Transforming your business – questions to help

There’s been a lot written recently about transforming your business – as in transformational change that comes with going digital. 

Although it was happening before, Covid drove a lot of businesses to adopt remote working arrangements for staff and more digital workflows. Now we’re moving out the other side of the pandemic though, business is facing uncertain economic conditions and the only way through that is to hunker down and innovate around digital opportunities available to your business that will allow you to scale over time.

Even the government have put their money where their mouth is with its, proposed yet still to be legislated, incentives – aka the technology boost. But how do you make the most of such an opportunity to really innovate within and in so doing transforming your business. 

Unfortunately when it comes to innovation, Australia is well behind its peers – especially in terms of research and development, even more so when it comes to exporting the knowledge gained from R&D. 

A good starting point to make the most of what you’ve no doubt already endured in transforming your business to continue during Covid is to ask yourself the following questions;

1. What did we learn? And then list everything you can think of
2. How might that benefit us moving forward?
3. Did that affect the products and services we provide? If yes, how?
4. How did any changes we needed to put into place affect our business strategy?
5. What would be the next steps in transforming your business?

Once you’re clear on those questions ask yourself, what technologies might further enable your next steps. 

When you’re thinking about improving your technology, it’s best to think in terms of increasing efficiencies. A lot of time can be wasted working with different apps for different parts of the same work or having to duplicate work in order to make it ‘flow’ between the apps.

Recent research from online bookkeeping technology firm, MYOB, found almost 60% of SMEs had a less than stellar technology efficiency experience in that software and apps didn’t easily integrate with each other and a further almost 30% had experienced cost blow outs. Worse still, more than 40% of business owners are still paying subscriptions for services they no longer use because the tools weren’t a good fit and it’s too hard to change or there’s nothing better to switch to – to the tune of $1.4 Billion (yes, that’s with a B). In fact, the report found more than 20% of those business owners surveyed would save somewhere between $100-400 a month. 

As part of your end of financial year review, your accountant should remind you to look at what you’re using, what you’re paying for, whether you’re getting good value from it and encourage you to consider cancelling anything you don’t actually use. Just like you’d cancel an online music subscription (or even a printed newspaper subscription) that you don’t use, consider your business’ digital subscriptions the same way.

So when you’re considering what technology might help, think about;

• What drains the most time in your business (an answer we hear often is “the books and BAS”)
• Which technologies can help with that (if we’re talking books and BAS, this can be easily sorted by implementing bookkeeping technologies like Xero which has built in invoicing, payment reminders, automatic bank feeds to make reconciliation and BAS so much easier. It even has bolt on apps for single touch payroll – all in the one place)
• What the learning curve on the technology is (using the above example, getting your accounts set up properly can be a bit tricky, but everything else from there is reasonably intuitive).

You can ask these same questions for transforming your business admin, social media management, sales pipeline/CRM, routine legal forms, customer service, etc. Always start with the questions above, rather than being sucked in by sexy technology or great marketing videos, etc. And don’t purchase until you’re ready to commit to setting aside time to learn to use it – everything has a learning curve of some sort. There’s little point in wasting money paying for something that just sits there looking pretty and remains unused (remember that $1.4B wasted on tech mentioned previously).

Of course, if we can help you navigate the road to transforming your business by upgrading your bookkeeping system to Xero’s online software you can take with you – wherever you’re working from today (and make the most of the potential govt incentives – but more importantly, save yourself considerable time), you can call us on 6023 1700 or connect with us via Facebook or LinkedIn.