- And then the next challenge that starts to come up
is mitigation of risk.
And so what that is about is
putting technology processes in place
which are gonna help you to actually reduce risk
in the business.
So that might be around compliance,
using features like Google's data compliance features
in their enterprise edition of G suite,
which will detect if someone's put a Medicare number
or a credit card number in an email and tried to send it
or quarantine those emails it's called DLP
or data loss prevention.
And so those are the kinds of like compliance
and risk mitigation features that you start to have happen.
Someone shared with me recently
that most eight figure business owners,
so business owners who are in the multiple tens of millions
of revenue wish that they were seven figure business owners
because the kind of problems that come up
when you're an eight figure business owner
are not small problems.
If you have an "Oh shit" moment and something goes wrong
and, you know, we've all had those moments in our businesses
they tend to be like $100,000 "Oh shit" moments rather than
$5000 or $10,000 "Oh shit" moments.
And so it's very interesting that
that kind of sub $10 million revenue Mark
is actually a really nice sweet spot
for a lot of businesses.
But as we're going into scale mode
and we're looking at effectively a proven business model
that is now ready to be scaled up,
we start to have the challenges of a mid market business.
So what do we do about it?
Well, we're going to get
into our three things that you need to do
and you need to make sure that you do well.
So the first one is making sure
that IT and technology is a process within the business.
And that doesn't mean just creating policies,
it actually means approaching technology
as a process within the business.
So, what are some of the ways that we can do that?
Well, number one, it comes down to choosing technology.
If you're an earlier stage business and you're the founder
of the business, and you're involved
in the technology making decisions, you probably are someone
who may suffer from bright, shiny object syndrome.
And so what that means is
that you're jumping from tool to tool.
And Ryan Deiss mentioned this on a webinar,
let me go and jump on that
or the latest hack for SEO,
I'm gonna go and learn and jump on that tool.
Or someone, you know
at a seminar showed me a new way of doing something.
And we ended up signing up for different tools
all over the place, right?
Now, that can not only come with subscription fatigue,
where we ended up signed up to 10 extra things
that we didn't really wanna be.
But the real root problem with that is that,
we're not actually making clear and conscious decisions
on tools that we need.
What we need to do when we're choosing a tool
is actually start with the business case.
And then from the business case, develop a scope
of what do we actually need this tool to do.
And so this kind of thinking is how you will make sure
that when you're choosing technology tools
for the business, you don't just jump at something
and then get aways down the road with that tool
and find that you're either not getting a great result
or it's not as cost effective as you wanted,
or maybe as you started to add extra users
you didn't realize how expensive was it was gonna get,
or even you didn't realize that there was something else
out there in the marketplace
that was actually better for you.
And so the simplest way to do technology tool selection
it's actually not, not quite rocket science.
Number one, I already mentioned it, you start with a scope.
So you write down and this can just be
in one A4 page document.
What do we need this tool to do?
What is the business problem we're trying to solve here?
And what are the inputs?
And then what are the important outputs?
Like what do we actually need this to achieve?
What are the success metrics to make sure
that this is gonna work?
That's number one, right.
And then number two, we do a decision matrix
and a decision matrix is just a spreadsheet.
What you're gonna do is you're gonna put a list
of all the tools down in that in one column.
And then along each other column,
you're gonna have things like your criteria
for the actual choice of that tool.
So criteria might be, what are the integrations?
What is the pricing?
What is the support like?
Can I get support in my, in the local country here?
What is the pricing?
Is it in Australian or is it in us dollars?
What is the longevity of the company that is supporting
and creating this tool?
Is it likely to be, get gobbled up by someone bigger
or is it likely to last a long period of time?
So these are the things that, you know
for me being a technologist,
I kind of naturally think about these things
with tool selection.
You know, if I'm choosing between Asana
or monday.com or Trello or Podio,
I'm thinking about all of these things naturally
when I'm choosing a tool.
But when we see a new tool on a webinar
and we get excited about it
and bright, shiny object syndrome kicks in,
we don't always think about those things.
So, before choosing to actually roll something out
there the kind of things that we wanna do.
So at number one, scoping document
number two, decision making matrix, hopefully that's useful.
If this stuff is useful, go ahead and drop a comment
and say, "Yep, Pete, this is awesome,"
or, "No, Pete, this is boring."
So the second thing that we wanna do before we go
and roll out a tool,
is to do something called user profiling.
So if you've ever worked in a large organization
and had anything to do with the IT team,
before they go and roll out a tool,
they'll do a user profiling session.
And what that means is, they think
about the different categories of users within a business.
And so a frontline worker or frontline consultant
would be a category of user.
A leader or executive would be a category of user,
a field worker would it be a category of user.
And each one of these user profiles
will need different technology, different tools
perhaps even different levels of support
for them to actually get their work done.
And so, as we develop these user profiles
that is gonna help direct
and dictate what kind of technology
and what kind of support we're gonna need for those staff.
Now, why is that important?
Well, if you go to your employees
and you just roll out an iPhone,
because you think it's a good idea for everyone
to have an iPhone, well, you may be overspending
that's number one,
but also you may not be giving them the best tool
for their job.
