This article could be out of date, as it was published 9 months 10 days ago.

Running a business is always a challenge but with a 50% subsidy from the government and Experience On Tap (EOT) your company can reap the rewards and increase its growth.

“I trebled my turnover as a result of one coaching session!”

“My retail shop is open 12 hours a day 7 days a week so I thought I had to be there all the time. Working together we have doubled the turnover of my business and that has given me life choices.”

“Teaching me to understand our KPIs helped me to catch a staff member who was stealing from our business.”

“The time we have spent with EOT has been extremely beneficial as it has provided us with a more organised structure and clear paths to follow. One of the more important attributes is the “outside viewpoint”, which is essential but impossible to get from within a small company.”

These are comments of some of the many SMEs from varied industries who have benefitted from business coaching of EOT.

The reality is that every company has issues, opportunities, ideas and problems which in an ideal world they would like to address but sometimes a lack of experience, skills, time or energy prevent this from happening.

EOT was specifically set up to provide experienced managers to those companies who recognise the need to make changes and who are prepared to change the way they do business.
Most of us have a “to do list” with lots of things that we don’t get around to doing. EOT helps to turn your to do list into an action plan.

The government recognises that SMEs are a major factor in the New Zealand economy and has set up a business development scheme to encourage growth through the development of the management capabilities of small business owners and managers.

The scheme provides a 50% subsidy up to a maximum of $5,000 plus GST in a financial year for Business Coaching and Training. As an approved provider under this scheme EOT is contracted to NZTE to provide these services.

Albert Einstein famously said “doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity!”

Just knowing that the government is prepared to assist has been enough to convince many SMEs to look to change.

A notable example of the success of the NZTE Business Development Scheme and the knowledge of EOT stemmed from Kingfisher Connexions Ltd, a boutique Telco transformed into profit.

“We reached the point where we needed to develop our systems and processes to cope with our growing business,” says Colleen Gray, Kingfisher Connexions. We selected EOT to assist us. Dave Wylie took us through a process by asking key questions to uncover what we really needed. As part of the process we received NZTE funding to cover 50% of the cost of his advice. Initially we thought we needed a website but Dave’s probing questions and experience has led us to cloud-based CRM and Email newsletter software that dramatically improves our sales and marketing capabilities. We are now in the process of finalising the content of our website yet we were so busy working in our business that we couldn’t see the wood for the trees – Dave’s guidance now has us working on the business and we are making great progress.”

If you would like to know more about the NZTE Business Development Scheme and Experience on Tap please click here.