Small Business Productivity & Innovation

NZCB NEWS —

Small Business Productivity & Innovation Mike Craig - NZCB Board Member

Well this year has disappeared! I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, a happy New Year and a safe holiday. I would like to thank the staff at NSO for their hard work, as well as the Board and Grant for their input and time above the call of duty.

Do you have up to 20 staff on the books? Most of our members do, making us officially ‘small businesses’. After nearly 40 years as a Trade Qualified Carpenter and 20 years as a Certified Builder, I’ve come to realise what small business owners are up against and what’s expected of them.

As a small business owner, do you feel recognised as contributing to New Zealand’s economy? There are more than 500,000 small businesses yet I question whether the Government considers them important. We often hear comments regarding low productivity and innovation in our sector and that we should be more like overseas companies with larger, more efficient businesses.

I disagree! We have a smaller population and Kiwis lead different lifestyles. We want to be independent, successful, own a small business and be self-employed. Small Kiwi businesses employ 30% of the New Zealand workforce and add 27% to the New Zealand Gross Domestic Product. Small businesses are good for Government with the taxes they produce compared to large companies. Small business people can afford to build new houses and turning small businesses into low income workers stops that cycle. How well are the large building companies doing? Not well if you look at the latest media coverage.

So, what about productivity? Our time is often taken up with more compliance e.g. local Government, resource consents, health and safety, administration paper work, pricing and repricing to fit budgets, micromanagement of workers (lack of skilled carpenters, other trades), council documents, clients asking for more information….the list goes on.

What does NZCB do for small business owners? We’re in the middle of a big change with the new generation of tech-savvy builders and older builders seeing their time out. As a group, we’re the biggest building company in New Zealand and the Board is always looking at ways to help small businesses gain skills, increase productivity and remain competitive. We know it comes down to having more skilled staff, buying power, business technology and realistic health and safety policies. Being on the wrong side of earth and operating in a small market, we have to ensure affordability or costs will run out of control for clients. To create more time for building houses (and fewer late nights buried in paperwork), could we look at setting up business hubs to handle building office work (eg: pricing, accounting)?

Small Kiwi businesses employ 30% of the New Zealand workforce and add 27% to the New Zealand Gross Domestic Product.

Could investing in technology as a group change how we do business? Food for thought.

What can Government do? For a start, recognise that building a house is the biggest investment any New Zealander will make so fund the trades and get the skill levels up to what they were 30 years ago (how much did they spend on the leaking building crisis!?). They could also help builders attract young staff with incentives, fix the high cost of land, review the resource consent process and find ways to stop the boombust cycles. Last, but not least, take more care and consideration when bringing in policy that they stop and think about impact on small business as I would say it’s their biggest asset!

Until next time.

Are we innovative? I think so. We’re seeing more kitsetstyle building and more specialised trades doing more of the work. We have new technologies, such as Xero and software management, and more young, sophisticated business-minded builders using them.