Peter Moriarty: If you're thinking about implementing a
brand new technology system in your business, or you're just
choosing some different online software to use, there is an
important point for me to make to you. And that is to stop. And
let's have a think about things before you jump right into a
new, bright, shiny object. Now, why is it so important for you
to make sure you make effective decisions when choosing business
technology? Well, because it's so disruptive to change further
down the line. And it can also be quite expensive as well. And
I don't want you to make a bad choice now that you're going to
pay for later. Now. My name is Pete Moriarty, I help small and
medium sized business owners with their technology strategy.
I've been running a small business consultancy for over 10
years. And we've helped 10s of 1000s of employees across 1000s
of businesses all over the world with their business tech. Now,
we've grown and scaled the successful business by helping
other business owners with its technology, but we also eat our
own dog food. And we've had to help grow and scale our business
as well. Now my reason for being here on YouTube is to give back
to the community that has worked with us. And I love helping
business owners, I'm semi retired in my business. And now
for me, I get to do things I love, which right now is sharing
this good stuff with you. Now, if you've not already seen our
videos on our growth roadmap that takes you through the
different stages of business, and how your technology strategy
needs to move and shift as your business grows. And we take you
through what are the important steps to make sure you get right
at each stage of your business growth, if you haven't already
checked out those and check out that video on how to grow your
business. And also the video playlists on our YouTube
channel. So you know, based on what stage of business you're
at, where you should be focusing your attention. So let's talk
about choosing business technology. And for most
entrepreneurs, they hear something from a friend and they
go ahead and dive straight into something new. And that's all
the thought they put into it. Yes, this is new. And this is
exciting. But I want you to kind of like, ease off the gas a
little bit. And let's rewind and say okay, we have a business
problem that we're looking to solve. Let's make some
considered thought decisions here, before we jump straight
into actually implementing a piece of technology. And before
we find the perfect solution, which is going to solve all of
our problems, I want to ask you a curious question or invite you
to ask that question to yourself, what would version 1.0
of this technology look like? Now many business gurus will
tell you that when it comes to technology and business, you
need this, and you need that and you need everything, you need a
CRM system, you need an amazing autoresponder, you need this
thing on your website, you need this thing in your back office
operations. And I don't always believe that we will take
businesses through the growth roadmap. And we know that if
you're a two person business, you probably don't need a big TV
on the wall with your KPIs and live dashboards and statistics.
Because you didn't even know what your KPIs are yet. And so
different stages of businesses have different needs. And I want
you to think about that with technology as well. And so if
you've chosen to implement a piece of technology to solve a
business problem, my question is always, Hey, could this be done
on a spreadsheet? Could this be done as a version 1.0, just to
get us out of trouble? While we make a really great technology
decision, let's come into the part about actually making a
decision, then, once we've got an idea of Okay, let's get
really clear on what business problem we're trying to solve.
And maybe we've attempted to solve it with a spreadsheet
solution or the version 1.0. And that's been helping us go along
for a while, we're going to get a bit of an idea of like, well,
what are the processes surrounding this piece of
technology? What are the inputs? What are the outputs? Which team
members are involved in this? What do I really need to get as
a result of this piece of tech, then we can start to think about
the different criteria in which we would evaluate a solution.
And so when we're really clear on a problem, we can then be
really clear on how to solve that problem with a great
solution. And this is kind of like consulting one on one,
right? So decide on our criteria, I'm going to take you
through some of the criteria that I use to decide on a piece
of technology so that I know I can make really great decisions.
And yes, this is a matter of just putting all of these
options down on a spreadsheet, and then putting your different
software solutions or your different proposed solutions
there. And then working things out or maybe even point scoring
your different solutions based on a set of criteria. Number one
criteria for me is always betting on the right horse. And
what I mean by that is if I'm choosing a CRM software vendor,
or if I'm choosing an email platform, if I'm choosing a
virtual phone system, I want to know that that company is going
to be around because once I've implemented this piece of
software, I want to make sure it gets updates, I want to make
sure it just doesn't disappear. Because they run out of funding.
I want to make sure that it's got great people behind it, and
they're actually going to move the company in a great
direction. And you know, the piece of software where it is
now may be very different to where that piece of software
goes in four or five or 10 years from now. And so, for me back in
the right horse is really about Okay, well what kind of company
is this? Where is it headquartered? Is it in Silicon
Valley? Are they funded? Are they profitable? Who are the
founders, what are the successes they had? And yes, I will
literally looked at that level inside a company and a piece of
software to see whether or not
I think this is something worth putting my time into number two,
I look at backing. And what I mean by that is one of the
companies are involved in the periphery of this piece of
software. Are they deeply integrated with Google? You
know, some of the software that we work with commonly is
actually on Google's recommended for workspace program, which
means that it's been given the big tick by Google. And Google
has vetted that software to be partnered closely with Google,
and therefore giving a lot more credibility than something else
that's not a part of that program. What kind of financial
backing is behind this company? Have they got heaps of money in
the bank so that they can actually effectively grow the
business? Or are they a bootstrap startup that might run
out of money and have to send a sorry, email to everyone were
closing up or even worse, disappear out of the blue,
potentially losing valuable data of yours in that process? Number
three, I look at the future potential and the future
potential is okay, where is this business going? Has it reached
its product maturity? Or are they still ambitiously building
new features, and able to excitingly take the product in
new directions, that's the kind of business that you want to
look for. But you probably want a balance in that if you're
starting off with a piece of software, and it's superduper.
