Scaling a service by dressing it as a product
This Week@Work, turn a service into a product to deliver a consistent client experience at scale.
Author: Lindokuhle Ntombela
Registration Details Aurik London 21 March
Join us for 55 minutes on 29th September to understand how we have gotten this right, and how we would work with you and your team to achieve the same, or more.
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Download the details for the Business Blueprint workshop.
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Friday 21 March 2025
9.30 for 10am start to 2pm
Wilson Wright, 5 Fleet Place, London, EC4M7RD
We will be in touch nearer the time and look forward to seeing you there.
Get building… backwards
This Week@Work a building site is a great analogy for a business. The owners of the site had a vision, they developed a blueprint which contains the action steps to deliver that vision. What’s your business vision and blueprint?
Lose sight of your customer & lose your brand’s soul
This Week@Work a cautionary tale about the risks of expanding rapidly through distribution partners, if it means losing touch with the reason your business exists: your end consumer.
Do what you can control; control what you do
We’re heading into a year where the only certainty is uncertainty, with everything from a noisy news environment, to internal business issues trying to distract us. Set your end destination now, and stay focused on that.
Aurik build your scaleup and growth blueprint workshop Johannesburg 4 April 2025
This event has passed. You can view upcoming Aurik events focused on helping you build your business into an asset of value here: aurik.com/events
This full-morning workshop is designed for business owners ready to take their company to the next level. Be it scale-up growth, succession or an exit, walk out with a customised, actionable blueprint to attain your 3–5-year ambitions
Key takeaways:
Identify Your Growth Impediments:
Spot recurring impediments to growth and value and how to resolve them
Design Your Actionable Scaleup Blueprint:
Develop a three-to-five-year roadmap to deliver growth, improved value, and operational and management succession. Including:
- Crafting a lasting Brand distinction and clear Purpose
- Engineered scale delivering predictable, consistent customer experiences
- Building a motivated, effective team
- 4 growth strategies to achieve defined outcomes
- An understanding of the 5 levers of company value
- Embedding the levers to support valuation, capital raise, succession and exits
“Real-world relatability to any business in any industry”
Hosts & Presenters:
Pavlo Phitidis
As an entrepreneur, Pavlo Phitidis cut his teeth in turnaround companies. Then spent a few years in M&A, which allowed him to conclude 68 transactions before answering a call of duty in a family business, which enabled his parents’ retirement.
Pavlo co-founded Aurik by directly starting, growing and exiting 12 businesses to develop a business growth system, which has worked with upwards of 3,500 established companies in 4 countries.
Pavlo is a passionate advocate for business as a force for good and has brought this to life through more than 1,200 radio segments, two books, Sweat, Scale $ell and Reset, Rebuild, Reignite and hundreds of articles for columns across business and lifestyle titles.
Daily, he works with private business owners, personally and through his company, to resolve growth and value challenges.
Date: 4th April 2025
Time: 7.00am for 7.30am start, until 12pm including a light breakfast and networking
Venue: Protea Fire & Ice Hotel, Melrose Arch
Outcomes:
Leave with a practical, customised, actionable blueprint to implement in your business the next day, setting you on a clear path to achieving your ambitions.
“Very informative and simplified a complex process”
Register here
Aurik build your scaleup and growth blueprint Windhoek 10 April 2025
This event has passed.
You can view upcoming Aurik events focused on building your business into an asset of value here: aurik.com/events
This full-morning workshop is designed for business owners ready to take their company to the next level. Be it scale-up growth, succession or an exit, walk out with a customised, actionable blueprint to attain your 3–5-year ambitions
Key takeaways:
Identify Your Growth Impediments:
Spot recurring impediments to growth and value and how to resolve them
Design Your Actionable Scaleup Blueprint:
Develop a three-to-five-year roadmap to deliver growth, improved value, and operational and management succession. Including:
- Crafting a lasting Brand distinction and clear Purpose
- Engineered scale delivering predictable, consistent customer experiences
- Building a motivated, effective team
- 4 growth strategies to achieve defined outcomes
- An understanding of the 5 levers of company value
- Embedding the levers to support valuation, capital raise, succession and exits
“Real-world relatability to any business in any industry”
Presenter:
Pavlo Phitidis
As an entrepreneur, Pavlo Phitidis cut his teeth in turnaround companies. Then spent a few years in M&A, which allowed him to conclude 68 transactions before answering a call of duty in a family business, which enabled his parents’ retirement.
Pavlo co-founded Aurik by directly starting, growing and exiting 12 businesses to develop a business growth system, which has worked with upwards of 3,500 established companies in 4 countries.
Pavlo is a passionate advocate for business as a force for good and has brought this to life through more than 1,200 radio segments, two books, Sweat, Scale $ell and Reset, Rebuild, Reignite and hundreds of articles for columns across business and lifestyle titles.
Daily, he works with private business owners, personally and through his company, to resolve growth and value challenges.
Hosts:
Christo Swartz & Fanie Steenkamp
Christo is a born entrepreneur and a chartered accountant with senior financial leadership experience in large financial services corporates. He founded Alora Financial Partners in Windhoek, Namibia, and brought Aurik to the region.
Fanie has more than 20 years of experience in corporate and commercial banking, as well as an MBA to his name. He is the co-principal of Aurik Namibia
Date: 10 April 2025
Time: 8am for 8:30am start to 1pm including a light breakfast and networking
Venue: The Weinberg Hotel, Windhoek
Outcomes:
Leave with a practical, customised, actionable blueprint to implement in your business the next day, setting you on a clear path to achieving your ambitions.
