Family business:

Peter Sarai
Modoras Financial Performance Solutions

Industry
Business Advisory, Accounting, Wealth Management

What generation is your family business?
2nd generation! I am fortunate to have 2 sons that share my passion for helping clients achieve their financial potential. We work together to grow, manage and protect both our clients’ financial position and our business.

What is your role in the family business?
Group Managing Director. My role is to inspire and lead my team to imagine the unimaginable, create not compete and explore what more is possible.

What/ who is a major influence for you in the family business?
My clients! Hearing their experiences and adversities keeps us learning everyday so we can apply the lessons of the last 30 years to each and every one of them.  That is why I love what I do. Turning every stone to find what more is possible and then designing strategies that empower them to create their business / lifestyle by design, not by default.

What keeps you up at night?
So many ideas, so many opportunities. I often email myself so they can be actioned with a fresh mind in the morning

What’s the key benefit of your FBA membership? Sharing key learnings and innovations with like-minded family business owners. Being inspired by how they have overcome challenges, implemented strategies and paved their own success path. And of course, what do they envisage the next chapter will look like?

[/special_functionality_column][special_functionality_column lg=”6″ md=”6″ sm=”6″ xs=”12″ ]

Adviser:

Michael Simonyi
Davidson Recruitment

How long have you been working with family businesses?
I worked in a family business for four years and then directly with family businesses as a recruiter, across Queensland, for the past 12 years.

What’s one of the most common mistakes you see in family businesses?

1.    Not having a rigorous, structured approach to the recruiting process – as much as most of us think we have a good gut instinct, we all have unconscious biases that influence our decisions and regularly impact on our ability to really identify high performers. Having a structured, ‘dispassionate’ approach to recruiting is crucial to making better decisions.

2.    Being overly-reliant on Seek, and other job boards, when trying to source staff. Are the best people actively looking for jobs at the time you need to recruit them? Probably not, unless you’re very lucky. If they’re not looking for jobs, they’re not on Seek. If that’s the only avenue you take to finding someone, you’re not attracting the attention of the vast majority of prospective, ‘passive’ candidates, who may not be actively seeking a change but are open to a career conversation.

3.    Not holding salespeople truly accountable for performance. In the end, it’s a relatively simple ROI equation – how much is this person costing me to employ and train, what return do I need to break-even on that investment, and are they delivering the return I’m really seeking from the role (which has to be better than break-even, surely)? If they’re not delivering the return I need, can I get them, quickly and affordably enough, to that level (remembering the opportunity cost of under-performance)? If so, I need to act – now. If not, I also need to act – now.

What is your “uh ha” moment with your clients? When they realise…
That not being a corporate is no impediment to attracting the best talent in their field. There are a raft of reasons why people become disillusioned with working in corporate environments. Tapping into that discontent, positioning yourself as an employer that gives people the opportunity to make a meaningful impact at work, and ‘walking the talk’ in terms of delivering on your undertakings as an employer are hugely powerful attractors. Oh, and the ‘we can’t pay as much as multinationals’ argument is, in my experience, largely a fallacy. I don’t know of too many corporates who aren’t as cost-conscious as you are likely to be, which impacts significantly on what they’re paying their people.

[/special_functionality_column][/special_functionality_row]