SalesCRED

The Boosting Female Founders Initiative is a grant to help female founders of start-up businesses to launch and scale their businesses into domestic and global markets.

We spoke to Nikki Dennis from SalesCRED to chat about her journey and how the Initiative helped expand her start up.

How did you find out about the Female Founders Initiative?

A client of mine told me about it and suggested I apply, very grateful for the heads up! It has been amazingly useful.

What motivated you to start your own business?

Circumstance forced me into it partly, which I am hugely grateful for. In 2018, I was made redundant as Sales Director of a large global collections company following a takeover of the Australian arm of the business. It made me reassess what was important to me after 20 years of senior corporate experience within sales and credit management.

I realised that much as I had loved aspects of my job, I didn’t want to go back to working all hours, juggling the stresses of staff, client, and C-level expectations, whilst missing out on my kids growing up.  I realised an important lesson then; in 5-10 years no company will ever remember the weekends you worked or thank you for it, but your kids will surely remember all the soccer games and concerts you missed.

Within a week or two of my redundancy, a couple of contacts approached me to do consulting work, my business was born, and I haven’t looked back. Being my own boss allows me to focus on the things that I enjoy and enables me to share the knowledge I gained from the big players in the corporate world with small business owners which I find hugely rewarding.

I also love the flexibility of being able to pick my kids up from school, travel, and work remotely, and importantly to say no to things I don’t want to take on.

The rest, as they say, is history.

What is the most valuable information you learned in the Female Founders Initiative?

How to structure a winning funding proposal and the importance of including market research to demonstrate how your proposed product/service will address the challenges of your target market. This helps to really define your niche which is hugely important if you want your product or service to really hit the mark.

This whole process has helped with providing support and mentoring to address many of the challenges that female entrepreneurs face. For me, having a sounding board and mentor has provided me with the confidence to think bigger, and not be afraid of securing funding to grow and scale up the business.

What services and/or products do you provide?

I founded SalesCRED as a Business Growth Consultancy specialising in organic growth. We help business owners who trade on credit establish a sound end-to-end sales process, so they generate high quality leads, convert more sales, and get paid quicker. Because a sale’s not a sale until the monies in the door.

Our services revolve around improving lead flow, sales flow, and cash flow, and include:

• mini audits & strategy sessions
• content marketing packages
• sales management consulting & outsourcing, and;
• credit management consulting and our small business ‘Credipak’

For larger enterprise organisations, we work closely with a panel of trusted partners to deliver a range of complementary service solutions to help grow sales revenue and improve cash flow.

This includes access to outsourced collection services, digital customer engagement for receivables management, and legal services for debt management. In addition, our specialist training arm offers access to industry leading sales, collections, communications, and leadership training.

What challenges have you had to face since starting your business? How have you overcome these challenges?

The main challenge by far has been the Covid pandemic and associated lockdowns here in Vic which affected the work we were being referred. Many smaller businesses were going into survival mode, reducing headcount rather than investing in the growth of their business, and larger organisations who we help with a range of credit management solutions, had moratoriums on collections during that time which affected the volume of work coming in.

We overcame these challenges by diversifying our revenue streams further and developing new products and services. As an example, we were successful in obtaining a local Council grant to develop a ‘Get Back on Track Pack’ to help local small business owners recover from the challenges of the Covid environment.

The complimentary pack includes mini audits on 3 key areas of a businesses: content marketing, sales, and credit management. These audits are designed to help identify pain points and the pack includes practical tools and techniques to address some of those, with complimentary coaching sessions rounding out the offering. This has been a hugely successful project for us, helping raise our profile and build our business whilst simultaneously helping other small business owners through a tough time.

What have been some of the highlights of operating your own business?

I love putting my 25 years’ experience in sales to good use for a variety of businesses as opposed to just working with one. Helping small business owners with 1-10 staff for example, who can’t afford a full-time sales manager grow their business and only pay for the time they need is hugely satisfying.

Similarly, for larger businesses of up to 200 staff with established sales teams, we have helped expand their geographical reach and enter new markets: winning large scale new business for clients within top tier banks, Finance, Energy, Water, Government, Health, and Commercial trade sectors to name a few. I love the buzz of sales and the variety; I never get bored!

I also enjoy sharing my 20 years of experience within the credit management industry with small businesses owners who trade on credit as they can benefit from our insight and improve their cash flow dramatically with a few effective tools and techniques.  So many businesses fail due to poor cash flow and yet many don’t have a dedicated person to manage their credit and accounts receivables or if they do, they are often junior. It’s great to offer them access to the same consulting and advice as the big players but they only pay for what they need. I really feel like we are making a difference for them.

Lastly but certainly not least, a massive highlight for me is the time I get to spend with my husband and boys. Making new memories and taking time out to smell the roses is the most important thing that my own business allows, and I am conscious of doing all I can to keep it this way.

What is one piece of advice you can give to others thinking about starting their own business?

Do it. And don’t worry about having the perfect business model or spending lots of money on developing the perfect service or product before you start. Chances are that as you evolve, your business will look nothing like you expected it to at the start anyway. Start small, pick one initial target market and service/product to concentrate on and do it well, then grow from there.

Are there any additional comments you would like to include about your business, journey or experience?

3 things that have helped me massively in moving my business forward and that the Female Founder’s Initiative has also encouraged me to continuously develop:

1. Curiosity – Be curious about customer challenges, do your research. Find better ways to do things. Research and develop new products and services. Always look out for new business opportunities.
2. Connections – So important to build and foster strong connections, with clients, their customers, suppliers, staff, even the person who serves you your daily long black. Because aside from developing a new friendship, you never know where your next business opportunity may come from. We’re all human, and people like doing business with people they like.
3. Confidence – Without this your business won’t even get off the ground. If you don’t have it, fake it ‘til you do – it worked for Branson, and (on a much, much, much smaller scale!) its worked for me too so far. Overcoming those niggling doubts has pushed me to accept the invites to speak at conferences, to publish articles for industry publications and is pushing me further to start my own podcast and write a book by the end of this year. There I’ve said it, now I have to do it!

You can learn more about SalesCRED through their Website, Facebook and LinkedIn.

You can learn more about the Boosting Female Founders Initiative below.

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