Is technology holding your business back?

When you’re a business owner, there is no shortage of issues and challenges that need your attention. Whether it’s hiring and training, sales and marketing, or operations and production, your plate is probably full.

My question for you is: How is technology helping you manage all these disparate components of your business? Or put another way...

How are your company’s technical limitations blocking you from growing in a meaningful, scalable way?

Tech Limitations are Industry-Agnostic

Whether you’re in manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, food service or anything in between, technology is one of your greatest expenses and one of your greatest secret weapons to creating more efficiencies, happier customers, and a thriving, growing company.

Common Tech Challenges

I talk to business owners, founders, and entrepreneurs all the time and hear so many similar challenges, limitations, and frustrations with their current tech products, including:

• Complicated multi-step manual processes that they know CAN and SHOULD be automated
• Syncing mistakes and missing data between multiple systems that cause errors and cost money and customer goodwill
• Using so many redundant SaaS services and APIs (and none of them work perfectly)
• Feeling like you are the only one who knows all the different software components and how they work (or don’t work) together

But due to technical debt, a lot of these seemingly simple to-dos are stuck in development limbo.

So, How Do You Know It's Time to Reevaluate Your Software?

There are many ways to know that it might be time to rethink your software and your tech systems entirely. While the indicators and consequences are different for every industry and company, there are some big (yet common) warning signs implying you might be severely limiting your business due to your current tech stack’s limitations.

9 Ways to Know It’s Time for a Technical Facelift:

1) Your page loads are super slow and/or things crash all the time. If your site or software is constantly crashing or taking abnormally long times to load or send information, it may be time to invest in building some new software altogether.

2) Your employees and/or customers are complaining about your tech. It might be time to review some of your systems if the majority of your new hires’ and customers’ pain points are tech-related.‍

3) Many processes of your job or your colleagues’ jobs are manual. If your staff spends more time pasting data from your scheduling tool into your billing tool (and back again) that's time and money spent on something that has potential to be automated.

‍4) You’re butting up against security issues or concerns. This is a huge red flag and something that should be addressed immediately. The last thing you want are security vulnerabilities in your systems.

5) Your competitors are offering a superior digital experience or product. While it never feels good to lose to your competitors, losing on the grounds of technology is simply unnecessary these days. There are plenty of ways to build smooth, desirable, new features that your customers will love.

6) You can’t scale your business because you’re limited by your technology. Maybe you can't bring on new people because it would increase your administrative workload beyond what you can individually manage. Or maybe you have a running doc on 'how to work around' your existing software. Either of these instances would be a reason to start rebuilding some of your systems.

7) You’re having a hard time hiring people or teams to update your codebase. Maybe your platform was written in an outdated programming language, or maybe it’s just gotten so big and unwieldy that few people know how to wrangle it. Regardless, this can be a sign that it’s time to start anew.

8) You spend most of your tech budget trying to fix or patch up recurring issues rather than building new, helpful features. Being reactive vs proactive in the tech realm never feels good. Nor does being constantly frustrated by trying to fix recurring technical issues.

9) You spend more time managing your software than managing your business. For example, if you are combining data from more than 3 concurrent enterprise solutions and only you know how to do it successfully? That’s a problem. You are the expert of your business, but you shouldn't be the only one who knows how to manage it. Investing in software that can manage itself and/or open the door for delegating administrative tasks to others frees you up so you can focus on what you do best.

So, Now What?

While having to make huge technical decisions is an overwhelming situation for even the most tech-savvy CEOs, it’s also an opportunity to start fresh with all the information you've gathered over the last few years.

It can be exciting and inspiring to strip away old tech and replace it with newer, faster, more efficient and customizable solutions (not unlike doing a home renovation - messy and stressful, but ultimately exciting and worth it).

Not only will it free you and your employees up to provide a superior customer experience, it can also unlock new revenue streams and opportunities for growth.

Where to Begin?

At Cloudburst, we love working with growth-minded entrepreneurs, CEOs and business owners who have big visions and don’t want anything holding them back. We work as a true technical partner to help bring your updated technical solutions to life and make sure your systems are working as smoothly and reliably as possible - so you can focus on growing your business and not troubleshooting small bugs or running manual processes. Let’s talk!

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