Looking to grow your business? Maybe you’re even thinking about selling up, but you want to make sure the company you’ve nurtured is in the best shape possible, to maximise your returns.
One of the best ways to manage both of the above scenarios is not necessarily with increased services or products, or expanding into new markets.
Instead, it’s something much closer to home: your systems.
Take a good look at what you’re doing and how you’re working. Do you have spreadsheets that are doing lots of things but aren’t automating, because they’re not an operational tool? Are you duplicating effort because of systems not talking to each other? Is there lots of human error? Lots of paper? Lots of effort?
We often compare businesses to making sausages (bear with us here…)
If you can put in the same ingredients but invest in a piece of kit that squeezes out your sausages faster, you’ll make more sausages, and therefore, potentially more money.
And so it is with your business. If you invest in digitalisation, you can produce the same level of work in less time – or more work in the same time – which will have a noticeable effect on your profit.
You’ll also benefit from increased accuracy. Say, for example, your board needs the most up-to-date operational information in order to make a major strategic decision.
If your team have to spend days collating it, by its very nature, it’ll be out of date and inaccurate; not what you need when it comes to making meaningful choices.
Over the years, we’ve worked with a number of businesses that have used digitalisation to scale.
Take Pacifica Group. We started working with the team a decade ago on digitising the firm’s warranty business when it became clear that the existing software could no longer meet its needs.
The firm deals with around 50,000 inbound digital and phone customers a month, along with managing the accounts of the 330,000 customers who have already purchased a warranty product.
The software, Warranty Online, allowed Pacifica to scale and adapt, with new modules added over the years as the business grew and needs changed. Read more about how digitalisation enabled Pacifica to grow in our case study.
By creating a product that could be adapted and added to, we removed the risks of obsoletion that plague so many technologies these days, instead making something that grows alongside the business and, indeed, can be sold on and adapted in the future too.
Because whether you’re looking to grow to maximise profit for yourself, or because you want to sell up, the end result is the same – an efficient business is a more profitable business.
Making good digital choices makes you more appealing to someone that might want to buy you, by maximising the value of the profit in each job processed through the system. And more profit in your business means more profit for you, as any buyer will pay a premium for a company that’s as efficient as possible – it’s a numbers game, at the end of the day.
Whatever your reason for digitalising for profit, if you’d like to talk to us about making those good digital choices, get in touch on 01642 955645, email sales@sapere.co.uk or fill out our contact form.