SMEs compete in the market by offering unique products and services that meet the needs of the customers. It is crucial for SMEs to continue to evolve as their customers evolve and as the market changes. In the midst of servicing the customers, SMEs must also develop their strategic positioning in the market – guided by their visions, executing their missions and achieving their goals. This module aims to equip SMEs with the framework, methodologies and toolkits to compete effectively in the marketplace.

Programme outline

Competitive Positioning:

• Vision, missions & goals

• Industry analysis & competitive forces

• Company evaluation & SWOT analysis

Competitive Strategies:

• Product & service differentiation

• Market segmentation

• Innovation strategies

18 - 19 Jul 08

Branding is vital for every modern company, regardless of whether it is offering a product or a service, whether it’s an SME or MNC. In a world of me-too parity, branding becomes the tool for differentiation which prevents the brand owner from having to compete on price.

The ‘Brand Management for SMEs’-module will explore the origin of brands and why brands today are so powerful. It will look at a number of case studies – from global MNCs to local Singapore-based SMEs and explore how they built their brands, and what are the successes (and failures) any business owner can learn from.

Day 1 will see an overview of how to build a brand and generate some ‘brand equity’ over time. We will look into why branding often fails – one of the reasons could be missing consistency (which we will explore in Touchpoint Management), another missing credibility.

We will examine new trends in branding, such as “Blue Ocean Strategy” (is it applicable to SMEs?), Faith Popcorn’s “Save our Society” (S.O.S) trend which leads to questions of responsibility and transparency, hot topics on today’s consumers’ minds. In particular, we will look at recent Asian trends (like “New Asian Pride”) and explore what they mean for branding.

In two activities we will look at the brand DNA of some Singapore brands and define the touchpoints where the brand meets the consumer.

Day 2 will concentrate on brand communication – what are the tools that we have to make our brand positioning (and therefore our point of difference) known to the consumers. Is branding a matter of money? Or can we find other tools that are just as effective as big advertising campaigns but come at a fraction of the cost?

Next to Media and New Media, we will also look inside rather than outside – once you have developed a brand positioning, what are the tools to get the necessary buy-in from all your staff? How can you make each and every one of them into a “Brand Ambassador”?

In summary, the 2-day module will cover these important areas with a specific emphasis on application for SMEs:

• Brand positioning/creating Brand Equity

• Touchpoint management

• Trends and new developments

• Brand communication

• Internal branding

25 - 26 Jul 08

Liberalisation of global trade and investment flows has created vast business opportunities. Consumer preferences and market demands are changing constantly, resulting in more intense pressure for firms to reinvent and grow.

One of the keys to successful growth is prudent financial management. Often firms fail not because they have no business. On the contrary, many firms fail because they grew too fast without adequate financial support. In this module, Mr. Adam Wong, a seasoned banker, entrepreneur and consultant will share with participants key issues in financing and managing business growth.
 

Programme outline

Participants will

• Learn to determine the level of financing required for your firm’s growth

• Understand the concept of sustainable growth rate

• Spot the signs when a business overtrades

• Know the key fundamentals in successfully raising bank debts

• Have an overview of the financing packages provided by various banks in Singapore

• Explore alternate sources of financing beyond traditional bank debts

• Know the limits of your firm’s debt capacity

15 - 16 Aug 08

Every SME must be concerned about the growth of its company. Growth is not a choice for SMEs anymore, unless you already have a strong dominant position in your industry. If you want to survive and sustain your position for the long term in the current global business environment, you need to seriously plan for growth. Barriers to entry for any business are now not sustainable to prevent new entrants if your business is a profitable one. Innovation, ease of communications, access to knowledge and talent can help any new strong entrant with resources to attack your position. Even family and long time incumbents must be concerned about growth.

This module will help participants evaluate their present growth strategies, business model, position of their business and review macro and micro factors and competition to develop strategic growth plans for growing their business. Given that Singapore is a small market, SMEs that aim to be a MNC one day, need to grow overseas and tap the global market, so how does one do it, should we set up overseas operations directly, set up joint venture, franchise, license or just export? This is a strategic direction that one needs to decide as part of the growth plans for any Singapore SME.

