A lot of people, even the ones who have been in business themselves for many years, fall for a very common misconception and ultimately a trap when it comes to business success. Many assume that the goal of business success is making a lot of money in terms of turnover, usually through increasing sales. In reality, though, business success is about profit. Period.
Automate, Scale and Profit
The idea is simple to grasp really because if you are making, for instance, ten million dollars a year in sales but say, one hundred thousand dollars in profit, then the business is less successful than one that is only making two hundred thousand dollars in sales but one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in profit right? Profit is the key factor when it comes to the business success formula.
The other important factors in this formula are automation and scale and these are deeply connected with profit. One of the main reasons for this interplay between the three is that at a basic level, in order to get more profit, you need to both increase revenue while also reducing the costs and overheads. Now, automation can be a good way for reducing costs because it obviously involves less processes, people, manual intervention or complicated problems to solve.
The Importance of Software Development for Business Success
Automation is clearly something that can be arrived at through software development, particularly through custom developing applications that bring about workflow automation, improvement in processes and integrating various systems into one simplified interface, thus reducing complexity and overheads. This is at the heart of what we do at Kaapisoft. We don’t just take pride in developing products but in engineering processes and solutions, and many of these happen to be related to business workflow automation and systems integration.
The other factor that of scaling up, is an iterative process that happens once the business process is polished and automated. So for instance, if you have a business workflow automation running smoothly with back office processes neatly streamlined, with the least manual intervention possible and a sales funnel that is working almost on its own, it is generating the revenue with the least amount of cost involved hence maximizing the profits. The next thing to do is to either scale it up in terms of volume or replicate it and use it in other markets or sell a different service or product. It’s a wash and rinse type of process.
One has to notice that at the heart of this profit maximization process is automation and this is where some good software engineering and good project management come in as essential. Workflow automation and process design require skills and expertise that go beyond simply development skills. So when looking for a software development company to help you automate and scale your processes, it is important to find one that has people who understand the business landscape and are experts in taking the lead in such projects, rather than just developing what you are asking to the dot.
In fact if you do not have the in-house resources and creative power, when brainstorming, designing, and implementing such process and workflow automations, it is then more important than ever to really find people outside of the company who can come in and help from understanding the needs and goals to clarifying ideas, drawing the first concepts to project managing the whole thing from beginning to end.