Testimonial by Chris Lubas, Lubas Medical
It was as though my business was split in two halves: the quality of the service we provided was top notch, but behind the scenes, our systems and processes were letting us down…
Lubas Medical was created by my paramedic father, Paul Lubas, and provides high-quality medical training for the sports industry and medical professionals.
We’ve spent over 20 years perfecting the courses and training we offer, and we’re proud of the relationships we’ve built within the industry. But it hasn’t always been easy.
There was a time when we weren’t making effective use of two of the most valuable resources a Business has: time and money.
The problem we were facing
Up until a few years ago, the administrative systems we were using to run our business were archaic. Most of our Processes were manual, and a lot of information was being stored in people’s heads – forget centralised databases! With so many moving parts, it was difficult to keep track of everything.
The turning point came with the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, we were forced to strip back to a skeleton crew and, sadly, had to make our three administrative staff redundant.
In 2021, as the world began to slowly open up again, we took the opportunity to start fresh.
In the post-Covid world, everything had changed. Our online training courses became a vital part of our business, meaning we had to find a way to incorporate them into our workflows. We came across a platform called ThinkificTM, which is used to create and deliver online courses.
However, with limited technical knowledge, we were struggling to integrate this into our website. Once again, we were finding that everything had to be done manually. Because we’d lost our administrative team, my role as company director began slowly morphing into office manager.
I had no choice but to handle all the back-end manual processes, and it provided a stark insight as to just how much time – and money – this way of working was costing us. It was unsustainable.
The solution we found
I first came across The Business Catalyst in September 2021 after hearing Lisa Catto on a Dan Bradbury podcast. Everything she was discussing on the podcast was answering the problems we had within the business – and even ones we weren’t aware we had!
Within our first meeting, I knew my decision to reach out had been the right one. Lisa took everything in my head – all the worries, concerns, and goals I had for the business – and laid them out neatly in a customer journey.
At the start of the process, the main pain points we identified were:
- Not having a central database
We had data all over the place, from Excel spreadsheets to Google Docs. We didn’t have anything close to a central database – in fact, we didn’t even have a shared drive! One of the major reasons we were reluctant to get started on solving this was that we’d anticipated it would be a huge task to bring everything together in one place.
2. Integration
As mentioned previously, we’d been finding it challenging to link the platform we used to host our online courses with our main website. I’d been manually processing everything: bookings, sending out emails to each individual client, making updates if information changed, and sending links to the courses. If we wanted to offer value adds to our clients, we’d have to manually provide those too, which just felt unfeasible.
The results we benefited from
Working alongside The Business Catalyst to implement automation cut out all of our pain points. Without the technical understanding and access to resources, this simply wasn’t possible before.
The four major advantages we benefited from were:
- Saving on staff costs
Pre-Covid, our administrative processes required three members of staff to manage. Now, the same administrative KPIs are hit – and beyond – but only one member of staff is needed, our office manager. We will consider hiring another administrator in the event of absences, but we’ve certainly saved at least one wage per year. Plus, it’s easier than ever to train new staff on our systems.
2. Saving time
After implementing automated processes into our business, the changes were almost immediate. Within just the first few weeks, we’d saved hours per week at minimum.
For example, previously we were manually creating certificates for clients who had completed our online training courses. This process would take on average half an hour per certificate. The volume we work at could be as many as 140 students per university signed up to our course, or 300 medical practices. This meant we had been spending around one whole day just creating certificates.
We were also manually taking bookings, and had no system to segment and collect data from B2B bookings versus private individual bookings.
Now, we have no involvement in either of these processes. If a client books onto a course, they get automatically enrolled, and a certificate is automatically generated.
It sounds small, but these things add up, and cutting them out of our to-do lists saves us massive amounts of time. The benefit of this is that it allows our office manager to run the office more efficiently. We’re not bogged down with the operational side of running the business. Instead, we’re free to focus on improving our service and constantly increasing the efficiency of our processes.
3. Freeing my time
As mentioned earlier, one of the pain points I was facing was not having enough time to dedicate to my role as company director. I was so busy on the operational side that I had very little time left to dedicate to striving for our long-term business goals.
Having implemented automation within our processes, I’m now at a point where I’m very close to handing the reins over completely to our office manager. I still like to maintain a level of involvement and understanding into how our behind-the-scenes processes can be improved, but I’m free to dedicate my time to propelling our business forward.
4. The future
When I first approached The Business Catalyst, I couldn’t imagine how all of these systems would work at the level I wanted them to. It felt almost impossible. Seeing my vision come to light and experiencing the benefit of everything functioning properly has had major advantages, not least the ones listed above.
It’s a completely different way of running our business, and I only wish we’d done it years ago. This way of working has become critical to our growth, and we’re now able to push the company in the direction we want it to go.
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If you’d like to see how The Business Catalyst can help you to cut down on staff costs, save hours of time, and automate the pain points in your business, hop on a free discovery session. This enables us to get to know you and your business, and identify a unique strategy for how we can help.
