Cobblers Shoes and Eating Our Own Dog Food

Over the past 6 months, the Zero Down team have suffered at the hands of management.

You see, we decided last year that we should be leading by example, or, as I like to put it, 'eating our own dog food'. This expression, if you are not sure what it means, is about using the systems in our own business that we are promoting to our customers. So with this in mind, I set about replacing 100% of our internal computer systems with best of breed, Cloud-capable systems.

One of the key drivers behind us pushing so hard on this internal transformation, was the term 'a Cobblers kids never have shoes' and in IT circles, there is a bit of a cliche that an IT firms systems are always the last to be worked on.

Here's what we did....

Key Objective One - 100% Cloud in 12 months
I started off with a lofty goal of having our entire business running in the Cloud within 12 months. The reasons were plentyful and the key points are listed below;

• Remove reliance on office servers for our field staff and customers
• Enable our staff to be able to access systems from anywhere
• Change our IT costing model from a complicated capex model to a per-user opex model
• Learn about the pitfalls and benefits of 'living in the Cloud'

Key Objective Two - Create a Foundation for Growth
Our business has been running on a number of systems that were hampering our ability to grow and have a dynamic business model. With growth on the horizon, we needed to find software systems that could allow us to increase in size and maintain smoothly running operations.

After reviewing the objectives in detail, we decided that we would need three new systems; an accounts package, a CRM / job management system and a system that could manage and monitor our client's computer systems.

The Selection Process
With Google as my best friend, I went out and researched for industry leaders in each of the three categories of software that we were looking for. After hours of research (most of it fruitless), and a dozen free downloads I decided to refine the criteria down to the following key attributes;

• Software must be in use by over 500 companies world-wide
• Must be compatiable with NZ regional nuances (e.g currency, timezone)
• Software vendor must be accessable by phone call, in NZ buisness hours
• Pricing must be per-user, per month with no hidden extras
• Must fit at least 95% of our current systems' functionality
• All 3 systems must be able to integrate with each other

We ended up settling on the following three products;

• Xero online accounting
• Autotask IT helpdesk and CRM
• Kaseya Systems Management

Implementation
One of the problems of being an IT firm is that we believe we are somewhat invincible in what we can achieve technically. After successfully negotiating a good price for the 3 systems above, we set about implementing them one at a time.  Overall, the products and their vendors were straight forward to setup and implement (remember, they are all Cloud based so no install or servers required).

The main challenge when embarking on such a high degree of system change in a short period of time is the people. For each system we set aside a significant amount of time in staff preparation and training. However, if I were to do it all over again, I would have doubled that time investment.

The other challenge was changing the way that we were doing things. You see, when you start a business, everyone believes that you know what you are doing. We changed a significant portion of our internal processes and workflows to be able to 'fit the system'. What we identified was, the changes that we made all ended up improving our processes... in other words, we were doing it wrong and the software taught us how to do it right!

The Outcome
Well, I sit here writing this article after reviewing my accounts, helpdesk and sales pipeline from home. The only thing that I need to use on my laptop is a web browser.  I don't need to worry about backing the systems up. I don't need to worry about a power cut in the office.  We've had no downtime and I no longer need to budget for new servers... just new staff.

As a business owner, the most important thing that I've got access to is accurate and up to date business information. With the products that we've implemented, I can literally view things 'real-time' which makes decision making easier and swifter.

Having licked their implementation wounds, my team are extremely happy with the systems as it has significantly reduced adminstration and data entry time.

We have recently surveyed our customers to ascertain if our customer service has improved or declined over the past 6 months - the result is a resounding improvement.

Taking all of these positive outcomes into account - the overall result is that we are more confident in driving our business forward because we have reliable, cost effective tools that can grow with the business. If you are a business owner or manager, I'm sure that you'll agree - confidence is a wonderful thing.