RMB Lawyers sells legal and business products and services across a large geographic area in southern NSW. The firm, which won NSW Business Chamber’s Excellence in Business Sustainability Award in 2010, employs 93 people across six offices and nine specialist divisions.
Craig Osborne, Managing Partner, shares his insights on running a successful business, the importance of being a member of NSW Business Chamber and what keeps him awake at night…
What has made your business so successful?
RMB Lawyers grew 10% in the 2009/10 financial year and looks like doing that again in the 2010/11 financial year. This has been helped by the fact that we have won a series of awards at Illawarra and state level with respect to our innovations.
Being mentioned in the Business Review Weekly three times in the last 18 months has also helped raise our profile.
The key touch points for growth of our business in the last 12 months have been:
• implementing a profit sharing program for all staff
• having an internal business school
• receiving Illawarra Business Chamber’s Most Sustainable Business Award 2010
• receiving NSW Business Chamber’s Excellence in Business Sustainability 2010 Award
• employing excellent talent recruitment and talent retention strategies
• celebrating the firm’s 125th birthday with a multisport event that ran for two days in the Wollongong area and brought business to the Illawarra region with over 1,000 competitors NSW wide
• working hard in the community to build a better Illawarra and South Coast through many and varied projects
At the end of the day, what has made our business so successful in the past is the provision of excellent legal services to our clients, which will continue to be the cornerstone of our future.
What NSW Business Chamber services or products have you used and how have theses helped your business?
We find our membership with NSW Business Chamber invaluable for a variety of reasons.
We use the Chamber’s website because it enables us to keep up to date with current business issues. Information on the website can help improve our business knowledge, providing us with ideas and giving us a feeling of being ‘connected’, and it’s a good way of gaining business support and business information from the Chamber.
We attend awards functions and local networking and information events when we can, and these have proved useful in identifying business ideas and opportunities created and used by other members and replicating the same in our business where appropriate.
How has your membership with the NSW Business Chamber enhanced your business activities?
Membership has allowed us to showcase our business innovations on a much broader stage than regional NSW and it has helped give further legitimacy to our business in the minds of our city-based clients.
What keeps you awake at night?
We think that operating for two years in an economic downturn and in particular getting through two Christmas periods successfully, means that every step we take and every day we go forward this calendar year will see us get stronger. We do, however, note that, in keeping with the theory that the darkest hour is before the dawn, the last couple of months have been as tough as any throughout the downturn.
Otherwise the future is very, very bright and I am sleeping well fully believing this to be the case.
Is there anything in the business world that is exciting you?
Our firm has grown significantly during difficult conditions. We think we have set an excellent platform for continuing growth within our five local government areas and beyond over the next three to five years.
What excites me the most is that 93 of our staff are using their active minds and brains to continually improve the way we do things and come up with innovations that a Managing Partner could probably never think of.
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