Success can be measured in many ways. Monetary success, time with family, your career, and maybe your golf score… well, not my golf score. Success in a small or midsize business is not always clearly defined and the path to attain success can be difficult, like swimming upstream in a river with whitewater, rocks, and waterfalls, all points of friction. You might get to where you want to go, but it’s a lot more work than it probably needs to be, not to mention the anxiety.
With quickly changing markets, a tough macroeconomic environment, and extreme advancements in technology, you need to reassess your operations and adopt a mindset that leads to a repeatable, scalable technology and business environment.
So, what is this mystery mindset? Well, we can sum it up in one oft-quoted saying. “If you want to be rich, do what the rich do.” Replace the rich with a sample from the Fortune 100 or 500 list of companies, perhaps represented by the S&P 500 Index, and you have the context for the Port Technology Enterprise Mindset. Do what successful Enterprises do.
There are attributes of enterprise organizations that scale down perfectly for small and mid-size businesses. An Enterprise Mindset encourages you to take advantage of these attributes and operate according to best practice and tried and true methodologies without having to reinvent the wheel…or your business. So where do we start? With a PASS of course, to the next level of success! Process, Architecture, Simple, and Scalable.
Process
Contrary to what you might think, process is not a list of impending doom robbing you of your initiative or flexibility. Process is a framework for reaching a goal consistently, following the steps in a repeatable manner, and being able to manage outliers consistently.
Think of process as the bumpers on a bowling lane. In a growing or changing market, without bumpers, you are more likely to toss the ball in the gutter completely missing your primary objective. In this case, the bumpers are the process and the pins are your objective. With the bumpers, you significantly raise the probability of attaining your primary objective, i.e., hitting more pins or getting a strike! The process should be enough to keep you headed toward your goal but not too much that you can’t adjust to changes in the market or your own business. Remember that a process represents what you do every day to be successful, manage change, and grow!
Architecture
If you have been a part of software engineering for the last 50 years you know that, in general, software architectures scale up and down the business spectrum quite well. If your business is about delivery of a software product or you are using software or the cloud to provide the delivery mechanism for your product then regardless of the size of your business, most software architectures will support the flexibility and growth of your business model. The point here is that whether you have 2 developers or 200 developers, architects from both teams can leverage the power and flexibility of a single architecture, or numerous architectures, to support your business objectives.
Simplicity
OK, I know what you are thinking, your average Fortune 500 enterprise is NOT simple! On the surface it seems that way…lots of moving parts, multiple business units engaged in multiple markets, and enough technology to support a small country. However, if you look a bit closer you will see that these organizations can be decomposed into manageable chunks in both the business and technology areas. By decomposing markets and technology into small, manageable units these organizations dominate their respective industries and can remain flexible to changes in the market.
In your business simple means different things. On the business side, it means focusing on your core market, the thing that you do the best, the product or service that you are passionate about, and the reason you started the business in the first place. Focusing on this core fundamental, and ignoring dysfunction and noise, is the simplest most efficient path to success.
For your technology group and assets, it means adopting the technology to support the business, no more, no less. Be mindful of the tendency to have more technology than is needed to execute your business objectives. Sales, transaction volume, perceived market needs, or the physical size of your organization can lure you into a false sense of “I need more tech” to be successful. Be specific about what you require from technology and that it aligns with your business objectives and fits within the processes that you have adopted. A complex solution is expensive, difficult to maintain, and can run your business into the ground. Simple, appropriate, and scalable will contribute to your success.
Scalable
Scalability is the component that relies on process, architecture, and simplicity and allows your business to act on change. Not react to change but evolve your environment to act on change. This is an important distinction because as a small business you may not have the luxury of do-overs.
Case in Point: Microsoft. It is well known that they rarely hit the nail on the head right out of the box when it comes to market or product endeavors. However, they always right that ship and iterate to the point where they dominate the respective area. Microsoft has the cash and business capital to sustain do-overs and continue to grow the business. Small businesses do not. Your business does not.
You may need to scale because of an increase in sales, transaction volume, or market potential. For the operational side of your business scalability may mean that you adopt a lean or agile sales methodology to scale your business vertically, possibly by product or channel, and horizontally, possibly across markets, regions, or internationally.
For the technology side of your business, chances are you are using cloud-based applications and infrastructure. If so, scalability is managed by your provider via auto-scaling and auto-provisioning features at both system and component levels. If you have on-premise systems, or you are co-locating your systems in a local data center, then you are responsible for managing the scalability of those systems. This can be done vertically by adding more resources to the server such as RAM, Hard Drive space, and CPUs. This can also be done horizontally by adding additional servers and VMs to manage the load based on where your bottleneck is. Regardless of how you manage the scalability of your business and technology, the fact that you are means you can PASS Go and move on to the next level of your business operations.
What to Remember
Implementing lightweight processes, adopting best practice architectures, keeping your organization and systems simple, and being scalable are the embodiment of the Port Technology Enterprise Mindset that small and mid-size businesses, your business, should utilize to be successful and grow their business, hopefully with dramatic results.
Operating your business in an ad-hoc manner will work for a short time. At some point you will hit a plateau and if you want to continue to grow the business you started, you will need to adopt an Enterprise Mindset.
An Enterprise Mindset gives you the ability to focus on your passion, operate your business without dead weight, and stay nimble to take advantage of change and opportunity thus moving you, and your business forward, to success. Contact Port Technology if you want to know how you can get your business on the path to success by utilizing an Enterprise Mindset.