49: Cure your Growing Pains with Sam Gupta

20
Jun

Sam Gupta is the CEO and Principal Consultant at ElevatIQ, a digital transformation consulting firm focusing on business process automation, customer experience, continuous improvement, and marketing automation. We talk about human capital management, the art of incremental implementation, and why having the right people is crucial for digital transformations.

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Cure your Growing Pains with Sam Gupta

Our guest is Sam Gupta, who is the CEO of ElevatIQ Inc., which provides business system procurement and implementation assistance for systems such as ERP, HCM, CRM, and BI, more of these acronyms later. Sam is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. So welcome to the show, Sam.

Thank you so much for having me, Steve. I am super excited to be here.

Yeah, I’m pumped also. I’m very curious about all these acronyms and stuff. So let’s start with your entrepreneurial journey, which is not that long because you’re still quite young. How did this becoming entrepreneur and building ElevatIQ come about?

I mean, one thing that I would like to mention is in our family, we don’t necessarily age. So if you look at my father, we look fairly alike right now, even though he is 84. So you can imagine that we don’t really age. Now, you know, my journey, I grew up in a very manufacturing distribution centric family. So business actually runs in my blood. Okay, I then I, after working for my family for roughly eight to 10 years, starting at the age of five-ish, six-ish, and then I went for engineering. Okay, so spent roughly four years.

I never wanted to be an engineer as such, but I always wanted to go into business. So then I started doing a lot of Fortune 500 consulting, did some side gigs, but they were never came to fruition when it comes to creating a real business. And I was always into creating a real business that can pay my family, that can pay for my employees. And if I don’t have that serious business, that doesn’t really excite me. So that’s why I spent a lot of time learning a lot more about the enterprise technology, enterprise software space. So did a lot of consulting in the Fortune 500 world for roughly 10, 12 years.

And then started exploring a little bit more of the entrepreneurship world. So last eight to 10 years have been really in the startup space. Initially, I would say four to five years. I spent a lot of time working on a lot of startups that didn’t necessarily go anywhere. And the reason for that is because I was changing some of the ideas. I was not necessarily expert at from the sales perspective, from the business perspective, from marketing perspective, failed miserably and then finally decided, you know, was what my core really is in the manufacturing distribution ERP business systems.

That’s why I started focusing on elevate IQ a little bit more. Last five years we have just focused on this. The focus is really on the SMB space in the business system procurement implementation. If anybody needs any sort of help with their business architecture, enterprise architecture, we maintain multi-system capabilities. Our goal is to help manufacturers, retailers, any sort of product companies that might require our help.

Okay, all right. So we’re diving into this in a minute, but before we go there, I’d like to ask you, because this is the theme of our podcast is management blueprints, business frameworks that people use to build their businesses. So have you used any such framework, or if not, examples could be the E-Myth, EOS, Scaling Up, Great Game of Business, Four Disciplines of Execution, or are there business books that were really instrumental in helping your thinking evolve on how to build a business.

So I am going to say and I don’t know if this book is really a management blueprint book but the way the book is structured it has had a lot of impact on my life. The way I think about creating the management blueprint, again, not the standard management blueprint book, but overall the way I think about how the business should be structured overall from the organization perspective, how these T and L slices should be created.

So the book name I am going to mention is going to be predictable revenue. It’s done by Aaron Ross. He is the guy who was extremely instrumental in growing Salesforce. Okay, initially Salesforce wasn’t as big. I think he was the guy who was really instrumental in getting that predictable cadence from the revenue perspective, but also from the business perspective. Once you have revenue, things become slightly easier overall, just because again, I’m not saying that the operational aspect is going to be any easier.

You know, I have seen that, you know, if you don’t have the management operational and financial aspect figured out, the revenue could fire back as well. So that book has had a lot of impact overall in terms of how to make everything predictable, how to make everything scalable. So what we have done for ourselves in terms of management blueprint, and again, I am not the professional coach, Steve, you are. So you can tell me which framework this is.

But what we have done here is we have divided each of the organization in its slice. So we have the micro P&L for each of the businesses. They are fairly autonomous. We don’t necessarily have any sort of management layer. The only management layer that we have is really our systems, okay? And that’s what the reason why we had done it this way. Number one, some of the business units that we have, for example, we do a lot of enterprise recruiting for our customers. So what we are doing really in that business is we are simply finding talent and we are helping bridge the talent gap. As you know, in any of the professional services business, the recruiting is going to be core part of the business.

