|
Until you identify and prevent the risks inherant in owning and managing a small to medium business, your business cannot be sustainable.
This is where Jean Cannon's approach to QA systems and sustainable business is different because she helps you to manage risk, be truly sustainable and to throw away the typical mountains of outdated forms and wall of paper.
Jean is an author and an award winner dedicated to helping business to become genuinely sustainable using her online training in simple and effective management systems like ISO 14001, ISO 9001 and Safety and integrated ISO systems. In a former "life" she was an internationally published environmental scientist and marine biologist who has presented in Europe, the USA and Japan.
Jean’s Story
In the late 1980s Jean was working as a research marine biologist when her husband had an entrepreneurial spasm and decided to build and sell computers.
Jean became increasingly involved so that they did not lose money and ended up managing the business when he worried himself into a breakdown.
Like so many small business people they worked ridiculous hours. So much that Jean actually ended up with a mattress in her office so she got some sleep.
Jean decided this could not continue and studied quality assurance to implement an ISO 9001 quality management system or AS 3902 as it was called then.
This revolutionized their lives and the business grew to a $5 million turnover and 17 staff after she put in the system. A true testament to the power of systems.
Those errors from staff who were doing their best but were run off their feet stopped, they had a really good feedback system and they saved a heap of money by having really clear documented contracts and contract amendments. The system reduced the risks so that they no longer had the fear that staff could make mistakes resulting in expensive legal issues.
And better than all, they had well trained staff who followed procedures and they discovered free TIME.
The extra productivity allowed Jean and her husband to build a wonderful beach house with a stunning view on top of a cliff and go there most weekends and even take holidays while the business ran smoothly and continued making money with no dramas. What a change!
When they left the business and moved on Jean decided that she wanted to combine her environmental background with the quality assurance that she knew was so helpful to business and started Jean Cannon Consulting, mostly working face-to-face with larger clients.
Initially Jean worked as a contractor to another consultancy but left to work on her own because she wanted to empower her clients to understand and manage their own systems and that was not the business model she was expected to deliver.
In 1998 Jean started working various members of the tuna industry which continued 2-3 days a week for six years. During that time she was approached by smaller aquaculture farms to give them the same systems at a lower cost so she developed group training programs and aligned them with the VET system.
The training program was launched in 2003 as “ISO 14001 In Action” by the then Federal Environment Minister Dr David Kemp and Jean started using the business name Enviro Action to deliver mainly ISO 14001 environmental management systems
.
At the time she wanted to differentiate the business from the majority of quality consultants who had done a two day environmental course at SAIGlobal or even less and were happily moving into ISO 14001 thinking they knew something about the environment.
In 2007, Jean took her training programs to the next step and developed online training – no mean feat at that time and she got up at 3am several days each week to join various marketing and internet subjects online from America after she received ridiculously priced quotes to have it done for her so she built her own online programs.
While working with the tuna farms Jean saw the need for safety systems and trained to become a safety auditor to get a better understanding of what she was preparing her clients for and over time found that most of her clients actually need integrated systems.
In 2011 Enviro Action is not a descriptive name for our business. It is time to change and revert to using the orignal name of jean Cannon Consulting.
The business is focussed on assisting businesses to understand and implement simple, effective, low paper risk based and integrated ISO systems, including ISO 9001 quality, ISO 14001 environment and occupational health and safety – AS/NZS 4801 in Australia and New Zealand and OHSAS 19001 overseas (the difference is that Aust and NZ have more requirement for rehabilitation than the rest of the world).
The websites:
www.integratedisosystems.com is now the main website
www.enviroaction.com.au caters for ISO 14001 and and is fully linked with other sites and
www.riskmanagementinbusiness.com is for the risk management workshops that run twice a year in several locations.
We truly believe in what we do and our own company has been certified to ISO 9001 since 2004 and to ISO 14001 since 2008. This is simply the way we do business. To the best of our knowledge this is the only similar business that has made that double committment.
Watch Jean Interviewed on Sky National TV with two different interviews
Our Environmental Policy and Quality Policy can be viewed here.
If you still have questions, here are some of the frequently asked ones, with answers
|
