Michael Taplin's Page

I love helping people and sharing the hard won lessons of half a lifetime. I set up bizlearn.biz because I have learned that traditional training courses often fail to meet the needs of small business owners who are remote from the major metropolitan centers, and need a more accessible approach to learning. This is bizlearn.biz, and I set it up on the smell of an oily rag (a "downunder expression") and loaded some of my papers on it to make a start. Please have a look at it, to see if it can help you.
I think that people with established product or service based businesses will get the most benefit from what we offer on bizlearn.biz. Our approach is quite different from traditional training courses in that we drill down into specific management techniques, some old and misunderstood, some new and powerful, to show you how to do the work and use the results.
To make it work I need contributors, who will volunteer as "subject matter experts". Everyone knows something that may be useful to someone else in business. If you can write a short paper explaining it and you are prepared to conduct an on-line webinar or tutorial session so that people can pick your brains for the detail of how to do it, why not register as a contributing member and start sharing your knowledge. You can do this at bizlearn.biz. I intend to provide contributing members with shared access to the best available webinar and on-line training systems. These are expensive but if the costs are shared by many members, we can all harness the power of the internet to share our knowledge in a more useful way.

More about me.....
I have spent the last 25 years as an independent consultant, owning and running successful businesses that trained thousands of people in large organisations. 12 years ago I left the Australian corporate scene behind to move to rural New Zealand. This change of lifestyle meant getting close to the small business culture in New Zealand, and I have spent many rewarding hours with small business owners as a volunteer business mentor with Business Mentor NZ. I get a lot of satisfaction from guiding people with business decisions and they seem to get something from me.
For 12 years I was a contract lecturer for Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand; I was a Teaching Fellow of the Graduate School of Business, teaching topics in both the MBA and Public Sector Management programs. This work took me into the small island nations of the Pacific where I made many friends and had some interesting experiences.

I am qualified with an M.B.A. and a Grad.Dip. Management from RMIT University in Australia, and have worked with a leading global strategy consulting firm. I firmly believe that we should understand the theory as well as the practice when we offer advice.

Today I live in a beautiful patch of rare Kauri bush at Sandspit north of Auckland, in clean green New Zealand, and do much of my consulting work on the web. My philosophy is expressed as "when you live in paradise, the world wants to come to you." This is why!