The reason for that is because we all thrive because of talent. So now in that business, that business has a lot of, you know, it has a lot of moving parts. And if we did not have systems, right now we would require probably eight people to manage that team. But we don’t necessarily have any sort of management layer. So the way the management blueprint works for this specific business unit, and that is used as the role model across the business units. This is the philosophy that we live with. And this is the sort of management blueprint framework that we operate by as an organization. That’s it.

In any professional services business, recruiting is a core part because we all thrive because of talent. Click To Tweet

So let me just take a step back for me to understand. So predictable revenue, so this is the kind of the blueprint that you have used.

Yeah.

You basically don’t have a management layer. You have autonomous business units. Yeah. And they have micro P&L, so everybody is running their own P&L. So what kind of business units do you have and what does a micro P&L mean?

So from the business units perspective, and again, what I am trying to say here is when you say everybody has their own P&L, I am not suggesting that every employee has its P&L. Every employee is structured in a business unit. So we have three or four business units. So the businesses that we are involved in, number one, we do a lot of selection engagements. Now, selection is a completely different business from the implementation.

So we have selection, we have upgrade, we have the ERP implementation, and then finally we have the enterprise tech recruiting. So these are four different business units, and all of these business units are completely different from each other, the way their management blueprint is, the way they operate overall from the from the management and leadership perspective. Now, what I am trying to say is these business units have micro P&L, but they don’t necessarily have any sort of leaders.

The only leader that we have is going to be your system. So the system is the governing framework to be able to drive to be able to drive these business units. So when anybody joins, the only thing they we do from the leadership and mentorship perspective is number one, we are going to set the expectation that they should be self-sustained. They should be autonomous in terms of the way they work. They are going to get roughly half a day or one day training overall in terms of getting used to of the culture, the way the systems work in the organization, and then they are going to get the KPIs. Typically, we don’t necessarily monitor anybody on a daily basis.

We have our daily standups for each of the business units. And on a daily basis, everybody is reporting their work. We work on a trust basis. Everybody has their own KPIs that they need to head. For example, if you talk about slightly more operational business in case of recruiting, they have their daily number of submissions that they need to do, the number of interviews that they need to get, the number of placements that they need to make from the recruiting perspective.

Now, when you think about the selection or implementation business, the KPIs are going to be slightly different just because now you are looking at how many how many stories have you implemented in the implementation. So the KPIs may be different, but the governing framework that we have is same. OK, so they all are going to get cleaning for roughly half a day or a day. And after that, they are going to be part of the system.

They need to, they need to make sure that they are logging all of their activities inside the system anytime I need to go and I need to see where the red flags are in my company. The only thing I need to do is, hey, I have my P and L at the, at the micro level, right? And so I need to see, okay, where the red flags are, which are the ones that actually require my attention at this point of time. So out of four, if I try to spend all of my time in those four, I will not be able to sleep Steve.

Okay. So just to slow down. So you have three or four business model business units. Yeah. And each business unit has its key performance indicators, KPIs, which you are monitoring. Yeah. And they have their projects and they know that they are competent, they are running their project, you’re just watching the dashboard, so they’re hitting their KPIs. As long as they do that, you sleep sound because the system is working and you can onboard further people who also have their own KPIs and run their projects.

And you just intervene when there’s a gap, when someone is off their KPIs, then you intervene. And in daily stand-ups, you basically, you know, you figure out if anyone has any issues, you figure out what happened, what’s gonna happen next day, so everyone knows what’s going on on the team, and then they can focus on the work for the rest of the day.

Exactly, you got it.

Okay, all right, so very good. And predictable revenue. Do you know the author of that book?

Aaron Ross is the guy from Salesforce. So he has written the book more from the revenue perspective. So what he does is he creates these segments of the emails or the email campaigns and using those email campaigns. What he is trying to do is he is trying to bring the number of leads that they need in terms of growing that revenue. Again, it has nothing to do with the leadership or the operational aspect of the business. But what that provides us is OK.