“Very informative and simplified a complex process”
Register here
Elite Business: New era for employer-employee dynamics
In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: Structure Determines Behaviour,” new employment legislation presents an opportunity to reshape our approach to finding, training, and retaining talent.
In response to the Labour budget, I recently facilitated a roundtable engagement with angry business owners. The deeply furrowed brows of concerned senior leaders concluded with a paradigm shift that opened new growth pathways.
The recent UK budget and tightened employment laws may feel like an attack on business, but they also present an opportunity to redefine how we structure our organisations. The post-COVID remote work and the post-Brexit skills crisis have stretched and reshaped the traditional employer-employee compact. This could be the perfect moment to rethink and rebuild for businesses looking to thrive.
The value exchange in employment
At its core, the employer-employee relationship is a value exchange. A business pays a salary or bonus to derive measurable value from the employee’s work. Yet, many organisations need to quantify this exchange effectively, leaving them vulnerable to inefficiencies and misaligned expectations. If we can measure the value of tangible assets like machinery, why not apply the same principle to our people?
Consider the machine in a cheese-slicing business. The machine’s performance is precisely measurable: slicing 528 monthly blocks under optimal conditions. The operator’s role, which includes setting up, running, and maintaining the machine, can also be broken into measurable activities. This clarity in defining measurable tasks allows for more effective recruitment, value exchange and performance management. Each party knows what’s expected of them!
This same approach can—and should—be applied to every role in your business. It’s even more necessary in a services business where the assets (your people) walk out the door every evening. By viewing roles as systems comprising sequential, measurable activities, you unlock opportunities to improve recruitment, streamline performance management, and ultimately increase your return on employment.
Systems thinking for a changing workforce
The escalating costs and risks of employment demand a new way of thinking. Systematising work not only improves clarity but also highlights activities that can be digitised or automated. This frees employees from mundane tasks to give their time and attention to more interesting work. It also allows leaders to focus on core, strategic areas as they lighten their management load through effective, sticky delegation, which also helps reduce fixed costs.
This method addresses immediate challenges and builds resilience. Systematic roles and processes simplify delegation, training, and scaling. Far from constraining employees, it gives them freedom within a framework to fully express their potential in a role. As employment laws become stricter and employment costs rise, this structured approach offers sustainability, cost management, productivity gains, and resilience.
Engineering for the future
The Labour government’s changes may feel like a setback, but they invite us to rethink how we structure work. Redefining roles into systems will improve your recruitment success, employee tenure, and productivity and open pathways to digitisation, automation, and outsourcing. In this, a more agile business can be built, and without compromising customer experiences, a less cumbersome salary bill will help lighten the load of senior leaders to focus on what counts – growth.
When structure determines behaviour, thoughtful engineering of your business systems and roles can turn the challenge presented by Labour into opportunities.
Aurik build your scaleup and growth blueprint Walvis Bay 11 April 2025
This full-morning workshop is designed for business owners ready to take their company to the next level. Be it scale-up growth, succession or an exit, walk out with a customised, actionable blueprint to attain your 3–5-year ambitions
This event has passed.
You can view upcoming Aurik events focused on building your business into an asset of value here: aurik.com/events
Key takeaways:
Identify Your Growth Impediments:
Spot recurring impediments to growth and value and how to resolve them
Design Your Actionable Scaleup Blueprint:
Develop a three-to-five-year roadmap to deliver growth, improved value, and operational and management succession. Including:
- Crafting a lasting Brand distinction and clear Purpose
- Engineered scale delivering predictable, consistent customer experiences
- Building a motivated, effective team
- 4 growth strategies to achieve defined outcomes
- An understanding of the 5 levers of company value
- Embedding the levers to support valuation, capital raise, succession and exits
“Real-world relatability to any business in any industry”
Hosts & Presenters:
Pavlo Phitidis
As an entrepreneur, Pavlo Phitidis cut his teeth in turnaround companies. Then spent a few years in M&A, which allowed him to conclude 68 transactions before answering a call of duty in a family business, which enabled his parents’ retirement.
Pavlo co-founded Aurik by directly starting, growing and exiting 12 businesses to develop a business growth system, which has worked with upwards of 3,500 established companies in 4 countries.
Pavlo is a passionate advocate for business as a force for good and has brought this to life through more than 1,200 radio segments, two books, Sweat, Scale $ell and Reset, Rebuild, Reignite and hundreds of articles for columns across business and lifestyle titles.
Daily, he works with private business owners, personally and through his company, to resolve growth and value challenges.
Christo Swartz & Fanie Steenkamp
Christo is a born entrepreneur and a chartered accountant with senior financial leadership experience in large financial services corporates. He founded Alora Financial Partners in Windhoek, Namibia, and brought Aurik to the region.
Fanie has more than 20 years of experience in corporate and commercial banking, as well as an MBA to his name. He is the co-principal of Aurik Namibia
Date: 11 April 2025
Time: 8am arrival for 8:30am start to 1pm including a light breakfast and networking
Venue: The Protea Hotel, Walvis Bay, Pelican Bay
Outcomes:
Leave with a practical, customised, actionable blueprint to implement in your business the next day, setting you on a clear path to achieving your ambitions.
“Very informative and simplified a complex process”
Register here
100 Episodes on, and we want to hear from you
This Week@Work tell us what business issues you want to get more insights on next year. We are marking 100 episodes of the series and are taking a break over the holidays to plan for the new year. We’d love to incorporate your ideas, please share them in the short poll below.