- Hey, what's up guys Peter Moriarty here.
And so in this session we're going to be talking
about the technology adoption playbook,
and what does that mean?
Well, that is actually how business owners adopt technology
and what are the different stages of business success
that you should be thinking about different kinds
of technology to adopt.
Now, when I've worked with literally thousands and thousands
of small business owners,
they come to me at all different stages of business.
Some are just at launch phase,
they've literally just got an idea,
and they wanna get the basic setup.
Some businesses are hiring their first few staff.
Some have got massive teams, hundreds,
or even thousands of employees.
And there's different challenges and different struggles
at every different level of business.
And these have become quite distinct for me,
what businesses at different sizes
should really be focusing on.
And so I'm gonna be sharing in this video,
how you can know where you are at
and where you should be focusing.
So if yours a very small business,
and maybe you've only got your first one or two employees
that you're hiring, it's probably not the best use
of your time to be worrying about building a KPI dashboard,
so you can track all the KPIs of the business.
Because the businesses probably changing so rapidly,
you don't even have time to check the KPIs,
you need to be focusing on managing your team,
managing your staff, and the strategies for growth.
If you're a small stage business,
then one of the things that people will often miss out on
is the basics of security,
setting up an application like LastPass,
and making sure that you're actually having
all of your passwords saved securely
so that you're not losing them,
and that you so you have a safe way
of sharing them with your team.
Now, my mom actually has a business
that she's launching at the moment,
and she's hiring someone to help her out,
doing some of her work.
Now, what she's doing right now
is she's actually sharing passwords, and that's a big no no.
(chuckling)
And so one of the things that I recommended to her
was using you delegated mailboxes inside of G Suite.
And so these are the things that we're gonna cover,
I'm gonna share with you guys my framework
for technology adoption,
and this is gonna let you know what things
you may have missed, so blanks that you may need to fill in,
and also where you should be focusing your energy now,
so you can get your business growing, and successful
and that your technology all works nicely for you.
I'm sharing this with you in this group,
this is literally hot off the press,
we've been developing this framework
and putting the intellectual property together,
literally over the last couple of weeks.
So you're the first people that I'm sharing it with.
So any apologies upfront please forgive me
if it's a little bit rough right on the edges,
but I'm gonna be taking you guys through in depth
as much as possible what I've learned in working
with the number of businesses that we've learned.
And of course I'd love to know, what kind of challenges
that you're having in your area of business right now?
And so you can use the comments for that,
drop down the comments below,
anything that you think may be relevant
for your stage of business,
or if you're trying to like match up
the difference business stages to challenges
that you've got in your business right now,
I'd love to hear if we hit the mark,
or maybe you think we may have missed something,
and you wanna share it with the community.
So please go ahead and drop those down below as we go along.
Let's go ahead and jump into the framework.
So my lovely team have put together
an amazing slide deck for me.
So thank you very much to the Genius team for helping out,
and I'm gonna share this all with you guys.
We've talked a little bit about our mission in the past,
but if you're new to itGenius, our business is a small
and medium business consultancy for technology.
And we have a concierge service,
that service helps small business owners
get their technology in check,
and as you grow and scale your business,
we help you with support for your team
and implementation of new technology tools,
which are gonna help you and your team be more efficient.
So if you're at all interested in that,
head along to itgenius.com
and you can learn more about what we do.
But in this session, we're talking about
the different stages of technology adoption.
And this is really the different stages
of a customer's journey that they go along with us.
As they're working with us,
we work from very small businesses,
right up to large organizations.
But what we're really about,
is making sure that the right technology is in place
for you to be able to grow and scale the business.
Now you can see here that not all this
is completely filled out, in our published version,
in the YouTube version of the video,
we'll have the finished product in there,
but I'm just sharing the raw stuff with you guys,
because I wanted to really share this with you,
'cause I was so inspired when we put this together,
I wanted to make sure that we were actually getting
this in the hands of our community as quickly as possible.
Okay, so we're gonna start,
we're gonna go from launch to start up to growth,
to scale, to accelerate, and I'm gonna take you guys
through the different areas of the business.
But important here is for you to check out the team sizes.
So team size of one, two to three,
four to 20, 21 to 99, and then above,
let me know what you think about this,
I'm really curious if we've hit the mark here,
or if you think there's some improvements to be done.
So we're gonna go ahead and jump in,
and first talk about our launch customers.
So launching a business is a scary thing,
that's when we've just started, right?
And that's not to put crap on anyone who's a solo operator,
there's plenty of successful solo operators,
who are solo consultants,
or they're maybe just starting a business,
and they've got an idea for something bigger,
but right now they're just running it by themselves.
If you're running a solopreneur type business,
or maybe you're selling your time,
not the best thing to scale, but it does to work.
If you are selling your time
or that's the kind of business that you have,
what are the kind of challenges might you have up with?
Well, you may have, you know,
the basics of like setting up a website,
you're gonna be getting your emails configured,
businesses that are in this stage of business,
are really going from the thinking of an idea
to thinking of an actual business.
But with the technology, they're usually using a computer
pretty much like a new employee would use a computer.
