I want to tell you about a client of ours, who was so frustrated one day that she nearly pulled her hair off! She manages a very profitable yet a small translation company and one day, she realised she was chasing endless admin chores and never getting to promote the company. Off she went to the most natural space, and googled with the following keywords: 1. Small business software. 2. small business automation. 3. Small business solutions…you get the drift of the search.
Basically, she was looking for a SMALL business software, but almost everything that showed in Google ads was big names…Oracle, IBM, SAP, ERP,Orbit. She kept looking and looking and got so confused she had to stop the search and go home.
When you are a small business owner or a freelancer, you naturally want something quick to fix your problems now. You have no time to waste on learning how to start working with SAP or what ERP is all about. Or, getting to terms with complicated words such as “integrated software collaboration tools”.
Do the big names add to your business the value you actually need? Do you pay a lot more just so you get a very complicated system, you don’t even use half of what it has to offer?
I can tell you from my experience, even huge companies and I mean huge, are sometimes better off with a simple, easy to use application. In one of the places I used to work , we had a new change manager, he decided that the entire firm should start using one of the big softwares out there and that this will revolutionise the entire business, cut costs, reduce headcount and will basically work wonders. We were all asked via email to embark on a rigorous training and pass an exam…
Up to that day, we worked on a very efficient, brand-less software that did a GREAT job, and I mean great. Never failed us, didn’t need weeks of training, it was very intuitive to use. We had no problems with it whatsoever. But yet, being on someone payroll you have to oblige.
We went on training via web-casts, training in classes, training in PDF formats, training from experienced colleagues. Training seemed to have landed upon our heads from just about everyone! We wasted so much time training on this software, that we could have finished our day to day work for the entire month. Now, we indeed started working on it, we had to work through endless functions and endless errors! it seems too complicated to use and very heavy compared with what we actually needed to do. We slowly reverted to using the good old software without anyone knowing just because we wanted to finish our work in time and go home!
Now, you know what happens with big organisation once the money has already been spent? They have to justify the expense somehow, no one will admit to the mistake. This very expensive software was just laying there on our desktops, totally neglected and ignored eventually.
You probably want to know what happened with this organisation. Only a year after I left this company ,It went bankrupted, completely belly-up.
Bottom line is all that glitters is not gold.
