The Buzz Insurance CEO Jacki Johnson shares her views on the increasing importance of transparency in business and tips for leaders.   Click on the image below to view or download her presentation for the Armidale & District Chamber of Commerce.                    

The Buzz brand and business has its roots in the community. More than 3000 Australians shaped The Buzz with their ideas.  Behind the scenes, a virtual team of Buzz internal people and people from our external partner businesses, in Australia and overseas, helped put those ideas into practice and created The Buzz. LinkedIn presented a perfect platform for us to stay connected with the tea...

What's 24/7 engagement with customers?   Is it simply a case of having your branches or phones available for longer hours or is it about engaging to understand customer behaviour and integrating the learnings into your business model? Do corporates understand and respect the social contract vs. the commercial contract with their customers? What role does technology play in the next s...

I often think of a great line that I once heard, artificial intelligence beats natural stupidity, when I think about the smash repair industry and the void between those that have joined the internet age and those who have chosen to remain fixed in time somewhere in the 1980’s.Like any industry you must move and change as those you deliver a service to increase their expectations and become ...

We first established Dioptics in 1980 and, after a ten year hiatus, relaunched it in 1994. Diane and I opened our first store during the ‘recession we had to have’. With the goal to create an establishment catering specifically to the high-end market, we chose a small 26msquare shopfront in the Mid City Centre for Dioptics Mark 2 – a move involving considerable risk. As ...

A clean sheet of paper, a supportive IAG Board and CEO and a leap of faith!  May 2008 seems like a lifetime ago. Anyone who has been involved in creating a new company and quickly getting to market will appreciate this statement. I look back over the last 17 months and realise how much learning, opportunity and fun (and hard work!) has been packed into this time.   Many people ar...

Why is it important to discover what customers truly value?Spending large amounts of marketing and sales dollars to capture customers only to lose them again, is a very inefficient and un-profitable way to run a business. Losing customers can be fatal to a business and the impact is far greater than the costs to acquire them in the first place. This is especially true within electronic environme...

A company’s culture is often a misunderstood concept. People tend to over think culture and define it in terms of grandious and unrealistic statements. Let’s keep it simple. A group’s culture is defined by how individuals ACT, how they behave and how they treat each other day by day. Its what you DO that counts.Someone said to me very early in my career, “If you want to cha...