And what I mean by that is, the files are stored locally,
they're just sitting in your My Documents
or maybe they're floating around on the desktop,
and there's no real organization to them.
I mean, you might be someone who's organized
and you've got them in nice, well organized folders
and those kinds of things,
but because you're not interacting
with anyone else inside the business,
you're really only thinking about yourself.
And so launch businesses really
are doing everything one dimensionally.
It's just one dimension and they're not really sharing
or collaborating all that much.
Now, that's not really an issue
until you start to hire your first few contractors.
So that might be a consultant, might be your accountant,
it might be a marketing consultant,
it might be a technology consultant,
or it might be a contractor to help you get some work done,
maybe a virtual assistant, and that person starts to need
to collaborate with you,
but you start to run into challenges.
So what challenges do we run into?
Well, if you wanna share a file
and it's sitting on your computer,
obviously that's not gonna work.
We start to think about things like security as well,
if all of your passwords are just stored in Chrome,
and you've got them all saved in a vault
that only you can access.
Well, then it's going to be difficult for anyone else
to access and work with any of that stuff.
And it's gonna be difficult for anyone to do work with you.
The other mistake that launch businesses make,
is they just sit everything inside of My Drive,
or inside of Dropbox.
And so if you're just using, you know,
if you're just working yourself
and you're just using Google Drive for files
that you're working on yourself,
as soon as you start to add a contractor
or somebody else inside the business,
then you start to run into problems with sharing.
Now we're gonna cover some more of those
in the startup phase, but in the actual launch phase,
it's important to have a couple of things right.
If you decide to use business email,
and that is my strong recommendation,
I don't recommend you use a Gmail account
because a personal Gmail account,
it doesn't really look all that professional
when you're sending out calendar invites,
and it comes from sexyhoneysixty9@gmail.com,
it's not gonna look all that professional, right?
But importantly, when you go to share some things,
or if you want to add more stuff,
you start to run into problems
with having a non-business email address.
So we wanna switch to a business email address,
that's basically one of the first steps there, right?
But what tends to happen,
is businesses run into trouble when they're saving
all their passwords locally on their computer.
And what does everyone do? They repeat their passwords.
They use the same password for everything.
And so using a tool like LastPass for your passwords,
means that you're able to store a different password
for every website you're using.
And so LastPass will allow you
to create a secure encrypted password
for every different website that you use.
And then each website, if someone were to get access
to your password is gonna be securely cornered off
or contained from anyone who has access
to your one password.
So, making sure that's taken care of,
other things like antivirus start to come up,
getting your DNS settings right,
and you're, you know, a later stage business,
and you haven't got this perfect just yet,
this may be something that you wanna go back
and check back on, just to make sure
that you've got DNS set up correctly inside the business.
But your DNS settings point to where your website goes,
and where your mail goes as well.
And so you wanna make sure you get those right,
because if you set up a business email address
at yourdomainname.com,
and you go to send someone an email,
and you don't have all of
those domain names settings correct,
you may end up in someone's spam,
and we definitely want to avoid that.
So some of the challenges that are on the horizon
for a launch business is just really working through
how to hire staff, how to onboard staff,
and then how do I actually build systems in your business,
how to delegate the things and take them,
take the hats off your head and share them
with others inside the business,
and we're gonna cover that when we get
into our startup stage.
Let's move on to our next stage of business.
Now we're gonna talk about the startup businesses,
and this is someone who's got off the ground,
they've hired their first couple of employees,
now it might be a couple of VAS,
it might be others who have joined the business mission
to help you out.
It may even be a co-founder or two,
but this is a business which is no longer
just a single operator.
And so this business actually starts to have some form
of collaboration happening inside the business.
It might be really basic and that's fine,
but you're gonna have to be doing work
with others on the team.
Now, the biggest challenges for startup business
is you're probably still spending a lot of time
doing the work yourself.
As the founder you're still in that technician mode
where it seems faster for you to just do things,
and it's challenging to delegate,
the key skill that a startup business owner
needs to take on is to learn how to delegate
and start taking hats off
and giving them to other team members.
However, the challenges of getting that right
is that it's not always easy to do that.
And you need to systemize the business,
you need to create systems and processes,
and start documenting how things are done,
because the biggest risk for startup business
is you spend lots of time training someone new,
and then they leave the business.
And all of a sudden, you've got to start again, right?
You've gotta train someone new,
and you're wasted all that time,
and it's a major pain in the butt.
Now, usually that happens one or two times
before someone realizes,
"Oh, crap, I better get good at doing some systems."
So using a tool like a business internet,
is a good way of documenting your systems.
And what do I mean by an intranet?
I mean an internal website,
which lets you store your hot tools, your steps,
your policies, your processes,
how to get things done in the business,
all of those documentations,
rather than just sticking them in a word document,
and dropping them inside of Microsoft Word or Dropbox
or something like that.
That kind of works but it's a bit clunky
and intranet is a browsable online website
that your team can use, which makes it really simple
for you to share those systems and processes.
So when someone comes into the business,
you just give them the login to the internet
and you say, "Here you go,
here's how to learn how to get things done."