Frequently Asked Questions

To edit your company information you can :

• Click on Edit my company under the Account tab of the Site tools in the right hand column

Or, you can visit your account by :

• Click on the account details link at the very top of any page

Once there, you can :

1. Click on the Edit tab
   • This will allow you to edit your account details e.g. email, password and other options
2. Click on the Company tab, next to the Account tab
   • This is where you can edit your company information

Or, to view your company you can :

• Click on the My Company tab, next to the Edit tab

Once there, you can :

• Click on the Edit tab, next to the View tab

To edit your personal profile you can :

• Click on Edit my profile under the Account tab of the Site tools in the right hand column

Or, you can visit your personal profile by :

• Click on the account details link at the very top of any page

Once there, you can :

1. Click on the Edit tab
   • This will allow you to edit your account details e.g. email, password and other options
2. Click on the Profile tab, next to the Account tab
   • This is where you can edit your personal profile

It's easy.

All you need to do is create a blog item and your blog has begun. Further instructions on creating a blog item can be found below.

Step 1 - Navigate to the Blog edit screen

All you need to do is click on the :

• Add blog post

Which can be found over in the Site tools / Contribute menu on the right hand side of this page. You'll also notice you can :

• Add Video post
• Add article
• Add event

That's right, you can add any of this content to First 5000 and share your knowledge / ideas / business with the community.

Step 2 - Add your Blog post

Now all you need to do is let the creative juices flow. A few tips on some of the items you might see on this page :

• Title
  • As it sounds, this is the title for your piece
• Body
  • This is the body of work, where you lay it all out
  • You can include images, links, and format your work how you like
  • You can even paste from Word if you like although you may have to reformat it once you do
• Media / Image
  • You can upload a featured image for this piece
  • This will appear when a user sees the article in any list page and when they read the article itself
• Vocabularies / Topics
  • Here you can define where in our list of defined topics your piece belongs
  • It can belong in more than one

Once you are happy with what you have created you can save it and move to the next step.

Step 3 - Tag your Blog post

After saving your work you will be instructed to select tags that describe your content. We will suggest some for you but you have the freedom to select from the suggested tags and also include your own.

As you type in your own tags you might see other suggestions pop up as you type. These are tags that other people have used. It is a good idea to keep tags similar so we can relate conten to one another.

Step 4 - Wait for your content to be approved

At this time all submitted content will go in to an approval queue prior to being published on the web. Don't worry, you will be notified as soon as it has been published to First 5000.

Thank you

Thank you for submitting your content with First 5000.

Based on our research we have compiled the following profile for our ‘typical’ First 5000 member:

• Employs between 20 -199 people
• Reports a turnover above $ 10 million a year
• Enjoys annual growth rates of 15% and over
• Has been in operation for 6 years or more

They are also more likely than other SMEs to :

• Trade internationally
• Invest in research & development (R&D)

Research conducted by GAP in 2009, found that somewhere between 6,500-6,900 medium-scale Australian SMEs (20-199 employees) had a turnover of over $10 million. Information came from two cross-referenced reports to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) listing Australian businesses by employees and turnover, (see The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia’s “Research and recommendations on definition on small business” and  The Scoping Study on the Compliance Costs of Small Business, Board of Taxation, Nov 20008).
 
This data was combined with the most recent data available from Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) regarding resilience and longevity of medium size businesses (those in operation over 4-6 years have 85% chance of survival), their share in Australian export (41%) and in total industry revenue (23-25%). Data on innovativeness and higher growth rates of globalised SMEs was also considered.
 
Based on these figures, we have come up with the following profile for our ‘typical’ First 5000 member:
 
1)     Employs between 20 -199 people
2)     Reports a turnover above $ 10 million a year
3)     Enjoys annual growth rates of 15% and over
4)     Has been in operation for 6 years or more
 
We then purchased an annual licence to the Dunne & Bradstreet (D&B) Who’s Who in Business database, screened it against the above criteria, and came up with about 5,800 eligible companies.
 
Therefore, as you will appreciate, ‘five thousand’ is a symbolic ‘round figure’ which also highlights the exclusivity of our membership criteria.
 
We are planning to review our database on an ongoing basis and extend invitations to include newly eligible member companies.  All member companies will be able to extend the free membership to their top 5 people, meaning that the total number of individual people in the First 5000 community is in excess of 29 000.

Top-performing medium-sized enterprises as an important niche audience which play a crucial role in our economy and job growth yet remains largely disconnected.

During his 12 year tenure as Chair of the Australian Small Business Council, one of the key observations
GAP’s Managing Director Peter Fritz recalled was that large business and government both traditionally make the mistake of trying to speak to all SMEs as a group, while a more efficient and effective approach would be to identify those most successful, who really “punch above their weight”, as they are in fact the engine room of the Australian economy.
 
For instance, research conducted by the Council in the early 1990s found that of the close to one million small businesses in Australia at that time, only a handful, 750 SMEs in total, were responsible for 85% of Australia's exports of elaborately manufactured goods.
 
Almost 20 years later, the number of actively trading Australian SMEs is over 2.01 million, but over 1.1 million of those are non-employing entities (ABS, 2007) and around 93% per cent of all businesses fall into the ‘micro-business’ category, with turnover of less than $2 million per year.
 
Peter took an educated guess that there were “probably only about 5,000 very successful medium sized enterprises in Australia, with a turnover above $10 million a year, and that with the use of web 2.0 technologies available it was now possible to create an effective network for them”.
 
 

Each First 5000 member company is entitled to nominate 5 individual members from their senior executive staff.

A company is eligible for complimentary membership of First 5000 if they meet the following two criteria:

• 20 - 199 employees
• 10 - 200 million revenue per annum

Why not? Go right ahead.