}
By: James Christopher, Chief Operating Officer
This is our fourth post in our Growth Series for SMBs. A series of blog posts dedicated to providing our readers with information and ideas on the topic of growth for small to medium sized businesses. This posts focuses on the importance of establishing a core technical foundation for your business.
Growth Without Focus – A Recipe for Failure?
Growing businesses, especially fast growing ones, often find it challenging to maintain a focus on their core competencies. Sometimes, the erosion in focus results from an organization’s relentless pursuit of growth regardless of whether that growth is related to its core mission or not.
This often happens when a company is seeking to grow via mergers and acquisitions and ends up with a portfolio of businesses that have very little to do with its core competency.
Sometimes the lack of focus can creep in when an organization pursues multiple revenue streams that are at best, only loosely affiliated with its core mission.
It May Just Be a Lack of Resources
For a majority of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) though, the challenge often stems quite simply from the rigors of having to compete with limited resources.
Unlike large enterprises, most SMBs are often resource-constrained and can quickly find themselves getting stretched thin in trying to meet their revenue and profitability goals.
The daily struggle to meet operational and customer support obligations can sometimes become all-consuming for SMBs and leave them with little resources to focus on, or leverage their core competencies.
The Answer Could be Automation
One way of alleviating the situation is through business process automation. In theory at least, the strategic application of technology in areas such as manufacturing, procurement, transportation, customer support and accounting, allows companies to free up the resources they need to focus on their core competencies.
Importantly, such automation can also yield significantly better utilization of existing resources. The experience of large companies has shown conclusively that process automation if done right, can yield significant productivity benefits and allow companies to leverage their core abilities in a far better fashion than manual processes allow.
Challenges Facing SMBs to Automate
The challenge for SMBs of course is to find a way to implement automation without being overwhelmed by the effort. Too often, companies that have embarked on major technology projects have gotten bogged down by cost and complexity issues.
Instead of allowing companies to focus on core competencies, such projects ironically have ended up only distracting companies from their mission. The industry is littered with examples of such failed projects, especially from the time when large companies were first rolling out Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software within their environments.
Some Ideas On Where To Start
The lesson for SMBs is that technology can be a powerful enabler of productivity. Technology can allow companies to leverage their core competencies, but only if they know how to manage it.
The companies that have been most successful at harnessing technology have been the ones that have figured out precisely what processes and operations they need to manage in-house and what needs to be outsourced.
History has shown that a strategic and well-managed outsourcing process can yield fundamental business improvements while allowing a company to leverage its core abilities. It’s a model that SMBs could take advantage of.
We’re here to help. Feel free to contact us if you’d like to explore ways where you can use technology to help your business grow.