Why getting systems right can make a business a S&P 500 company

Adam Shapiro, CEO, AutoCollect discusses why getting systems right can make a business a S&P 500 company.

Anyone who’s ever been involved in a startup knows that things can be pretty chaotic. Late nights, big personalities, and occasional technology meltdowns are so common that it’s easy to imagine that’s just the way things are meant to be. 

After all, today’s big tech giants all went through the same thing. Apple, Google, Facebook, all of them went through periods where they were flying by the seat of their pants. Apple, being the prototype for most contemporary startups, provides perhaps the best example. Working out of his father’s garage, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak spent hours building every single Apple I by hand to deliver the first 50 units to the hobby enthusiasts who’d ordered it. 

But to move from a backyard startup to a global player, each of these tech giants had to get serious about putting systems in place. 

And, if you want to take your business from SME to S&P 500 competitor, you should follow suit. 

The Adult in the Room 

For many startups, getting the right systems in place has meant hiring someone to be the “adult in the room”. 

Perhaps the most notable example of this is Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin hiring Eric Schmidt in 2001. A Silicon Valley veteran, Schmidt knew what it took to grow a company and make it profitable. 

Without him, Page and Brin’s brilliant product may well have been consigned to the annals of history rather than an integral part of our everyday lives. 

Over time, your company may find itself in a situation where it needs a similar kind of adult in the room. You may, for instance, find that you have lots of disconnected, disparate systems in place, often making it very inefficient to complete business functions or difficult for employees to get things done.

You may also find that company processes span multiple systems and keeping the systems in sync is often a challenge, resulting in duplicated efforts and mismatched data. 

Equally, if you find that employees involved in the same process are quite often in different departments and not in direct contact with each other, causing miscommunication, unnecessary delays, and poor business performance, it’s time to take action. 

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The adult (or adults) in the room has to be someone willing to take control of this chaos and put proper systems in place. 

If you’re the business owner and you’re not in a position to hire someone else, that person may well have to be you. 

Putting systems in place 

Even if that doesn’t come naturally, there are a few basic actions you can take to get started:

• Get together the process owners or process experts in your business - anyone on your team who can input on the way a system is working (or not working)

• Map out the high-level steps involved in each routine you do

• Identify which software or manual efforts are used to do the routines

• Identify what gets done or captured at different points and in different processes

• Look for crossover – is the same thing being done in different places?

• Identify inconsistent approaches - is the same thing being done in different ways?

• Start realizing which methods can be standardized, what data should be shared between processes, or what efforts can be removed entirely.

Put these steps in place and you’ll find that your business will run more efficiently and your staff will be more productive and in-sync. 

Poised for growth 

With the right systems in place, not only will less time be wasted on unnecessary efforts, everyone in the business will have more time to focus on the steps needed to ensure growth. 

Thankfully, an array of affordable technologies make implementing these systems simpler than ever. As a result, SMEs are able to compete on a more even footing with even the biggest companies. And, because they’re generally leaner, the best run ones can overtake legacy players and do so quickly. 

For more information on business topics in the United States, please take a look at the latest edition of Business Chief USA.

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