Web Podcast - Episode 18: Save time, make more with business software

Read the transcription of this podcast:

Hey guys episode 18. Welcome, we are talking today about a good business software. Using business software to help improve your businesses functionality and efficiency.

You've probably heard some of these terms before CRM, ERP, CMS all these technical terms for different systems your business can use. You might not have a clue about them or you may have some idea about them. We’re going to talk about the pros and cons of them today. The pros outweigh the cons, so let’s get into it.

Technology has come a long way over the last few decades, and it’s really revolutionising the way we do things. We can use voice control on our devices, Siri for example, cars with autonomous driving is now becoming a thing, the Apple Watch, having a watch on your wrist that you can FaceTime people on the other side of the world and read your emails and do your Spotify. It’s coming a long way in both areas. Personal and business use. It’s obvious that with the growth of technology we can think about how we can utilise that growth to our own advantage within our business.

You can now use things on your website, like ChatBot for example if you haven't heard of that look it up, they're quite cool. You can do tax returns online within a few minutes, whereas our parents or grandparents used to write it out on paper and used a calculator, or even did it on Excel. It’s just not efficient and it takes time every month or year to your tax returns.

We’re already using technology to help streamline and improve our business. Another recent example in technology growth in business is you can now use Apple Pay, you can use your iPhone to pay for something at a shops point of sale which saves that retailer time and obviously they can get more sales through the door with that time they’ve saved. Also, they use Point Of Sales. So them old cash registers that you had to push the buttons and ‘ding’ the cash register flies out? That’s now replaced with digital Point Of Sale technology.

I really want you guys to think about what software or technology you can put in place in your business to help save time and increase productivity. There’s something for every key area in business: accounts, sales, project management, client relationships, your website. All those areas can have things put in place that can help streamline your business.

Lets take me for an example. I’ve done this for the last few years now, I’ve put things in place to streamline my business doing web design. We’ve always had a good accounting system but we used to have to manually invoice everybody every month. Now there was two issues that were major issues.
A: there was a lot of invoices to do which took a lot of time having to sit there typing out invoices.
B: there was a lot of inconsistencies and inaccuracies in my billing. I might accidentally bill the wrong amount, or i might bill hosting for a month that was already billed the previous month.

There was a lot of inconsistencies which further down the line of billing someone, would cause additional administration issues which would, at the end of the day, take time and also would have an effect on the clients perception on the professionalism we were offering. You do an incorrect invoice for someone, they're going to come back, they'll start thinking “are they invoicing me for other things incorrectly?”. So, that was a key area that I fixed first off. Now instead of spending three to four hours a month doing invoices if not more, it was probably more like six. Now i spend literally an hour, an hour and a half. I’ve shaved two hours off every month which over a year is 24 hours. A full days worth of invoicing. Excluding sleep, I've saved time by not having to do it the manual way. Plus the software technology that I put in place and developed, is so accurate because it’s computerised. Computers just follow the process that you've told them to do. Everything is 100% accurate. Whereas originally the human mind and how we work obviously we’re not programmed to do everything in a linear fashion. We miss things, or our senses wont pick up on something, or we do it the wrong way, or we forget something and obviously the computer is far superior in terms of accuracy.

So what I also use in my business for example, and I recommend to clients of mine. Have some sort of follow up tool with your clients. So keep in touch with them and also keep in touch with prospects, people we’ve done quotes for. You’ll want to keep in touch with them. Sending them useful resources, i may send people links to this podcast or links to different design concepts that they can get influences from. Also, i’ll send them follow up emails automatically that says “Hello, how are you? Just seeing if you still interested or if you have any questions about the quote we gave you”. You’ll find a lot of companies don't do this. They’ll do a quote, they’ll send it to you and you won’t hear from them again. I always, and I’m sure you will as well, take the quote, or go with the company that gives you the most value and keeps in touch. Values your business at the end of the day. That’s what I find important and I will always consider that to be the company I go with. It’s very critical that you do have that in place.

There's lots of other features I use and I know you can use as well, but I’m not going to go into too much detail about them at the moment because we are talking about a general overview of using software and technology to improve your business.

But let’s just go over the pros of using a software and the cons as well.

We’ll start with the pros:
The first one is saving time. Put it this way, if we can save five hours a week by implementing technology into our business, over the period of a tear that is 260 hours. So five hours a week, 260 hours a year. If you charge $100 an hour that's $26,000 extra that you can make in a year by just literally not having to do anything, just putting the technology in place and putting your time to better use by doing things that make you money.

Thats only 5 hours a week. Technology in my business, I believe I save around 10 hours a week. Add that up, it’s a lot of time and a lot more money you can make without having to get new clients on board or by spending $10,000 on advertising. If you don’t want to spend that time working then go and enjoy the hobbies that you enjoy doing, like riding motorbikes or flying airplanes or watching rugby. Whatever, soon that time doing the things you love and there’s no real trade off, because you have the same processes in place, but technology has taken it over so that you don’t have to do it. You can go and enjoy life more. That’s one of my little things that I enjoy telling people about.

Number two is increase accuracy. Computers are obviously more accurate than humans so we’re going to save further admin tasks and stresses about invoicing someone incorrectly, or we send the wrong email to the wrong person. Computers are accurate. More accurate than we are. That's why cars are built by robots, and robots are massive in the manufacturing industry because they can build a lot of things with full accuracy. Whereas humans can't.

Another pro is that we are tracking everything. We have a system in place that tracks everything better; clients, sales, projects, products, inventory. Everything’s tracked. Therefore we can report easier, so we can set benchmarks and say “Okay, this month we did this amount and next month we’ll do this amount, compared to a year ago we’ve increased by 50% in terms of how many new leads we’ve got onboard”. We can do reporting, whereas if you do it the old fashioned manual paper way, or excel spreadsheets it’s generally not as easy to create reports. We can report on things and therefore we can better see what we’re actually doing and what’s working and what’s not.

