The Business Ferrari

Making money in business?

A trusted formula: you take a unique idea, turn it into a product or service, mark it with your very own stamp, and send it to market, glittering beneath a veneer of your glorious brand.

Of course, there are other factors, perhaps an investment deck, a sales team, employees, raw materials, logistics, and the necessary tech needed to get you through.

And finally, there it is, perfectly crafted, and honed to the finest detail. A gleaming vehicle with which to drive your commercial triumph. All you need now is a road, a map and a compass. Your product is a Ferrari, your colleagues (employees) a purring engine, driving relentlessly toward a common goal.

Lap after lap, day after day, the endless sales, the new clients, the product enhancements and the growing team. With each morning you cannot wait to get behind the wheel, this is a winning formula and the podium awaits as the finish line draws near.

But then … a red light on the dashboard, the screeching of mechanical parts, and in seconds your momentum is gone. The once shining black ribbon of road that carried your business toward victory has become broken, and that once purring engine is now limping and sounding very unhealthy.

If only there had been more money to pay for its upkeep, or the time to plan for road repairs. You are crawling now, the wheels bumping through pot holes as your once pristine product navigates the obstacles, its engine restricted in its performance.

To make matters worse, you learn the road was badly constructed and not at all compliant with the appropriate regulations.

Your winning engine, bit by bit, is coming apart, the pieces being absorbed by your competitors. True, you made a quick start, and had the first mover advantage, but the competition had chosen a different road, somewhat slower, but better maintained, with a more robust engine, so, now you are losing ground.

The first challenge is that all technology ages: the quicker advancements are made, the faster your tech goes out of date. Computers for example, need constant maintenance, software updated, and (where necessary) replaced.

But the idea of a little down time maintaining a laptop distracts from the bigger picture of the overall journey, and it’s not until that laptop fails completely, that it becomes a priority to the business, the downtime suffered is greater.

Staff training, proper documentation, and support for all company systems have an obvious overhead of both time and cost.

These are things that often strike resistance from senior management, and again, seen as breaks on the momentum of the business as a whole. But ultimately a well-supported system, being used by fully trained staff, will provide greater traction, avoiding issues further down the road.

Issues around compliance in areas such as privacy, and health & safety, are seen as costly oil slicks that simply must be avoided. Yet if tackled in the right way, they can be used to improve the culture, and engagement within the business, while enhancing its reputation in the market.

Ultimately, hit the wrong oil slick at the wrong time and it could end with your business crashing badly. So, running your company without compliance is rather akin to driving without a seat belt. You might get away with it, but why take the risk?

Choosing the right software for the systems you are trying to create is as important as choosing the right tool for a specific job, and yet so often we see spreadsheets being used as databases, or Word documents to manage CRM.

Software licensing, networking, intranets, extranets, websites, SEO, compliance, reporting, bespoke versus off-the-shelf solutions, the list just keeps on growing, and all the time you are trying to focus on the key gospel according to simple business economics, that you need to make money in order to survive.

But if investing in the road guarantees the Ferrari never stalled or broke down, wouldn’t it be worth taking the time?

What if by creating a solid tech policy for your business, you could increase productivity while suffering less downtime, with better engagement from your team?

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Fixing issues as they happen is costly both in time and money. Proper planning with a properly crafted policy, that exactly matches your business needs, is a clever, proactive approach toward improving your business vehicle.

So next time you take your Ferrari out for a drive, make sure the road has been properly maintained.

Oh, and one more thing, if you need a little air in your tyres why not pop over to Oxygen and take G2L’s free IT health-check. You’ll find questions covering:

• Locations

• Installed Software

• Bespoke Software

• Data Governance

• Data management and access security.

• Data Integration

• Data protection, encryption, and storage

• Known Issues

• Wish List.
  

And when you’re done, you’ll get a handy personalised report.

Think of it as an MOT, designed to get you to where you’re going in the safest, fastest way possible.