So if I need to hit a specific number from the revenue perspective or from the P&L perspective, what I can do is I can set those KPIs in my PML and then I can figure out, okay, if I need to get this much revenue, okay, these are the people that I need, okay, how much training would I need? Again, training is scalable because we are trying to create more of the assets inside the organization. So, once the training is created, the only thing I really need to do is I need to spend, let’s say, four hours or one day and one of the differentiator with us is, you know, the training is really provided by me for each of the employees.

I don’t want anybody else to provide the training because there is going to be a bit of consolation there. So every employee that joins the company, I want to make sure I am personally training them. Okay, that is going to be a shock for a lot of people that you know, how come you are coaching a new web developer, but I want to do it, but then we assign a mentor as well. Along with my training, we assign a mentor. That mentor is going to be there with this person for roughly a month.

And until they get used to have the culture, they get used to have the standups, they get used to have how the performance is measured. We promote the collaboration inside the team. So everybody should be on Slack. Everybody should be helping each other. We have our Slack channels. For example, let’s say if anybody needs the technical help in the organization, we are going to have a designated Slack channel that, okay, you have the help desk, now everybody should be helping out.

The more you help, your KPIs that we have for your performance are going to be aligned towards the collaboration, towards the leadership, to the people who are going to be becoming the real leaders of the organization are going to be the ones who are really becoming the champion for the culture who are really enabling these people for their success when they join the organization. And one of the things that we do very different in this organization is going to be we are completely transparent.

Transparency is a core value in our organization. Whether it's positive or negative feedback or even letting someone go, open discussions based on data create a culture of accountability and improvement. Click To Tweet

Whether we are talking about positive feedback, whether we are talking about negative feedback, whether we are talking about firing somebody, okay? It has to be an open discussion that we are letting go somebody because of number one, number two, and number three. And nobody really disputes that because we have data in front of us, okay? And typically the person who’s getting fired, they also admit that, you know what? I failed, I’m sorry. So it’s a very interesting framework.

So, and basically what you’re saying is that people are coming to the organization, you train them and then they are working and they are hitting the KPIs. And if they are one of the higher performers, then they elevate to having leadership and mentorship responsibilities with their own KPIs.

And basically it’s a self-selecting mechanism, people progress up in the organization and, and be part of the manager formal management structure as I understand but basically people become mentors and leaders and it’s still a flat, flat structure so I don’t want to spend more time on this it’s very fascinating. I want to get a little bit deeper into what you do. So, you mentioned a lot of. I mentioned a lot of acronyms, you know, ERP, most people probably know, Enterprise Resource Planning, and CRM, Customer Relationship Management, but there’s also HCM and BI. So what do these mean?

So there are, I mean, these are just four. There are going to be at least 100 different acronyms when you talk about the enterprise technology. The easiest way to understand this would be, ERP is sort of your poor man’s solution, OK? That does everything. It may not be doing every function as well. So if you look at an enterprise, you are going to have roughly 300 to 600 to 900 different processes. And when we think of processes, these are going to be your cross-functional collaboration of the process.

For example, one of the examples is going to be is order to cash. When you accept the order from your customer, then you take, you know, if you are talking about manufacturing retail distribution organization, you need to ship it, you need to you need to pick back and then you need to send it to customer. Then you can send the invoice and you need to build them. Now, if you are talking about more of the professional services business, then you are going to have some sort of project.

The project is going to go for roughly six to nine months. And finally, you are going to build them. So these are the examples of the cross-functional process that is going to be enabled by these business systems. Now, if you want to be on a budget, OK, ERP systems can get you up and running to a certain extent, but then you would require some sort of specialized systems for a specific function. For example, let’s say if you are growing, let’s say that you are a recruiting organization. If you are a recruiting organization, then your HCM, which is going to be your human capital needs are going to be far greater than your inventory or warehouse, or they might not even have inventory.

So human capital management, HCM? Human capital management.

Yes, human capital management is the HCM, but that is designed for the specific function of your HR organization. Just because the default processes of the ERP may not be sufficient. In fact, ERP systems are not designed for covering the boundary processes of your sales, marketing, HR. They are really your financial and operational backbone. So an average enterprise or the company uses roughly three or four or five different software systems depending upon your business model.

Ok, so your HCM is going to be a very specialized system for your HR. Now that is going to be most likely used in conjunction with some sort of accounting system or the ERP system, okay? So sometimes it could be just the HCM system, but then you might be doing your accounting in your QuickBooks just because you don’t require a very sophisticated ERP system to be able to create your financial statements to be able to run your company.