This module will also help SMEs to forecast growth and their future capital and funding requirements for sustainable growth. Some questions to be discussed include. How fast can your company grow without needing external capital? If you need external funding, should you acquire debt or raise equity? If you decide to raise equity, do you raise it from Angels, VCs, Bankers, Strategic Investors, IPO, etc?

(Day 1) Strategic Growth Business Plans
A Strategic Growth Plan is an important plan to guide the management and employees of the company. Like a road map, it describes the direction the company is going, the external environment and competition, what its goals are, where it wants to be, and how it is going to get there. Developing a proper strategic growth business plan provides a game plan for successful management, and is essential in helping the management come up with a systematic, realistic evaluation of the company’s chances for success in the market.

Programme outline

• Need for a strategy and a business plan.

• What are some of the growth models for SME

• Crafting the total business plan
• What makes a good plan and what are the mistakes to avoid
• Elements & framework of a business plan
• Guidelines of the executive summary
• Evaluation and post business planning

• Strategic review

(Day 2) Strategic Growth Financial Plans – How to plan your expansion funds strategically to avoid the pitfalls?
Every company needs to grow and after you have set your business direction and plans in place, you need to calculate what funds are required? How much? And where and who to raise these funds from? What are the pitfalls to prevent and what are the best practices to adopt? Also, we need to understand what the investors think to be successful in fund raising.

Programme outline

• Why do we raise funds? What is our sustainable growth?
• What are the funds required? Forecasting of our revenue, profit and balance sheet. Then determine what funds are required using the DFN Model.
• Who should we raise funds from?
• What is the mindset of investors?
• Other sources of funding like franchising, licensing, branches, JV?

22 - 23 Aug 07

Talent is the spring for a firm’s leap from small to big. While a founder could do it all himself when he started, and even manage it himself as his business succeeds, once he makes the fateful decision to “go big”, he will need a talented team with him to win.

What’s big, of course, differs from business to business. In this module, we will define as “big”, the stage when the founder realizes that the next move up will be more than he himself or his start-up team can handle.

This session will be highly interactive. Participants will be encouraged to share their experience with the group on the challenges which they face as they grow. The facilitator will then draw on these experiences to highlight the principles involved in Talent Management.

A special feature of this programme will be a video case study of a local company that has made the leap from small to big including an interactive session with the current CEO.

As a takeaway, you will have a framework for determining the talent your company will need to implement your growth strategy, covering tasks and competencies and how to inspire your team.

Programme outline

The module will cover issues such as:

• What are the tasks that you now do and what can you delegate when you grow?
• What new tasks (e.g. relationship with government or activists’ groups) will be needed?
• What competencies will complement your own?
• What about character and the “fit” among people with different personalities and values?
• What does new research in Neuroscience tell us about the role of Money, Justice and Fairness in building Trust within a team and motivating talented individuals?

Talent management, for founders of companies and CEOS of SMEs, is like going from being a singles champion in sports to being captain of a team game. Suddenly, it is no longer you against the world but your team against the competition.

29 - 30 Aug 07

This module aims to provide participants with a general understanding of the relationship between costs and costing of products and services. In order for organizations to be in a position to plan and control its operational cost, it is critical that the organisation knows the nature of its costs, the typology of costs and what are the drivers of the costs of its operations.

Programme outline

Cost Concepts and applications

• Types of costs – distinguishing between product costs, period costs, and expenses

• Uses of costs - Understanding the importance of organization’s cost drivers

• Cost behavior – fixed, variable, and mixed costs

• Cost estimation – scattered-plot diagram, high-low method, and the regression method

• Cost-Volume-Profit (CVP)/Breakeven analysis – graphical method and computations, operating leverage, effect of advanced manufacturing technology of CVP relationships

Cost Allocation

• Product costing and cost allocation

• Traditional approach to cost allocation

• Activity-Based-Costing (ABC) approach to cost allocation
  - reasons for use of ABC
  - criteria for selecting cost drivers
  - issues in ABC
  - use of ABC in service-industry organisations

Budgeting for cost control

• What is a budget?
• Types of budgets
• Objectives of budgeting
• The master budget
• Variance analysis
• Behavioral implications of budgeting
• Activity based budgeting

12 - 13 Sep 08

Internationalisation Strategies
Any company that aspires to stay above its industry in the 21 st century must think in terms of global at an accelerating pace as countries previously closed to foreign companies open up their markets, as the Internet shrinks the importance of geographic distance, and as ambitious growth-minded companies race to build stronger competitive positions in more and more countries, it is imperative to expand overseas, in order to survive in the long term.

