MEET THE BOSS: Mark Lim. Managing Director Magnetic Alliance

MEET THE BOSS

MARK LIM Managing Director, Magnetic Alliance Pty Ltd

“Don’t get discouraged by the limitations of your situation. Open your eyes to the possibilities of growing and focus on how you CAN rather than why you can’t.”

WHITEBOARDS are everywhere in Magnetic Alliance’s Head Office because helping business owners, CEOs and managers grow their business is their business.

“When we started Magnetic Alliance, we were told that what we were doing was not going to work because there were too many competitors, we were unknown, and what we were doing would have been the first thing to get cut,” says Mark Lim the Managing Director. “Starting the business after the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) didn’t help too much,” he adds.

“But we have been able to grow year on year for six years straight, have the second fastest growing business in South Australia, and are continuing to grow from there.

“We started off by helping small businesses and large businesses alike. Our client base is very diverse. We have micro businesses with one person, to small subsidiaries of corporates, to large privately-owned businesses of BRW Rich List entrepreneurs, to gigantic global corporations.

“And what we do is continually pull and push on the levers of growth because once you know how to handle it, growing is always possible.”

Magnetic Alliance is being developed into a first-class Head Office run by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, who provide access to a suite of tailor-made services to help businesses grow. To date, it has added over a billion dollars of revenue for clients across more than 85 industries.

When I asked him about his view on people issues and how it impacts organisations of different sizes, Mark views the challenges facing business this way: “People and culture go hand in hand, they work together. The bigger an organisation becomes, the more compacted the relationships become, and culture becomes even more important.

“It is inevitable we focus on culture because culture is like a beautiful bowl of soup – fantastic when it is good, but it takes only one fly to jump into your soup to spoil it. If you have a poisonous culture in your workplace, it will only take one or two people to spread a negative culture that could impact a lot of people in the business.”

Mark is adamant there is always a way to grow. “If you know how to grow your business, you can grow in any economy whether it is boom or non-boom,” he says. “You can grow in any industry geographically regardless of the market conditions.”

“It is inevitable we focus on culture because culture is like a beautiful bowl of soup.”

He tells this writer that Magnetic Alliance’s first lever of growth is a big one. “I call it core growth foundations,” he says. “It consists of things you do on a daily basis to help your business grow as part of your standard business activities. Inside it are such things as strategy, marketing, sales, finance and people.

“The second lever that can really help a business grow is systemisation. This is something that relies on your core growth foundations being in place. It allows you to grow and expand without having to hire more people or get more resources because systemising a business helps cut out cost and cut out having to start over again each time you want to do something.

“The third lever is funding. Funding can help you grow by amplifying what you are doing. It alows you to hire more people, open more locations, buy more equipment et cetera so that you can take on more customers and create the capacity to get the job done.

“A practical example is growing your team, which can help you get more work done and allow your business to expand just as pushing sales can also increase your revenue. But in a downturn when sales drop, growth could come in the form of an acquisition or launching a new product or service that is counter-cyclical.

“These are some of the things we have done to grow, and it’s worked despite market conditions because where businesses face problems, there are always opportunities to create solutions.

“My final word would be: Don’t get discouraged by the limitations of your situation. Open your eyes to the possibilities of growing and focus on how you can rather than why you can’t.”