Nuggets from the Australian Gold Rush

It’s a beautiful day in Brisbane, Australia, and I’ve just had the pleasure of spending four days with more than 100 PRISM members at the 2013 PRISM Asia Pacific Conference. The conference was a hit, largely because of the hard work of our Asia Pacific Advisory Council, chaired by Angus Wildie.

During the conference, attendees listened to some of the brightest minds in the industry speak about sales, destruction, risk mitigation, technology, trends, media storage and more. Michael Hyland also was gracious enough to open the doors of Grace Records Management for a tour of his beautiful new facility in Willawong, Australia.

What were some of the most important takeaways from the conference? Here are a few that I gathered after discussions with some of our attendees:

• Know your sales cycle and your average time of sale. Sometimes, if a sale is taking too long, it’s OK to walk away. Be aware of your ROI with regard to time of sale.
• Embracing new technology means more than just knowing about the latest product or gadget. It also means embracing the risk that comes with new technology. There is no such thing as standing still; you are either improving or declining.
• We all know how important it is to have a disaster recovery plan. Equally important is to regularly evaluate, revise and improve it.
• Make sure your employees are safe when they arrive at work, safe at work and safe when they return to work. It cannot be over-emphasized, both from a moral and a practical perspective.
• Compliance and retention of data is a driver of longer storage periods.
• A quote from the well-known management consultant Peter Drucker really stuck with some attendees: “The single most important factor of a company’s existence is its customers; hence, marketing and innovation are the most important functions of a business.”

Was the conference successful? Let me answer it with a statistic—as I write this, 100 percent of attendees surveyed said they would recommend this conference to their peers. If you didn’t join us this year, please join us next year, so you can be part of this 100 percent.

Congratulations, and more importantly thanks, to the volunteers, speakers and attendees who made the 2013 Asia Pacific Conference a terrific event.

Dave Bergeson is executive director of PRISM International, Chicago, and can be reached at dbergeson@prismintl.org.