But then you might have other ad systems, for example, CRM system is designed for your sales and marketing organization. Now inside sales and marketing, there might be multiple systems. For example, not each CRM is going to be as specialized in marketing automation. So you might have two systems there, one for marketing automation, one for CRM. So any enterprise that you are going to have, it’s going to have roughly five or six different systems. They need to be talking to each other. If they are not talking to each other, then you are going to be investing in a lot of admin cost. That’s where your bottleneck is going to be when you are creating this management blueprint.

Because if they are not talking, you are going to be investing a lot of time in getting data from one system to the next. Then you are trying to, let’s say, work on somebody’s performance in your organization, you need to have data on your fingertips. If you don’t have that, they will not be happy. They will challenge you. So you need to have this 360 degree view of your organization, whether you talk about employee performance, whether you talk about your customers, whether you talk about your vendor, the more connected your systems are, the better insight you are going to have in your organization overall, and you will be able to scale far faster, grow faster.

A well-integrated tech ecosystem is key to satisfying employees, customers, and vendors, leading to accelerated growth. Click To Tweet

Okay. All right. So what I’m hearing is that in a typical, you’re talking about manufacturing, distribution, e-commerce organizations, there are five or six of these technological systems that you need, and there could be six to 900. Then we go down into the roots or into the details, but maybe five or six major systems, and they need to talk with each other, they need to be completely integrated for you to be able to be efficiently operating.

Now, how does one go about first designing this, this system. And how do you pick those, how do you make sure they are integrated are they coming from different companies or same? And I have a third question is, how do you know that you need one or multiple of these systems? So what is the life cycle when companies start to need these systems and how do you build them out? Is it like you need the five or six at the same time or is it a gradual buildup of the systems?

So I will, a lot of questions there, I will try to cover each one of them. And if I miss anything, obviously, you can ask me that. So yeah, so number one, the comment that you made about the systems being completely integrated, it’s not as binary as either you are going to have completely integrated or you are not going to have. You need to assess whether the integration is going to be a requirement for your specific business process and what are the implications because of that.

Is that going to be a bottleneck in your business process? If that is going to be a bottleneck, then you probably need to integrate just because the manual effort that you have in reconciling data from one system to the next and analyzing is really becoming the bottleneck to your business. If that is the case, then you probably need to integrate. Now, to your question about how do you go about selecting a system? How do you make sure that you I mean, how do you make a decision whether you need just one system or you need five system one thing that you need to understand or anybody who is listening to this episode needs to understand is number one thing you need to understand your own business.

Integration isn't binary; it's about assessing if it's a requirement for your business process. If manual effort and data reconciliation become bottlenecks, integration is the solution. Click To Tweet

You need to understand your own business process. You need to simplify those business processes. Okay. So when you look at any of these startups or the lifestyle businesses that is going to be below 10 million dollars. So typically the nature of these businesses is going to be they are trying to do anything and everything when you are doing manually or when you are working manually or you are working in a lot of disconnected systems, you can pretty much do whatever you want because you don’t necessarily have rules of the game. Ok, you don’t have that process documented.

Once you start documenting the process, then only you are going to realize that how complex your business has become. And sometimes the smaller organizations tend to be far more complex than the bigger organization. Okay, so once you actually start growing, then there is going to be a standardization process that, okay, you know what? Now I am at a $50 million and on a daily basis, my leadership team is probably making 200 decisions they are not able to sleep what can I do to make their life easier okay that’s when you are going to realize that you know what maybe I’m carrying you know for 40,000 products okay and those four out of those 40,000 products only 400 products are really paying our bills you know the other products that I’m carrying they are not necessarily required now you can kill yourself and carry everything, but then you need to analyze.

You need to realize that if you try to do that, then obviously you are going to kill yourself. You are probably going to kill your employees. So the first thing is going to be, OK, how can I standardize my business process? How can I streamline my business process? Then the next thing is going to be once you have that, then only you need to explore the technology. Ok, so the easiest way always is going to be, OK, if you can find one system that can do everything for your business, then you don’t have to worry about this integration because that’s where the complexity is.

Many talk about the technology and technology enablement in the organization. If you pick two pieces of technology and then you are trying to integrate them, it’s never going to be fun. Ok, if you are not an IT organization, if you have never either built or integrated these systems You don’t want to get into that the easiest always is going to be find one system but in most cases what is going to happen is you are going to run short of the options in that specific system because let’s say if you are a staffing organization or you know, you are a very human centric organization, maybe a construction company, which has a lot of different people.