Programme outline

• Reasons for expanding into foreign markets
• Cross-country differences in cultural, demographic, and market conditions
• The concept of multi-country competition
• Strategy options for entering and competing in foreign markets
• The quest for competitive advantage in foreign markets
• Strategic alliances and joint ventures with foreign partners
• What are the pitfalls?
  

Media Strategies
While more SMEs are waking up to the importance of public relations in brand building, many are still confused about what PR really does. Perhaps due to a squeeze on resources, some organizations also expect PR to deliver what advertising does.

Some functions of PR are

• Educating constituencies on policies, products or people
• Taking advantage of the “opportune moment” or creating circumstances to tell a corporation’s story
• Generating and building goodwill amongst constituencies
• Telling a corporation’s stories using the right communication channels

The top PR guy in any SME is the boss himself or herself. The CEO as brand ambassador is widely accepted – in fact, expected – in top US companies. Think Jack Welch, Martha Stewart and Donald Trump.

And yet many SME leaders shun the limelight for a variety of reasons. One could be cultural: They are used to letting their employees take the credit. Another reason is the lack of training and awareness. This is true in particular when it comes to facing the media.

Media handling requires skills that can be learnt. Knowing what the media is looking for can often lessen the stress when “in the hot seat”. More importantly, an SME leader should be able to articulate the company’s vision and strategy in a way that engages audiences, including the media.

Course Content

• Common misunderstandings about public relations
• What public relations REALLY does for you: Case Study
• What the media is looking for, what makes news
• Do you have what it takes to be Chief Communicator?

Methodology

• Practice interviews with camera
• Role play
• Lecture
• Interactive discussion
  Media examples and case study

19 - 20 Sep 08

International Operations
History shows that distant shores are a great enticement for leaders. Given the flatter, more highly networked, more competitive world of today, leaders are even more pressed to look abroad for growth. And it can make good sense when local markets cannot fulfill the growth needs of an enterprise. Multiple challenges can arise for owners, executives and managers of SME’s once they make the strategic decision to invest internationally. Operational issues such as leadership choices (local or corporate), organizational structure, portfolio choices, marketing approaches, factory site location and management, supply chain issues, goals and measurements, and cultural differences can create barriers to opportunity fulfillment. This course will clarify the principles and practice of international operations for SME’s. Participants will:

• Develop an understanding of the concepts and frameworks of international operations
• Learn appropriate application of tools and methodologies to execute international operations
• Learn to apply international operations to create competitive advantage for their enterprise

Selected Course Topics

• Portfolio management: picking winners and eliminating losers
• Implementing international marketing strategies
• Leveraging cultural, management, information & organizational differences
• Integrated supply chain management
• Locating and managing operations
• Performance measures

26 - 27 Sep 08

This last module in the program deals with the advanced stage of a corporation’s development. Many regard listing of a corporation as the “coming of age” of a company. Not only does listing catapult a company to a higher growth path by expanding the sources of financing, it also increases the company’s prestige with respect to dealings with suppliers, prospective and present employees, and society as a whole.

The module will first review the motivations and demands for listing. We shall look at the listing rules and the IPO process, with a view of assisting in the packaging and aligning the internal structures and processes to position itself for an IPO. It is also necessary to discuss issues of corporate governance, which is getting increasingly important for investors.

In order to understand the IPO market well, it is useful to revisit the workings of the financial markets and how it operates to channel resources from those with surplus funds to those who are in need of those funds. We will focus on the role of an investment bank in the capital markets and what makes a successful IPO would be useful.

Additionally, the role of an investment bank in the structuring, management, arrangement, underwriting, researching and pricing of a primary offering cannot be underestimated. This is because the structure of an IPO has significant effect on how the company’s stocks trade in the secondary market, hence its profound impact on shareholders’ value, and the growth trajectory of the listed company.

Equally important is the understanding of what drives and creates value and how analysts and investors in the capital markets evaluate and critique listed companies. The focus will not be the derivation of equity value per se, but the main methodologies involved and the key parameters that drive equity value.