Hi, this is Rob O'Byrne, CEO of Logistics Bureau. Now, someone was asking the other
day what does Logistics Bureau do and what gets you out of bed in the morning? And I
had to actually answer this question with a diagram, so I thought I'd share it with
you, and it goes something like this. So, bear with me. Now if you've watched any of
the Simon Sinek videos, you'll know that he has this fantastic concept called starting
with your why. "Start with Your Why" it's a book as well. And here at Logistics Bureau,
it's very simple what our why is, what gets us out of bed in the morning, and it's actually
helping people. Now, that might sound a little bit odd for a supply chain and logistics consulting
firm, but let me put some sort of flesh onto the bones here, and hopefully you'll understand
what this means. So, let me just get another circle around here. What's really interesting
in our business is that we don't really have one target group of people that you focus
on, and you'll understand in a second, because we're probably best known for our management
consulting, and our focus there of course is our management consulting clients. And
they come from all different industries, generally quite large in multinational businesses, and
these are people who have issues in supply chain. So it's kind of who we're helping there.
And then you might be wondering, well, what do we actually do for those clients?And yes,
it's all based around management consulting, but primarily, what we're doing for them is
helping them reduce cost and improve service. It's really those two things. I mean, obviously
it's a little bit complicated than that. We're looking at networks, and designing warehouses,
and developing strategy, but ultimately, it's always about reducing cost and improving service.
And then let's get one more circle around here, and hopefully this is legible. And how
do we do that? This is a really interesting bit, because we like working with people at
Logistics Bureau, and so obviously, when we're working with our consulting clients, some
of this, we're actually doing it. You know, we're in there, we're implementing, we're
project managing and helping them on a whole range of things. Other times, we're analysing
things, and we're preparing business cases, and we're looking at cost to serve, and all
that kind of cool stuff. Along here as well, we're looking at a lot of knowledge transfer
as well into the client's team, which is really important so that they can maintain the momentum
and keep things going. And then of course, straight project management. I ran out of
space on there. You know, there's a lot of that as well, driving our projects to a conclusion.
So, that's the obvious one for Logistics Bureau, kind of who we're focused on, what we're helping
them with, and how we're doing that. Over the last 5 to 10 years, we've actually also
branched out, and we're helping another group of people, and let me call them members and
guests. And these people are the members of our education programs or they're guests at
our free seminars. And we've been doing these free seminars now for about 20 years. You'll
see where this dovetails in, because as well as helping our consulting clients, we just
love to help the broader supply chain community. And we have some formal education programs
that people join, 12-month programs, and we run free seminars as well all around the year.
We've been doing them for 20 years. We've got some coming up very soon. And there, what
we're doing is we're basically helping people boost their knowledge, boost their skills,
and ultimately, you know, we're helping them in their roles and their careers to actually
do better. So, this is probably more focused on businesses, this is more focused on the
people in the businesses. This is probably more focused on the individuals, and then,
you know, indirectly helping their businesses. And how we do that? We obviously have our
free seminars, we have our education programs as well. But this is all about helping them,
you know, how we actually do that is giving them the technical skills. We're giving them
the management skills. We're giving them the interpersonal skills, you know, team building
skills. We're giving them, you know, case studies, things like that, so they can see
really what's possible. We're giving them exposure to senior executives in the industry
who have been there and done it and sharing their tips and so on. That's one other way
that we help people, consulting clients and members and guests at our education programs.
We've got a bit left over here. So, what goes in there? This is a really cool bit because
our day to day business is very much about management consulting, another arm that we
really enjoy obviously is our education programs. But what we do is that a proportion of the
revenue that comes from those, we allocate to this third group, and this is a really
important group because it's those in need. And what we do is we allocate resources, some
of our income to different charities all around the world. We support those in Asia, in Africa,
our home here in Australia and further afield. And the sorts of things that we do, what do
we do? We get involved in a lot of really basic food and water programs. So one of those
is actually an Australian charity called WellWishers, and they build water wells in South East Asia,
in a place like Cambodia, Kenya, Ethiopia, places like that, so that's a really good
one. A really important cause that we support as well is education. You know, education
helps people break out of poverty, and so whether it's educating kids or adults to give
them skills to, you know, start their own businesses, that type of thing. And then there's
a big element as well around sustainability. We plant rain forests and things like that.
So, that's really cool. And how do we actually do that? So we're helping these people, that's
what we're doing. So, how we do it? It's basically an allocation from these income generating
activities that we can give to these ones. So, a bit of a long-winded way, I know, to
describe what we do. But I always find this a little bit of a challenge, when people say
what do you do. Well, we're a management consulting company, but really what we're about is helping
people, and we do that with our consulting clients, with the members and guests through
our education programs, and that enables that in turn to help those in need. So, our business
is all about helping people. What's yours about?