You have union rules, you have, you know, the way your payroll processes are, they are very complex. If that is the case, then you are going to require a specialized system for your HCM processes. Okay, if you are very deep into data analytics, you are carrying some of the digital products. For example, let’s say you could be financial services organization or the insurance organization. If that is the case, then you are probably going to require a very deep, sophisticated business intelligence layer to be able to provide the feedback loop in your business to be able to make that decision. To answer your question, how do you go about selecting the system?

So you need to have deep understanding of your processes. You need to have them documented as possible. If not, then you need to assess, OK, I have my three hundred to six hundred different processes. OK, can I find one system that can do it all? In most cases, you are probably not going to find. OK, then what are you going to do? You are probably going to find try to find two systems. If two are not possible, three, if three are not possible, four. OK, so that’s how you go about it. One of the lessons then that I would like to share with your listeners is take incremental approach always in the digital transformation.

Technology is brutal, it’s cruel, okay? It’s nobody’s friend. So the easier you make for your people, the easier you make for your business, the easier implementation you make from the technology perspective, the more higher success you have of the technology implementation. You are going to hear in the market that, you know, 80 to 90% of the digital transformation initiatives fail. In most cases, the reason why they fail is number one, they have not documented their business processes. They have not really analyzed, how can I send the in-line business? They are trying to put everything as is inside the system.

And then the system is literally dying because it was never designed for that specific purpose, the vendor is simply taking the instructions from your customer and they are simply trying to incorporate everything that they can in that system. So again, to answer your question, how do you go about this whole enterprise architecture? I guess number one is you need to analyze your business. Number two is you need to simplify your business. Number three is you need to standardize your process.

Number four is you need to find the systems that are really designed for your specific industry without any sort of custom development. The more out of the box that you get from the market, the easier it is going to be to be able to implement. If you cannot find that, then the next step is going to be, what can I do to glue these two pieces together or develop on the existing platform. The more out of the box that you get from the market, you are going to have much easier life. I don’t know if I covered all of the questions.

So just for me, just to see if I understand it. So first you analyze your system, then you document it, then you standardize it, and then you select a system that will be able to manage your processes, hopefully one, if it doesn’t work, and then you customize it, and if that’s not enough, then you need multiple systems, and then you integrate them.

So I think the order is flipped a bit, so I am going to make it slightly easier for you. Let’s say if you are constructing your house, what would you do first? If you are developing your house, let’s say in the developed world, most likely you are going to be taking permission from your city or you are going to be working with an engineer or architect. What architect is going to do is, he’s not going to worry about, you know, how your windows is going to look or how your door is going to look.

He is going to design that blueprint on a piece of paper. Okay, that’s exactly what you do in your case when you are doing the business. So when you say the first thing that you do is you are going to analyze your system. The assumption here is going to be either you don’t have any of the existing system. If you’re starting from scratch, then you are simply analyzing your business processes. It has nothing to do with the systems. Okay. If you have your existing system, then obviously you need to analyze those and you need to find out, okay, this is my blueprint on a piece of paper. Where can I fit in the existing pieces? And that’s how most architects work.

If they are remodeling a house what they are going to do they are going to create a new architecture on a piece of paper and they are going to see you know what this existing area is completely fine i can probably reutilize some of the assets from the older house but then i need the newer architecture so the process of building digital system or architecture is no different than building a house is no different than you know building a bridge or whatever project that you can possibly imagine. It’s just that you don’t see how complex it gets in case of digital system, because it’s invisible. But the process is exactly the same. If you don’t document…

So I analyze my processes, I map them.

Yeah.

Then I redesign it so that it becomes an optimal architecture.

Exactly.

I’ve got kind of an organic that came about by me just organically building my business and then okay This is where I am. This is not optimal. So I Redesign it so it becomes optimal and then I look for a system that will handle my process My open process if there’s one system, you can handle it great

Yeah,

If one system can handle but I need to customize that I customize

Yeah,

If that’s not enough then I pick a second system. I integrate them. And if that’s not enough, then I pick more systems.So basically, that’s how it works

That’s the simplest possible explanation I can provide. Obviously, there are going to be a lot of moving pieces and the iteration, but that’s a great simplified way of thinking.

