As a small business, it’s easy to think you simply don’t have access to the kind of technology which is helping the bigger players get ahead. There are a wealth of expensive and expansive options out there which larger companies spend their inevitably larger budgets on, and that can be seen as a superpower.
Yet, in focusing on what they can’t access, small businesses are overlooking their own superpowers: the ability to understand their own company at a micro and a macro level, and the massive advantage of quick decision making. Larger businesses are often weighed down by complicated and cumbersome governance machines, which simply aren’t in place within smaller operations, giving them a unique mix of agility and speed when it comes to making changes.
While smaller businesses may be priced out of the market when it comes to the platforms seen as more ‘high end’, it’s very likely they will have access to either Office 365 or Google Workspace. Both of these are incredible technology suites that the majority of businesses – of any size – barely scratch the surface of when it comes to exploiting.
To get the most out of any technology project, there are some pitfalls to avoid and some approaches that help ensure you spend your time, effort and money in the right places.
Human centric focus
Possibly the oldest mistake in the book is to start with the technology and then look for the problem it solves in your business. Every business is unique – so start with your people and your unique understanding of your business. Look at the bottlenecks, the time sinks, the repetition and the duplication within and across teams and processes.
Digging into the detail of what your teams are trying to achieve and then stepping back to see how that supports or hinders your strategic objectives is a super power large organisations pay millions in consultancy fees to achieve.
When you have this understanding, you can then look at where changes to technology, process and systems can help support your people to deliver your objectives.
By designing your systems around the people within your business rather than focusing on a tech-centred solution, you can make their jobs easier, quicker, more accurate, or a combination of all three.
Define success before you start
With a world of possibilities and problems to solve, you need to make sure you’re able to prioritise the ones that will give you the best outcomes. You also need to make sure that you’re able to learn from successes and failures.
It’s so obvious that it seems absurd to state it, but the real key though to avoiding costly mistakes is to define the metrics and the measures you will use to declare success and failure before you start and stick with them.
When you’re picking those metrics and targets it’s very easy to focus on things that are easy to measure rather than what’s important to measure. Productivity is a classic example of something that can be hard to measure effectively, but easy to find lots of meaningless measurements for like time logged in, emails sent or mouse movements.
Investing time and energy to decide how to genuinely and meaningfully measure productivity for each team will pay far bigger dividends than taking a shortcut and declaring a single metric across all teams.
Whatever you choose, try to make sure the metrics are aligned to the performance of your organisation, add genuine value, and that people are reminded of them regularly.
Definition of the problem is at least 90% of the solution
If you invest most of your time building a solid understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, and that’s based on your people and your commercial objectives, the technology you need will largely reveal itself as part of the process.
Walk the problem through from as many perspectives as you reasonably can and invite opportunities to pull the problem and any solution apart.
If you’ve defined your metrics well and aligned them to your organisational objectives, it’s very likely you’ll be focusing on applying technology to solve relevant problems.
And now you’re on solid ground to start exploring possibilities and the solutions. It might be you can change the structure of a team, or add some very simple process or technology you already have access to, and see a big improvement. Starting with something simple like automation tools embedded into emails can deliver enormous value very quickly with little upfront investment, enabling you to then decide whether you need to add in anything else.
Beware of ‘speedy boarding’ projects
Organisations both large and small can fall into the trap of applying technology they can measure the impact of, rather than something which brings actual value. It’s like speedy boarding on a plane, you’re paying a premium to sit down a couple of minutes before everyone else, but you still have to wait for everyone else to board before the plane takes off. You might have optimised the journey to your seat, but your overall journey took the same time as everyone else’s.
When you’re looking at the bottlenecks in your organisation, and where you will commit time, resources and people to solving them, you really need to apply the speedy boarding test. Is this genuinely improving some meaningful metric, or are you confusing motion with progress?
Your ability to understand the micro and the macro of your organisation and processes goes a long way to helping you avoid this trap.
Beware the AI trap
It’s very tempting to see the current generations of AI tools as almost magical multi-purpose tools that can tap into some rich seam of undiscovered gold in your organisation.
The question you need to become almost allergic to is ‘how can we make better use of AI in our business?’ It’s a solution looking for a problem, and will take your time, energy and money while likely delivering nothing of value as a result.
Let’s be very clear: there are almost certainly parts of your business that could be helped by some AI technologies but you’ll only find them, and only get meaningful benefit from them, if you understand the what and the why of the problems you’re facing first.
And remember, most of the value these tools can give you is at the micro level: processing awkward documents, finding patterns in purchasing behaviours, automating error prone manual work. Using ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to help you define competitive advantage is not a competitive advantage because your competitors can do exactly the same thing.
Ultimately, as with all decisions in business and life, beginning with the problem and understanding the people, decisions and activities, and then designing the solution from there will stand you in the best stead to utilising technology in a way which works for your business, no matter the size and scale. As a small business owner, your superpowers of understanding and agility can absolutely help you level the playing field by making the right people-centric decisions in a timely manner.