There is no getting away from the fact that today's world is a digital one. It might be nice to reflect back on the more sedate pace of the business world of 30 years ago, before all our lives became dominated by mobile phones and email — but making the best use of these technologies can have a massive impact on the success and profitability of your company. Done well, it also goes a long way to reducing the stress of surviving in the digital age, and gives you a competitive edge that was not previously possible.
This post is about the first rung of the ladder we climb with our clients — Digitise, then Automate, then AI. Digitising is the unglamorous, foundational work of getting the right tools in place, and in our experience it is where most SMEs, including successful and growing ones, quietly leak the most time and money.
Your most expensive resource
I think we can all agree that the most important resource in our businesses nowadays is ourselves and our staff. But people are costly to find and retain. So using technology well, to get the most out of that resource, makes absolute sense.
What form might this take?
- Digital tools can automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks.
- You can offer staff more flexibility to work remotely or outside of core hours.
- You can integrate all the important information your company needs into a single place — saving you and your staff time, ensuring you can respond quickly to your customers, and making sure that the decisions you make are based on the truth.
- You can provide customers with the means to access information and update their own details when it suits them.
None of this requires exotic technology. It requires the right tools, used in the right way — which is precisely where things usually go wrong.
Using the wrong tools
We all use digital tools in our businesses to a greater or lesser extent. But are we using the right tools? And even if we are, are we using them in the right way?
A lot of our work at CM System Designs involves helping companies get the right tools in place, and there is a classic example we come across time and time again.
A company starts selling a fantastic new product. As sales grow, they decide to use a spreadsheet to tally up their sales and costs. Next, they create another spreadsheet to hold their customer information. Then another one to capture their suppliers' details. Then another to keep track of stock… and so on.
Fast-forward five years. The company has done really well — it is now employing 20 people. And the spreadsheets? Well, they are still there, at the heart of the business. Only now they have grown into some kind of Frankenstein beasts, sitting in shared folders alongside mountains of quotes, letters, proposals and chains of emails.
Here is the thing worth saying gently at this point: nobody did anything wrong. A spreadsheet was exactly the right tool for a two-person company counting its first sales. Spreadsheets become the wrong tool by stealth — the business grows around them, and there is never an obvious day on which they break. They just get slower, more fragile, and more dependent on the one person who understands how they work.
So, is there a better way to manage that business?
Using off-the-shelf tools
The internet has brought us some great off-the-shelf products: CRM and marketing products such as Salesforce and HubSpot, Xero or QuickBooks for accounting, Dropbox for sharing documents, and so on. These are all good products. But before reaching for the credit card, it is useful to understand some of the limitations of relying on them:
- They are essentially one size fits all. They may offer some degree of customisation, but often you have to use an approved affiliate to do the work, which can be costly.
- You may need to alter your business workflow to fit the software's workflow — which, I think we can all agree, is the wrong way around.
- Because these products are trying hard to satisfy everybody, quite often you will be paying for a lot of functionality you do not need, and it can even get in the way of using the product the way you want to.
- You will be placing your vital business information in someone else's hands. Will you really have control of what happens to it, and would you be able to get it back easily if something happened to them?
- In most cases you will pay a monthly subscription per user, which means that as the company grows, your software subscription costs can grow considerably.
- You will be beholden to their development roadmap. You might have a great idea for a new feature that would really help you, but whether and when it gets implemented is entirely their decision.
None of these limitations mean "never use off-the-shelf". For standard processes — accounting is the obvious example — a mature product is usually the right call, and we say so to clients regularly. The limitations bite when the process in question is the one that makes your business distinctive.
A single point of truth
The holy grail of a good digital strategy is often to create what is called a "single point of truth" system. So what does this mean?
In essence, it is a single place where you and your staff can go to find up-to-date information about everything that is important to running your business well.
- All the information that goes into the system does so in a structured, validated fashion, with audit trails of who did what and when.
- It will probably take data feeds from other systems you are already using, such as sales and accounting systems, and combine them with information contributed by you and your staff — giving you a complete picture, with all the context you need to make informed decisions.
- It presents different views of your data to you and your staff depending on what they do. Custom dashboards give every member of staff easy access to the information they need to do their job, prioritised so they focus on the most important tasks first.
- It is cloud-based and mobile-friendly, so you and your staff can access it whenever they need to, wherever they are.
A real example: one of our clients, PizzaExpress, has many different marketing channels running on systems that do not talk to each other — Facebook, Instagram, their website, their mobile app, email marketing, press coverage and so on. Each week, it takes 2 of their staff a full day to manually produce a management report on their market coverage. They have therefore asked us whether we can create one centralised system that would automatically collate the data from all these different channels and produce the report automatically. That is the single-point-of-truth idea in miniature: the information already exists; the cost is in it living in half a dozen different places.
What we do
We build bespoke business applications that solve exactly the issues described above.
We are well aware that when you mention bespoke software to people, the picture in their mind usually involves lots of noughts and years of development time. However, the world has moved on from those days, and you would be surprised at how cost-effective it can be.
We make extensive use of open-source software to build our solutions. These are software components created and supported by the global programming community, and released under free-to-use licences. Rather than having to start every development from a blank sheet, we can pull a lot of the functionality we need from these proven components, and focus our time on putting them together in a way that exactly suits our client's requirements.
The benefit, compared with the other approaches discussed above, is that the end result gives you exactly what you need, works in the way you and your staff want to work, and is tailored to support and help grow your business in the direction you want to take it.
What is more, the return on investment can be quite substantial. We have implemented solutions that took a previously laborious manual task from half a day of someone's time down to half an hour — with a more accurate result at the end of it.
And finally, by being more efficient and freeing up your employees' time for the things that only humans do best, you can focus more on giving your customers a better experience of dealing with you — which is going to give you better customer retention and more referrals.
How to tell it is time
If the Frankenstein-spreadsheet story felt uncomfortably familiar, here are the signs we look for that a business has outgrown its tools:
- The same information is typed into more than one place, by more than one person.
- Producing a report means assembling numbers by hand — and two people asking the same question can get two different answers.
- Only one person truly understands how a critical spreadsheet works, and everyone quietly worries about their holidays.
- Customers wait for answers that your staff have to go away and dig for.
- You have stopped trusting the numbers enough to make decisions on them quickly.
If two or three of those apply, the honest conclusion is that the business is already paying for a proper system — it is just paying in staff hours, errors and slow answers rather than in an invoice.
None of this needs to happen in one leap. The right first step is usually small: take the one process that hurts the most and move it into a structured system, which becomes the first piece of your single point of truth. Everything afterwards — automation, integration and eventually AI — stands on that foundation, which is exactly why we treat digitising as the first rung of the ladder rather than an afterthought.
If any of this sounds like your business, we would be happy to have an honest conversation about which tools fit — including the cases where the answer is an off-the-shelf product plus a little glue, rather than anything bespoke at all.