• You will hear the founder of a company called Manshee talking to business students about its development.
• As you listen, for questions 1-12, complete the notes, using up to three words or a number.
• After you have listened once, replay the recording.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANSHEE
1 The speaker had a problem finding ____ for his computer.
2 Initially, the speaker bought from ____ businesses.
3 Four years after its launch. Manshee's ____ was £6m.
4 The company grew rapidly without having ____
5 The main factor in the company's decisions was the current month's ____ .
6 ____ fell as a result of competition.
7 Manshee's consultants work mostly with ____ .
8 The consultants made Manshee's directors put their future ____ in order of priority.
9 The directors first focused on ____ and financial goals.
10 What the speaker feels was particularly valuable was the ____ of the consultants' advice.
11 Manshee classifies its customers on the basis of their ____ .
12 The most successful division is the one working with the ____ sector.
BEC Higher 3 - Listening Test 1
1 ACCESSORIES
2 MAIL(-)ORDER
3 TURNOVER
4 (A/ANY) STRUCTURE
5 CASH FLOW
6 (PROFIT) MARGINS
7 SMALL BUSINESSES/SMALL COMPANIES/SMALL FIRMS
8 INVESTMENT(S) (PLANS)
9 STRATEGIC (TARGETS)/ STRATIGY/STRATEGIES
10 OBJECTIVITY
11 BUYING BEHAVIO(U)RS
12 TRAINING
Man: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm honoured to have this opportunity to talk to you.
Eight years ago, I bought my first computer, but I soon discovered that where I lived, it was difficult to find accessories for that particular make. That made me realise that other people must have the same problem.
Then I found that foreign magazines contained plenty of advertisements of mail order companies, so I started buying spare parts and things that way and selling them on to my friends at a small profit. That was how my company, Manshee, was born.
Four years later, Manshee was making a profit and had reached a turnover of six million pounds. We had four directors - myself and three of my friends - plus a staff of seventeen. The culture was young and the working environment didn't have any structure. The company just grew and grew with its own momentum, and everything we did seemed to strike lucky. If we needed to buy some equipment or redecorate the sales office, we decided yes or no in isolation, only taking the short term - usually the cash flow for that month - into account.
However, the market became increasingly cut throat, and that led to falling margins. We realised, rather unwillingly, that the time had come to structure our future, but we didn't really have much idea how to set about it. So we went to a firm of consultants who specialise in helping small businesses, and it proved a turning point. They insisted that we four directors sit down and rank our investments in order of importance for the coming years. It seems obvious now, but we'd never realised the value of doing it before.
Initially, we set out strategic and financial targets for the next three years, and now we're pleased with just how many of those objectives we've met.
The value of bringing in outside expertise was that it gave us objectivity. It's so easy to take things for granted, and to go on in the same mindset. Using consultants meant we received invaluable advice on our business priorities.
Planning has allowed us to make notable improvements. For instance, by segmenting our customer base, we realised that we could put our customers, currently in excess of a thousand, into four distinct groups, according to their buying behaviour. That made us realise we could increase sales if we allocated different people to deal with each group. So we set up four specialist divisions, and the most successful one has increased its sales by over twenty per cent, and that's the division involved with the training sector.
We're signing off the next plan for growth. People are sometimes concerned that planning leads to rigidity, but we certainly don't find that it stops us from being as flexible as we need to be. Thank you.