- Alrighty.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Great to have everyone here.
It's good to be here.
My name is Pete Moriarty,
and I am here to share with you some of the challenges
that scale companies have and how to overcome them.
And I'm gonna be sharing with you
what we've found in all of our time,
working with small and medium businesses
that have successfully grown and scaled
and got out of the startup land,
got out of growth mode and actually hit that amazing
acceleration of scale.
So if you don't know who we are, where itGenius,
and we are a small to medium size business consulting firm,
what we do is we help small business owners
accelerate their team, put the right technology in place
and help their business grow.
We've worked with literally tens of thousands of employees,
for thousands of companies right across Australia.
And we are all about getting the right tech
inside your business.
So, if you're joining us on the live,
thanks so much for being here.
If you are watching our replay,
then also great to have you here as well.
I am in my little office in Burleigh Heads here, thankfully,
not currently in lockdown,
but I live in work mostly from the road,
but I've been here plunk down in one spot now
after being on the road for two months
and very happy to be here.
And the number one rule with me,
if you're joining my stream is
that the more interactive you are,
the more I'm gonna be able to share and help
in your personal situation.
So please drop me a hi,
let me know where you're watching from.
If you're in lockdown, sorry to hear that guys,
but I'm gonna try and bring you as much entertainment
as I can to keep us busy.
So, we've launched in the last week,
our growth roadmap.
And our growth roadmap is about how technology
is adopted by businesses.
And so this is like the way that businesses,
as they grow and scale,
have different approaches to technology.
And what's important about this is that this actually
lets you know, where you should be focusing your energy
and your time,
and what kind of tools
are kind of next on the horizon for you
based on which area of business you're in right now.
And so what this tells us
is that as you're growing
and you're scaling your businesses,
there's gonna be different challenges that are coming up,
but also you can have different focus areas as well.
And so what we've done with this growth roadmap,
and we're still in the process of launching it
and tweaking it, I'm giving you guys
an early release version, very 1.0 of this,
or should maybe have a beta label on it still.
And this is basically showing you
what kind of areas in the business,
different technologies are going to be relevant for you.
So take a screenshot of this.
This will be shared on a blog as we continue
to develop this framework.
You can see here, it's literally still in progress.
We're still working on the accelerate side of that.
Now, why is it so important
that we actually think about this stuff?
Why is it so important that we consider
different pieces of technology as our business grows?
Well, tech is so darn big.
It can be really challenging to know
what you should be focusing on
at different stages of business.
Should I be worrying about setting up
a policy inside of G Suite so that people
have to change their password X number of times per month?
Or should I be rolling out Chromebooks to my team?
Should I be building a beautiful dashboard
for all my KPI data in the business?
And from working with thousands of different businesses
across Australia and beyond internationally as well,
we have a really good idea of what kind of businesses
come up against what challenges
as they're at certain stages of business.
And so this framework is our attempt to take
all of that knowledge that we have from our customers
and from the businesses that we've worked with
and help succeed and try and bring that down
into a really digestible format.
So you know where you are right now,
and if there's any steps that you've skipped,
that maybe businesses, you know, that you in the past,
maybe should've got done,
but you haven't got done yet,
what you should be focusing on now
and then what's around the corner
around the horizon as well.
And so I'm not gonna spend this video
going through this framework.
We're actually just focusing on scale businesses
and what scale businesses do well
so that they are successful.
Because this is gonna inform growth businesses
have on the horizon and how growth businesses
should start to think.
But also if you're a launch or if you're a startup business,
then you're gonna get some tips from this as well,
to give you a bit of an idea of the kind of matured thinking
around technology that larger businesses have
as they go into that scale growth mode.
So does that exciting?
Awesome.
Now, scale companies are really,
really interesting businesses.
In Australia, 98.5% of all businesses,
98.5% of all businesses have less than 20 employees.
Once you are above 20 employees,
you're literally in the top 1.5% of all businesses.
And the businesses that are over 200 employees,
it actually goes down to half a percent.
So there's 1% of all businesses in Australia,
which are between 20 and 200 employees, amazing statistic.
Now 50, 60% are actually sole traders.
That's the biggest chunk,
but then most of Australian businesses
that actually have employees are in that segment
of having one employee to 20 employees.
It's about 300,000 businesses across Australia, right?
So, these scale companies just by launching past
and growing past 20 employees are already in the top
one and a half percent of the country,
which is pretty phenomenal, right?
It's a big jump there.
So if you're one of those scale businesses,
give yourself a pat on the back.
You've made an amazing achievement
by actually getting your business to that stage.
Now, what kind of challenges start to come up
for these businesses?
Well, we know because we've worked with so many of them,
some of our customers are
some of the more larger end of town, like the Canva,
O'Brien, who were previously Laser Electrical and Plumbing,
People like One Agency who have hundreds of different
real estate agencies all over the country.
These are all Google customers
and they're our customers as well.
And so we speak to their IT teams
and we work with them very closely,
we get an understanding of what the challenges are.
But we also have hundreds of businesses
that are in the stage of that 20 to,
let's say 100 employee mark,
where they're really out of growth mode
and they're starting to scale.
And so we're gonna go through three areas
that are really important for these businesses,
for the mindset of the business owner
and the business leaders to make sure that they have right,
in regards to how they approach technology.
So, those three areas are, number one,
creating technology process.
And that doesn't just mean like business processes,
we're gonna cover exactly what it means,
but recognizing that technology and the function
of technology management inside the business
is actually a process.
So that's gonna be number one, number two,
data driven decisions, right?
That sounds like a nice little kind of buzzword
and throw away phrase,
but I'm going to take you through some practical steps
on how you can actually make data driven decisions
on both choosing technology
and then also managing your technology as well
and managing your people as well, it's very important.
And then thirdly is about delegation,
and technology assisted delegation.
I'm gonna take you guys through some cool stuff there.
So some of the biggest challenges that these companies
come up against when you're a scale company, right?
We found this very much when we
kind of grew past 20 employees
and we've kind of like rocketed off
and continue to grow and scale that at teams.
The biggest one for us, once we got above 20 employees,
is our customers started treating us differently.
They no longer treated us like a small business
and our customers start treating us like a mid market
or like a large business.
It's kind of like, "Sorry,
you've reached a point of success now.
And so you have to serve me in a certain way, right?"
And I'm not saying our customers treated us
like they would treat Telstra
or faceless large organization,
but there was definitely a shift in how we are treated
by our customers.
And so what that means is that we need to adapt
our customer experience to be able to deliver
to a different perception of our customers.
So that's one of the biggest challenges
that these businesses come up against.
The next one is that you start to have all of the
quintessential traits of a mid market business.
You have information silos, you might start having politics
that start happening across your teams.
You start to get less efficient with your people
because you're hiring extra departments like sales
or marketing, or maybe you're, you know,
starting to build out an HR function.
And so the amount of capital that you need to spend
every year in your people,
actually increases as a ratio to your revenue.
And so what that means is your labor
can actually be less efficient
as the business then continues to grow.
And so there are ways that technology can help
counteract to that, of course,
and that's what we want to try and do,
but these are the challenges that start to come up.
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