Training

We are a learning and teaching organisation. We run numerous training courses all directed to helping business owners and their managers run better businesses. These courses are for clients and non clients of obk.

The obk MBA
This unique course is meant for busy owners of small and medium sized businesses. Most successful business owners did not go to Managing Director School before starting their business. As a business grows business owners have to learn to play by a new set of rules. The obk MBA attracts successful and aspiring business leaders and managers who want to benefit from a formal training in areas of business analysis and development.

This is a highly focused course that covers the essential areas of business leadership and management as they apply to smaller businesses in just 30 hours. The monthly 3 hour sessions start at 8am and finish promptly at 11am. Each ‘MBA’ group is small and the sessions interactive.

Of course it is not a real Masters degree. People who attend this course are not looking for any recognised qualification, but for a better way to think about and run their business.

Grow your business and get a life!
Every business has the potential to be great! But the reality is that most never last 10 years and of those that do, they earn little more for their owners than they would make working for someone else. In fact if the owners charged full price for the value of their own work and made a charge for the cost of capital they have invested, only a handful would make profit – in other words, most people are actually destroying their own wealth.

There are two reasons for this:

Business people tend to pursue a “me too” competitive strategy
Execution of that strategy is at best ordinary and at worst appalling

The material in this program is intended to provide you with a foundation to change this situation for you and to give you a shot at being great, or at least significantly improve their personal wealth.

Building a saleable business
All business owners will need to exit from their business at some time. It’s as predictable as gravity; It’s as certain as death, which of course is one of your exit options! While some people plan to pass their shareholding down to their children most look for exit in their own lifetime. So given this inevitability you might expect there to be widespread exit planning in good time to optimise a deal. This is rarely true.

It never ceases to amaze us just how much work and focus business owners put into working on their business once they have decided to sell it. It seems that they are able to detach themselves from their business look at it from the outside as an investment in a way they just couldn’t up to that time.

In the last few months of ownership business owners pay enormous attention to profitability, cash flow and risk and most then ask themselves “why didn’t I do this before?”. Sometimes a business is developed with a sale in mind but then the sale falls through. Rather than regretting the lost time and money, business owners often reflect on time and money well spent. It would appear that most business owners put more effort into grooming a business for the next investor than they ever do for the incumbent investor!

The fact is a business worth selling is a business worth keeping – this seminar is about how to build a saleable business.