It may be that an iPad would be better
for certain staff members.
It may be that a laptop or a Chromebook might be better
for certain staff members.
We have different areas in our business
that our teams actually need different kinds of technology.
For some staff, it makes sense
to actually have a Chrome based device
and to have a Chromebook.
But then for a support team
who are sometimes troubleshooting a Mac or a PC
and they need to use tools for those machines,
well then they are unlikely to be able
to be productive if we were to just say,
"Right, blanket rule, everyone in the business
gets Chromebooks."
So developing those different user roles
will get you thinking,
what is the most productive tool for this person?
What is the easiest way
and the most frictionless way
that they can get their job done.
And what that means is that you're removing the friction
from them being able to actually get their work done.
You would all know that sometimes you have one
of those days where technology is just not your friend.
And what I mean by that is,
you wake up in the morning, you grab your coffee,
you sit down at your desk
and you get ready to get some work done,
and what happens is you spend the whole day
either dealing with the printer
or on the phone to text support or your Internet's down
and so you can't get your work done
or your computer is trying to install updates.
If you've ever had a day like that,
say, "Yes, Pete, I have been to IT hell."
If you've been there, what that means is that sometimes
technology gets in the way
of you just getting your work done.
Now for us as entrepreneurs and as business owners
it's pretty easy for us to troubleshoot those
because we are problem fixers by design.
We love a challenge and we love jumping in
and actually solving problems and fixing things
Even though, yeah sure, it may not be productive,
it's still good use of our skills to solve problems.
But not all of your staff will actually thrive
in solving problems all day
which is why when they hit a roadblock
they're just going to slow down, get frustrated
and they're not gonna have a very productive day at all.
And so your job as a leader
and this is what these scale companies
do really, really well is they remove all of the friction
of technology and they just allow staff
to get their work done.
Now that's why I'm such a big fan of Chromebooks
and Chromeboxes, I'm running on a Chromebox right here
as my primary machine.
I use a Chromebook laptop as my primary machine.
Yes they don't have every single bell and whistle
and button and just like G suite,
it doesn't have every single bell and whistle and button
that the Microsoft suite has.
But what they do have is simplicity
and simplicity, removes friction
and allows people to get their work done productively.
Okay, cool.
So the final one, you may have heard me say this 300 times
if you've watched my webinars before
but I'm gonna share it just once more for everyone.
Business leaders and technology leaders,
as companies grow and scale,
start to think about team members in logical groups.
And those groups can be used for permissions,
they can be used for access, but their mostly used
for making sure people actually know what team they're in
and what kind of area they should be working with.
And so we do that inside of our Google admin panel
creating groups for each different area of the business.
And then we start plunking people into those groups
and then we go and use those groups
in every different area of the business.
And so we'll use them to share resources in Google Drive,
or use them to share calendars.
We'll use them to invite people to meetings.
And Google does all kinds of cool things
to let certain groups access certain resources.
And so if I'm in my Google Drive here
and I wanna open up
and see who can access certain resources,
you can see the different groups automatically
have different areas and different levels of access.
Now, why is this important?
Well, because when you're onboarding a staff member
you don't want them to spend days having to ask
for the right access to this folder or to that folder.
When you are growing in a larger scale organization
you don't wanna accidentally leave your files open
to the wrong people.
You don't wanna share payroll data
with the wrong staff members because what are they gonna do?
They're gonna talk about it, or they're gonna get bummed
about someone who's getting paid more than them, right?
And so what this does is it just keeps the security
nice and tight
and allows you to continue to grow and scale
without any challenges.
I love that one.
Okay.
So we've taken care of IT as a process,
let's talk about data driven decisions.
And I can't start talking about this
without talking about dashboards.
And so dashboards are the number one way
of actually making sure that your data in the business
is exposed not only to you, but also
to your team members as well.
And so dashboards are gonna take data
from whatever system you've got it in,
whether it's your marketing data from YouTube or Google ads,
or from your Facebook pages,
whether it's information from your financial system,
like zero.com, a dashboard is gonna help you
to bring that data into one place
and then visualize that data
and share it effectively with your team.
Now, you are probably right now doing some form
of performance tracking inside of spreadsheets,
and that works fine while you're a smaller business,
because it's okay if things are, you know
kind of like a bit haphazard or if it's done manually
from time to time, that's totally fine.
But as you grow into a scale company, you just can't afford
for someone to accidentally key in an incorrect number
in a spreadsheet, and then have that data visualized
and have business leaders making critical business decisions
based on data that may have been incorrectly entered.
It's really time to get serious about your data
and about your data visualization
and pull data from either an API
or pull it in some way programmatically
so it's no longer relying on human operations.
The other issue that businesses run into
as they kind of breached that gap and go into scale mode,
they've got more than 20 employees,
is that you just don't have the people who have time to go
and update all of these things manually anymore.
Labor efficiency becomes really important.
And so what you wanna make sure is that,
if you are automating as many tools as possible,
you're reducing the need that as the business grows
to just continue kind of throwing people at the problem,
which is not great at all.
(swooshing sound)
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