Early days, well, there might be risks associated with that, even
if they've got a great team there, they might take the
product in a direction that you're really not wanting where
you want it to go somewhere else. And so I try and find a
product in the middle band of its actual development in terms
of the product lifecycle, next up is competition and
alternatives. And that's looking at what other options are out
there in the marketplace. For many of us, when we stumble
across a new application, like zoom, or we log into something
like slack.com, and we go, wow, this is a great app, we never
even think if there's potentially other options out
there, that might be good to consider. They might have
different features, they might have different pricing, they
might have a different way of working with the app that just
works better for our workflows. But if we're only ever having
the tunnel vision of looking at one solution, then we don't
really get a rounded perspective of what else is out there.
Number five, is integrations and integrations for me are really
about how well is this going to gel with the rest of my tech
ecosystem? And my God, this is my probably my number one
criteria, does it have an API? So we can have our tech team
actually connect to it and extract data? And then visualize
that in Google Data Studio? Will it allow me to have a shared
database with our other systems so that if we have a new
customer record created in our customer database, we can have
that automatically flow into this system? Do they talk to
each other? And do they make my team's life easier? Or are we
gonna get stuck with data entry, double handling between two
different systems, integrations are super important. And one of
the easiest metrics to check for integrations is does it connect
to zapier.com. If it connects to Zapier, then you've got a pretty
good chance that they're open in their policy and open in their
desire to connect with other applications. Now, the next one,
and this is one to watch for is vendor lock in, can you get your
data out? Now, this is not always the case of the business,
you know, going bust or something going wrong with the
platform. But this is just what's the ease of getting your
data extracted from the program. We're a customer of zero.com.
And it's an amazing platform for online accounting. But there's
no easy way for me to extract all of my data, it doesn't come
out in a database that I can manipulate and put into another
system, I would have to run reports and recreate my
accounting in another system, if I chose to move to something
else. Now, that's got me locked right into that system, which
means I'm pretty much stuck in one place, unless there was an
amazingly compelling reason for me to move. Now, that's not the
kind of thing that you want to have happen two or three years
down the line with something like a CRM system where you're
tracking all of your customer directions, and all of a sudden,
you need to move to a different platform, because all of that
data will need to somehow be extracted. And that might have
to be by hand. And so vendor lock in is really important to
make sure that you manage that. And you take a look at what is
it going to look like if in some future time I need to pull this
data out and actually change how I'm working with moving to
another app. So remember that, that pain of removal is really
great if you're a software vendor, and we want to work
against that and go, Okay, what options do I need to take to be
prepared to move my data if I need to, or just make a better
decision at the start, so you don't get stuck with that in the
first place. Now, lastly, it comes down to price. And this is
not the only factor but a very important factor. What's the
price market of this application right now? But also, how will it
be priced as we scale? as we add more team members as we add more
features as we have our needs grow? Do we need to bump up to a
higher tier plan which is going to cost us more? or How much is
it going to cost per employee that I hire and hopefully you've
done some kind of basic financial modeling and you get a
bit of an idea of how many people you will need to employ
in your business with that apply the pricing model of the
software that you're looking at and decide okay, well what's
this going to look at as we scale. So for you to bring all
of this together with
betting on the right horse, making sure they've got good
backing, making sure there's future potential in the product.
Looking at competitions, checking for integrations,
making sure the vendor lock in isn't too crazy, or at least
it's palatable. And finally looking at price, including your
scale pricing, how do we then make a great decision on
choosing a piece of business tech? Well, it's pretty simple,
we put it all on a spreadsheet. And we turn that into a decision
matrix. And we take all of the different solutions that we have
available. Remember, we're doing our competition and alternative
search. So you should have lots of different solutions that
you're evaluating. And from there, we rank and rate each one
of those on the criteria that we're looking for, you can give
them a score out of 10, if you want, and you can maybe even
make some notes on where they're great and where they maybe fall
down. And from there, we can make a great decision on
technology. Remember that the reason we want to make a great
decision now is because a stitch in time saves nine. And what
that means is when we make the right decision, now we don't
have to get stuck with the disruptive energy of change
later down the line. hope that's been helpful for you. And I hope
that's triggered some thinking. If you're someone who suffers
from bright shiny object syndrome, which is myself being
an entrepreneur, I absolutely understand the challenge. And so
this is your way of making great decisions when you're choosing a
piece of tech. And if you need support with that, and you may
be interested in a consult with our team, jump on the link
below. If you're a business owner, and you qualify, you're
gonna have a chat to our team about a piece of technology that
you're interested in implementing whether that's
Google workspace, or a CRM system, or maybe an online phone
system, or maybe you're looking for a shared inbox to deliver
great customer service to your customers, our team can help.
We've seen it all with small business owners, anything to do
with the technology landscape, we will be able to help you out
and you can jump on that link below. Now if you're a user of
Google workspace, we also have an amazing free offer where you
can transfer your billing to us cost you nothing extra and you
get an amazing bunch of benefits. You get access to our
Google Classroom, which has free videos on workspace and getting
the most out of your investment, as well as other exclusive
videos like getting your inbox down to zero. Learning how we
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or working from home. It's multiple millions of dollars of
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this video and I'll do my best to answer them. Take care