Let’s understand how growing Companies define the right attitude and processes to grow 10X.

Amazon started from Bezos’s garage in 1994 and market capitalization of Amazon as of 18 January 2023 is $979.87 Billion, and there are more than 200 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide.

Similarly, Uber Technologies, launched in 2009, operates in 69 countries, and its market capitalization as of 18 January 2023 is $58.24 Billion. Today, 118 million people use Uber or Uber Eats once a month, which has increased by 26% year-on-year.

Both these companies are giants but were they successful from day one?

It is very interesting to understand how they challenged the traditional businesses operating for years. Here are some of the common factors between both companies that helped them grow Multifold:

• Offer online technology to simplify their customer’s ordering challenges
• Proactive & World Class Customer Services to grow Repeat Sales
• Invested in technology that helped them Replicate business models across the globe
• Continuously upgrading their products and services
• Other factors include investing in resourceful teams, empowering work environments, business analytics, creativity, and more.

Is your company ready for growth?

For any company to grow, it must focus on building strong customer relations and processes to identify changing patterns in a particular industry.

The list of questions that you must be focusing on – Why are customers buying? Why are leads not converting? Who are key customers? Why are your customers getting frustrated? Is your customer recommending you? What are repetitive challenges? What is the potential for growth for the product and services you are offering?

This list of questions can be different depending on the nature of the business and the target audience.

However, there are two major challenges most companies face:

1. Lack of time to pay attention to the above questions as management is highly occupied in business operations.
2. No structured process to collect data and analyse it in real-time.

Is your team highly dependent on you for day-to-day decisions?

Small companies’ challenge is that they are too dependent on manual processes and key people to run day-to-day operations. When companies don’t provide estimations on time due to dependency on key people and excel sheets, they start losing opportunities and their reputation.

The major time is consumed to process orders in time because they need to manually track orders and solve challenges in various departments. This ultimately affects customer experience and repeat orders for not being able to offer proactive order updates.

Many SME companies, over a period, invests in multiple software, both third-party and in-house, which are not integrated, hence managing each software separately becomes time-consuming and expensive. This requires extra people to manage data from multiple departments in various systems leading to more chances of human errors.

In both the cases, printers’ businesses don’t have any structured process to centrally collect data which helps them to generate reports in real-time.

How this is affecting your print business –

1. High human dependency, cost of production, and errors.
2. The stress of following up with the production team and customers to deliver orders on time.
3. Instead of focusing on growth, the team is busy solving day-to-day challenges
4. No Central Customer and Order Data management
5. Poor customer experience impacts referrals, which is a major source of business for print companies

A Self-Test to find out if your print company is ready for growth

Let us take a small test if your company has a very high dependency on you for running the business and operations –

1. Are you answering customers or following up with production?
2. Do you have real-time updates on order delivery?
3. Are your Customers complaining about delayed responses?
4. Are your departments blaming each other for delays and errors?
5. You see a lot of new opportunities but don’t get time to work on them
6. Key people left and took some of your accounts

How to set up processes that reduce up to 75% of your involvement in day-to-day operations?

One needs to keep reflecting on where your focus and energy are used. Are you busy solving challenges or dealing with unhappy customers and teams or are you focusing on growth and what it takes to grow?

Four factors that can help you focus on strengthening fundamentals and helping you work on the business are –

1. Learn to Delegate
2. Defining the key challenges and solve them
3. Automate processes
4. Change Management

Step 1 – Decide to Change – Learn to Delegate

We first think, and then we act. Over a period, we have developed many empowering and disempowering beliefs. It is important to understand what we believe about delegations, as that helps us move from daily operations to building an organization.

Do you believe in any of these –

1. No one can understand my business better than me
2. I know what my customers want
3. I spend more time explaining the activity to the team, and it is better I do it myself

If the answer to the above beliefs is yes, then you are limiting yourself from delegating. This is where the majority of print companies have hit a wall as they cannot transition from being owner driven to building leadership and giving responsibilities.

It is about deciding to change and understanding that change will be challenging initially. But imagine if you can set up a team that can work independently and you have all the time in the world to focus on new opportunities.

But, What if you are unable to transform? Or you are stuck? There is NO shortcut. You will need to trust yourself and your team that they are capable and, given the opportunity, will learn to manage everything on their own.

Once you have decided, the next step would be to define the process and implement a software solution that helps your teams to be accountable and consistently follow the process. A system that helps you to monitor all the processes and helps you identify any loopholes or challenges even if you are not involved in day-to-day activities. A system that gives you control over your business and lets you focus on growth.

Step 2 – Defining the Key challenges & processes

Before identifying the order management software, it is very important to understand the 20:80 ratio. Twenty percent of problems are affecting your 80% productivity and growth. You will need to work closely with every department to understand what challenges they face in delivering results. What takes major time? What do they think could help them grow productivity? And how could they reduce costs?

You need to research for new technologies to stay proactive and understand your competitors. You have to stay more market-oriented, in touch with customers, get their feedback, and understand how their needs are changing. Most companies are in reactive mode, they only change when they start losing customers, and so they struggle most of the time.

You must build an environment and routines that empowers you and your team to work together on this, every member takes responsibility and ownership. This is not a one-man job but can only happen when an entire team decides to change and focus on growth.

Step 3 – Chose right Order Management Solution to Automate & manage reports

Choosing the right technology is a process and not a chance. If you have followed step 2 in detail, it will help you to define your key processes and critical aspects that are important for your business and customers. Print Order Management can help to set up a foundation for 10X growth and stay on top of the game. For that, you will need to invest in the right IT consultants who understand your order-to-delivery processes, print products, identify the right problems and offer best practices to automate.

The key to choosing the right technology is that ask the Software company to provide you with a personalized demo of web2print and order management software as per your needs. If required, offer Proof of concepts, customer references, and a sample store for your team and customers to test, as this is the stage where 90% of companies fail, as they focus on features and do not involve key people.

The most critical thing is to understand how those features will solve your challenges and how easy it will be for your team and customers to use. How will it take care of your unique needs right now and even in the future? How open the system is to integrate 3rd party tools or customize? How does the support work?

Step 4 – Implementation

Investing in software is easy; the challenge is transitioning from existing to new processes. Most companies fail when key decision-makers do not explain how it will help the team to grow. In addition, the most important key people are not involved during the implementation phase.

The challenge is people do not like the change and accountability. In a manual process, it is easy to blame it on someone else. However, once you have implemented online order management, you can track every process with date and time, even if you are not in the office.

Another very important key is to keep the software simple, easy to manage, and not over-engineer and fail to drive ROI, ultimately failing. Companies do this as they try to fit software into their business instead of building new processes as software helps to streamline.

Even during Covid, companies have delivered the highest sales, as OnPrintShop Web2Print and Order management empowered customers to quickly launch new sales channels and covid products.

Conclusion

When you are stuck up, are you blaming your customers or the economy, or instead you are ready to take up the responsibility to work on yourself as a winner?

The takeaway is that you must focus on your growth and take every challenge as an opportunity to learn and evolve stronger. The winners focus on repeat business, building strong customer relationships, and consistently improving processes to deliver better services and products. They believe in empowering beliefs that help them build leadership results.

Henceforth, choose the right technology that helps you centrally manage all your data to stay proactive and ahead of the competition.

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