We understand how it is. You started out in business, and at the time, you chose to use the systems and processes that best matched your needs. You probably chose the tools and that matched your budget, combined with your goals, and of course your awareness of them.
Over time though, your business grew. That’s great. You took on more work, new clients, added some new products and services, and you also grew your team.
Growth is great, but with that growth will come some pain points that you have to tackle, many of which you didn’t/couldn’t have predicted when you started.
The systems and processes at the core of your business will need to change as you grow. What served you right at the start of your business is unlikely to serve you a few years down the line.
We’re not talking about shiny object syndrome here… far from it.
If you set up your business 20 years ago then social media was unlikely to feature, and cloud computing wasn’t on your radar so you wouldn’t have integrated them into what you did at the time.
Of course, you’ll probably want to be up-to-date and using the new tools. But that’s not always the way to look at this.
If you’re grown, you’ve probably outgrown your systems and processes. If you don’t update them, you’re likely to slow further growth and it’s likely to cost you more business, and more of your profit.
When you started out you needed something else
Go back in time now to when your business started. If you can, remember what it was like on the day it was created.
What did you need to grow it at that time?
You’re probably aware of the infamous meme that’s often shared on social media of the small home garages that Google, Apple, and other tech giants started out in. True or not, it paints the picture perfectly that as you grow, your environment changes.
Your systems do, too. Do you think Apple still have the same processes in place now as they did when they started? Does Mark Zuckerberg still run Facebook from a few machines in his college halls? No.
As the companies grew, so did their systems.
Is it time to grow up?
Looking around your business and examining the inner workings of it, can you see:
• Areas that are clunky?
• Parts of the business that act as a bottleneck?
• An expert team strangled with spreadsheets and slowed by antiquated systems?
You could well need to update your software.
We recently shared on this blog some signs that you need to update.
These are worth sharing here once more:
1. You’re in Excel hell
2. You have high debtor days
3. Finding those key business metrics or KPI's is difficult
If you’re working with myriad spreadsheets, missing invoices, and have nowhere to turn for those KPIs, then it’s time to stop for a second and look back.
This doesn’t serve you anymore…
When you started out or even a few years into the business, the way you did things was great. It clearly worked – you grew! Be proud of that as it’s a fantastic achievement.
But as you grew, so did everything else, and although adding new systems and processes might come with some pain to start with, it’s a necessary pain and one you can manage.
Those old systems don’t serve you anymore. They might even be crushing you and your team’s progress.
As daft as it sounds, we can become attached emotionally to a database, a system, some software, or a dashboard we’re familiar with. You built a sense of familiarity with it and that can make it harder to move away.
But putting sticking plasters over it and adding on other bits and pieces and never truly building a more suitable solution isn’t going to end well.
Have a think…
• What do you actually need to happen in your business?
• What do you really want from your processes?
• What figures and projections would you love to have easy access to?
• How would you like that system to work in a dream world?
It’s entirely possible that software can make it a reality, and if that’s the case - we should talk!
Say “Thank you” to the old ways and say “Hello” to the new…
Without your systems and processes and without those day-to-day things that you do to make things happen it’s highly unlikely you’d still have a business right now. The way you’ve done things all this time have got you to where you’ve got.
Need to grow? Ah… they can’t do that so well.
“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein.
We’d like to add to that (if we may, Albert), “You can’t solve your new problems with the way you solved your old problems.”
As you grow and expand, you’ll have new issues, new challenges, and new solutions to find…
It’s unlikely that your current system will be able to deal with it or unlikely that you can carry on doing tonnes of manual data entry and admin instead of finding or creating software to do it for you. You and your team need to focus on doing what you’re great at.
Need help with that?
We build business changing software. We change businesses, helping you be free of antiquated and outdated systems and setting you on your way to growth with increased productivity and a better system in place. Your new system can handle anything from day-to-day processes to providing data and information to take you to the next level and beyond.
We even work with the old system to migrate it into the new.
Need help removing the anchor of the old days? Hello… we’re iO Studios, and that’s exactly what we do. Contact us today.