The last pro is constant evolvement. So, technology is always growing, there's always new features coming in. So if you get onboard as soon as can you can ride the wave and you’ll get introduced to new technology and new things that can help increase your business productivity and earnings over your competitors that don’t do any of this. Just by utilising one or two of these techniques you can put yourself ahead of competitors, because the chance of them using it are pretty low. Obviously most of us now have a good online accounting software but that’s about it. Most people don’t have the education or the knowledge of it at the end of the day. They don’t know how to use it. They’re not ignorant but they just aren't aware of it, so your being introduced to this. It’s up to you whether to make the call on whether to do it or not. But it’s definitely something you wont regret.

Cons of these systems:

At the end of the day, probably one of them is flexibility. The thing about excel, you can really customise a spreadsheet to how you want it. Software is generally built by another person like us or development team and you have got to mould your business around that software, so it’s not as flexible. If you had someone like us or another company you can go to them and say “I want it to do this” and you’ll probably have to pay for it, but it’s not as flexible as something like a spreadsheet or an access database. But that’s the trade off you get when you utilise smart technology like this.

Integration is another thing, the problem with a lot of systems is they all do one thing very good but they don’t work together. You could have a very good sales tool or a point of sale tool but it may not work with your client relationship management system. So ideally want to find something that does both things, or does three things all in one. But it still has a very good level of control, and it works well. You won’t want something that does everything, but only does it averagely. Otherwise you may as well not bother.

Another con: Learning and adaptation, humans are still in that phase where we are scared or we fear technology because we don’t know how it works. So it does take a learning curve, so i do suggest you put the time to just learn it. It doesn't take long, it’s all in your own mind at the end of the day. I think people just get carried away then when they’ve learned it they like “its actually bloody easy”. So you’ve got to learn it and you have to just commit to it. You have to try it.
I can tell you, they’re pretty straight forward, just like anything becomes muscle memory once you’ve used it a few times.

The fourth one is security. The issue is, a lot of these systems that are already made in the U.S. for example, or outside of New Zealand so if you're listening to this abroad from New Zealand just disregard this, but some of the privacy laws require data to be stored in the country that you're in. For example law firms, you just have to be careful you don’t pick a software that could breach privacy laws. You also want to pick software that is secure, so if the software you’ve got gets hacked, or it went down the tubes, that there is backups, that you have access to, that it is secure, that it’s regularly updated, that its SSL protected, stuff like that. Obviously it needs to be password protected. Make sure when you set it up you put a good password on there.

What to consider: If you think about all the key areas in your business, most businesses is either service or product based. You’ll know what you are. Do you sell services for an hourly rate or a fixed cost per project? Or do you sell products? So are you doing things the right way within your business? So if you’re a service business, are you tracking projects? Do you have a lot of customers saying that you don’t deliver on time or you’ve done something wrong or you missed the deadline?

You’ve got to think to yourself how can I speed up this process and how can i automate it and make it more accurate, so leading back to my business. I used to write a manual list for each of my staff about what they had to do. But that took too much time, also they’d miss things, and I couldn't see from my chair where they were all up too so now we have an inline daily task list that I can see where they’re at, wherever i am, whether I’m in New Zealand or overseas, or just sitting cross the desk from them. I can see in real time, where they are up to.

Consider, go through each process in your business and ask yourself “can I automate it” or “what can i do quicker?” or “what is the customer complaining about?” for example “whats taking me so long in my process that’s wasting a lot of time?”. Even talk to me about it and I may give you some ideas. But, write a list down, thats the first place to start.

Then, people say finally, “what do we pay for software like this?”. It varies on a lot of factors, if you have a system that does a lot of features, that does a lot of things in all areas of your business you’re probably going to pay a higher cost. If you want something that’s tailor made to your business, then you’ll definitely be paying a higher cost. Most of the software usually pay a monthly fee, it’s a software as a service, so you pay monthly and you get support and ongoing update. It’s generally the best way to go.

If you have the budget to do it, it can be good to really get something bespoke made for your business, that does exactly what you want it to do. Again it rules out the con of flexibility, you can get a custom system built to your business that really does what it needs to do.

If you're not sure where to start then i do suggest you try our system, which we built over the last several years, it’s called ZULU, as a listener of this podcast you get a three month free trial, i’ve put a link in the description that you can click on to sign up and try it.

I’m also happy to give you personal one to one help on using the software and showing you how it can benefit your business or giving you a free plan that you can utilise what you can do within your business to save time, therefore make more money or have more free time.

Zulu basically has a whole lot of features; from a website builder, through to quoting and project management and also staff time sheets and sales tracking, point of sale. It’s got a lot of features in it. So at the end of the day give it a go, I’ll help you set it up and I will give you some free tips, obviously on what you can use within your business, like a little plan that you can utilise and you can see how it can benefit you.

But, feel free to google business management software, there’s a lot out there and you can trial them all to see which one works best for you. But, I’ve built mine around my business originally and I’ve also set it up for many other businesses so far and we’ve put customer functions in place to help make their business run better and make more money. We’ve utilised those ideas within our system to keep improving and obviously it’s a thing we are working on day in day out. Just yesterday I was adding new features to it, so again going back to that thing about evolving. Where you keep adding new features to make it better.

I hope that helps guys, definitely something to consider. I really hope you do try out using technology within your business, because it will undoubtedly help you save time, make more money and just have a better business that’s ahead of the competition.

So thats Matt from the RAZOR Web Design Podcast, and thanks for listening.