Avoid reinventing the wheel

Starting a company is a fascinating journey. You are learning about so many things in a compressed period of time. You are learning to deal with suppliers, landlords, employees, accountants, your bank, customers, technology vendors and so on.

The more you understand these matters the better you get at making decisions and the better you’ll be in the future, right?

Yes, it does feel good to know how things work (I am often guilty of this) – but in business your imperative to start making money as soon as possible.

Let me put this in simple terms – this is not like building your dream home where you carefully choose each fitting and tile, etc.  A business is a money sucking black hole which will devour your savings in a very short period of time.

Here are your rules:

1. If you don’t need to do it, then don’t. 
2. If you need to do it then buy an existing solution where it makes sense.

 To explain.

Your time is limited – and yes I know you are working 70 hour weeks, but that can only last for so long, and trust me, administration will soon be riding you like demented jockey. So, ditch the fabulous social media campaign that everyone has convinced you is the solution to all your marketing problems. It will require an hour or so every day and when you see how few people actually read it despair will drive you to drink.

Put it this way, try and count on one hand how many times you have been influenced to buy something by a social media campaign (I can’t even count to one so my hand remains a clenched fist) – and then ask why your customers would suddenly come flocking to your business like bees to nectar just because you Twitter ™ .

Processes are important, but you need to remember that they enable your business – they aren’t your actual business. You buy and sell, you pay suppliers, employees, etc. What you need is a system to keep track of that. When you start out stick with paper and spreadsheets. Keep invoices and other records in folders for each month, or week, whatever works for you.  Hold off on the paperless office just yet.

When you buy a system to run your business look at a reasonably credible commercially available option. The key here is that as a small business owner you should bow to the inevitable and use the configuration that comes with the software rather than tailor it significantly. Never has more money been wasted in business than in the configuration of great software to match the processes of big companies and government.

The large software providers have put together hundreds if not many thousands of person years experience in the industry you are in into their product. They have simplified, tweaked and improved their software over time to provide the core business functions and processes.

For example, SAP is releasing a single web based core configuration for small to medium sized businesses (software as a service (SAAS)). I am sure you will be able to choose your business type or categories, and then just go with that.

Accounting packages are easy to use and allow you to just select business type. If you learned to do things a different way, then I am sure you can learn again.

You can reduce your need for IT support by using Google Apps or Microsoft 365 to be your online hosted mail server and normal server.

There are all sorts of specialist SAAS providers for customer relationship management (CRM), recruitment, point of sales, inventory tracking, web stores, credit card payment, automatic document compilation, supply chain management, etc.

You can buy HR manuals, quality manuals, capital investment systems, stock control manuals, etc. Yes, they cost money, and no, you don’t need them all from the beginning, but you also don’t need to reinvent the wheel to develop them.  Some larger organisations offer subscriptions to annual updates to their manuals and procedures to keep up with legislative changes and best practice.

Likewise, if you buy an existing business with all the right approvals and registrations you can save yourself a lot of time, effort and cost, plus you can start booking revenues the day you take over.

While you might save some costs by developing things yourself, you are likely to be costing yourself in lost revenues by delaying and bodging your solutions.

Your job is to make money as soon as possible – keep that in focus.