultaneously happy, sentimental, grateful, and a wave of other profound emotions. It’s so simple, yet so powerful.

The creative agency Crush + Lovely behind that project has an incredible portfolio of equally beautiful videos, apps, websites and other creative endeavors.

I was thrilled to discover Crush + Lovely has been a Xero customer for years. We wanted to talk with them about their experience using Xero to run a creative agency, to learn about their workflow, how their team collaborate on finances, and how they manage growth. We want to make sure Xero performs well for agency sized businesses like Crush + Lovely with around 20 staff based in various cities across the United States.

It occurred to us, it would be wonderful to capture their story on video. And who better to produce the video than Crush + Lovely themselves?! As you’d expect, they nailed it. It was thrilling to hear the impact Xero is having on their business and their lives.

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Un-learning to move forward

No matter where you are around the world the same principles apply to learning and making the most of your software. For some, learning new technology is easy, for others there’s some “un-learning” of familiar software – especially if you’ve been using it for a long time.

Recently we held a global training summit with our regional training managers travelling from UK, US, and Australia to join the NZ training team. There were 11 of us in total gathered together to learn and share ideas from our collective relevant experience of 145 years. Our common goal was to make the learning experience for both partners and customers as valuable and interactive as possible.

Across the week we covered a wide range of content and shared common experiences. One comment from our training managers that really stood out was that many people imagine that Xero will work much like their old desktop system. This was echoed around the world.

So why is this? There are different brands of accounting software in each market and we all get used to doing things a certain way and make assumptions that are not about accounting, but rather are based on how the software works.

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The next generation of business

A couple of weeks ago I took part as a judge in a competition/scheme run by the Young Enterprise Trust , which Xero sponsors, called the BP Business Challenge. This is a scheme that YE runs around the country to encourage an understanding of enterprise and entrepreneurship amongst 16-17 year olds and acts as a feeder into the bigger Young Enterprise Scheme.

It’s a 3 day event where kids are split into teams (not necessarily of people they know) and they have to come up with an idea and formulate a business plan around the idea. Obviously the time constraint means that nothing is done too in-depth (there’s not much validation of numbers that would take even the best business minds some time to come up with). But they are given a view into a world they may not be aware of or envision being able to get into. I have no doubt that some of those kids will become the future leaders in business and with the ever decreasing barrier to entry as a start up I wouldn’t be surprised if I see some of them reach for their vision sooner rather than later.

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Payroll reporting in real time

Today for Australia we’ve released an update that gives you more power when it comes to payroll reporting. Retrieving the right information when you need it is key to good payroll administration. With this release, we’ve completely rebuilt our reporting framework and increased the number of reports available from seven to fourteen.

So what’s new?

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Franchise doubles turnover with Xero

Rob Dixon, owner and founder of UK based franchise Joineryworkshop.com, switched himself and his franchisees to Xero a year ago. Since then, he’s doubled turnover – and he attributes a lot of that to the fact that Xero gives him better visibility over his business and more time to work on growing his business.

Financial visibility over the franchisees is key for a franchisor. Working in desktop software restricted his financial visibility because he never had an accurate view of his cash position. After all, his figures may tell one story, but without up-to-date data from his franchisees, that story wasn’t really complete.

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