TradeSquare Learning

Q&A with John Carnohan of Bayside Business Enterprise Centre

Tradesquare
Posted by Tradesquare on Jan 14, 2021 2:35:11 PM

Following a career in the corporate world, John Carnohan has spent the last 10 years dedicated to providing support to Australian Small and Medium sized businesses, and particularly through his role as Executive Officer at Bayside Business Enterprise Centre in Sydney.

 

TS: Tell us a bit more about your role at Bayside now, and what you love about that role?

JC: I'm the Executive Officer, which means I basically run the day to day operations. Bayside Business Enterprise Centre is dedicated to providing support to businesses, large and small, but mainly small. We focus very much on helping businesses improve their current capability and operations. But we do a lot of work with startups as well.

People come to us with ideas, we help them flesh the idea out and start laying the foundations for getting the business off the ground. What really gets me excited is the opportunity to work with a whole lot of people on their dreams, effectively coming up with ways to solve problems in the market and helping them to do that. There is probably nothing more satisfying than being able to contribute to that.

 

TS: You mentioned improving current capabilities. Can you explore that a bit further for me? And where are you seeing that small businesses are needing that support? 

JC: Yes, there are a couple of areas. I suppose the largest area of need would be around digital capability. It's about being able to get online and be effective online in your business. And obviously, prior to the whole Covid thing, there was a movement online for things like retail and other services.

That's just been massively accelerated. Also, lots of other businesses who might not really have thought much about having a great online presence, are going to find - or are finding - that consumers are really using online marketplaces as their primary source of products and services they need.

 

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TS: Thinking about how important small businesses are to the Australian economy, where can businesses in 2020 really create more value in the world? 

JC: I think people like dealing with small business, because it's a very personal interaction. And I think we've become more aware of this in recent times. You're aware as a customer of a small business that it's a mutually beneficial exchange, because by spending your money and sourcing your products and services from a small business, you're actually helping someone help their family and creating a real value exchange.

 

TS: Thinking about the people within organisations, and about the interesting year that we have had, how did resilient, dynamic and resourceful individuals play a key role in the transformation of Australian businesses?

JC: I think the first thing is that they recognise that there is opportunity which has arisen as people are willing to look at things differently now, more than before. Old patterns or old entrenched ways of doing things are being broken up, or if you like, being disrupted. I sense this is going to create a period of creativity, and a period of change, in terms of the way things can be done. 

 

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TS: You mentioned a period of creativity. Have you seen creativity being amplified within small businesses?

JC:  The way it tends to get amplified is that if small businesses are given an opportunity to create the conditions that they need to grow and thrive, then that manifests itself. Small businesses can grow and thrive if they have access to markets and opportunities to work with larger businesses as well. And that's an area where I think there's an opportunity for change. 

So in relation to, say, supply chains of larger organisations, I think some of the larger organisations that we deal with are looking to improve the quality of their own supply chains, but are also tapping the resources available within their small business suppliers.

They're looking at ways to make it easier for people to do business with them, because they recognise that has been an untapped source of opportunity. So that's an encouraging development because it means small businesses get a seat at the table with some of the larger players more often and the larger players are recognising that they don't have all the answers or that they are not necessarily always going to succeed without collaborating with other businesses out there.

 


 

Interested in learning more? Listen to our entire conversation with John Carnohan at the TradeSquare podcast, TSQ here.

 

 

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