Ok so I understand. So if someone would like to do that, how can you help them?

So if somebody is looking for help They simply need to reach out to me the easiest way to reach me is going to be you know They can contact me on any of the social media Easy to find Sam Gupta as am GUPTA, you know And the company name is elevatIQ, E-L-E-V-A-T IQ and WBS rocks is the podcast. I’m also a podcast host. So WBS.rocks and if you fill out the contact form, they can contact me. And then, you know, I can guide you with the whole process of starting from your system, how to document that. And then finally selecting the pieces. And, you know, it’s not that we are simply going to document on the paper and walk away, we implement it as well. So we are a full service company, and we can help you with your entire digital journey.

And what would you recommend? What is the time for a business when they have to start thinking about essentially digitizing their processes? Is it a size of the revenue size, a certain number of employees? How do I know that I go to the point the tipping point where I had to meet I need to? Invest time and money into doing this because I’m gonna be overwhelmed if I don’t.

So the best way to think about this is create your growth plan how fast you are gonna grow and Where your bottlenecks are going to be in your processes in our case? we implemented before we were incorporated to be honest and the only reason why we did this is because we were a technical company ourselves. So obviously our comfort level is going to be our I. And that’s why we were able to create this management blueprint from day zero, not even day one. Okay, this was our-

But you’re the exception. So let’s talk about someone who is a lay person in terms of systems. They are good at what they do. Maybe they are a manufacturer of widgets or they are an e-commerce company. They sell something through the internet. They don’t know anything about IT. They can use their Microsoft office, but, or Google, but beyond that, they not really an expert. So how do I know I’m one of these entrepreneurs? I have a business. I, you know, I have a couple of million dollars in revenue. How do I know if, if I need to go to you or I can still manage my things manually?

So if you’re looking for a rough ballpark, it’s typically roughly around eight to $10 million. That’s when you are actually going to run into a lot of challenges. That’s when you require integrated processes and the systems, if you don’t have that, you won’t be able to grow after that. It’s going to become chaos, your people are going to leave, it’s just a nightmare. Okay, so there are inflection points in the company’s journeys, and that is going to be roughly around eight to $10 million, then you are gonna have at around $25 million, one could be at $5 million as well, but then after 25, you are gonna hit another inflection point that is going to be roughly $50 million, then 100, then 250, so these are rough ballparks.

At these points, you need to change your people, processes, and technology dramatically. If we don’t do that, you just will not be able to grow. So again, going back to my point about how fast are you growing overall, if you are going to become $50 million in three years, you need to figure out how you are going to have those systems and processes and the operations and finance ready before you hit that growth. Otherwise, the growth is most likely going to fall back in your journey.

The other way that we like to look at is we like to analyze financial statements. So in the financial statement, it actually tells you a story. And the story is what has been your revenue growth and what has been your expenses growth. If your expenses are growing faster than your revenue, most likely you have a problem. Okay, now we need to find out where that problem is in your PNL. You are going to look at key problems.

Now, if you are doing your accounting appropriately, sometimes even the accounting is not done appropriately, so you don’t even know what is happening inside your organization. But if your accounting is done the way it is supposed to be done, then you will find your red flags in the historical data of your P&L. And what you need to do is, OK, where exactly is the expense growing? Is it in the IT department? If it is in the IT department, for example, let’s say you were at, you know, $100,000, $200,000, a million dollars, two million dollars, and it is simply growing, your revenue is not growing. That’s a huge red flag.

Most likely what you are doing is you are doing a lot of admin processes there. You are simply taking data from one system to the next. These guys are simply creating the reports. They are not necessarily adding any sort of value to the business. That could be one example. It could be in the marketing department. It could be in the HR department. It could be in the operations department, shipping, fulfillment. It could be all over the place, right? So basically you are looking at which are the areas that are not in sync with your revenue. And that’s where you are going to have a lot of room for either streamlining your processes or automating those.

Okay. So basically, again, the way I understand this, the complexity kills growth. If your business is becoming too complex, your expenses start to rise faster than your revenue, your margins start dropping. We call this the no man’s land. Every business goes through this, that when you’re a small business, it’s easy to grow. And then you get into this no man’s land where you have to systemize your business and technologize whatever the word is. And you’re gonna lose your profitability at that time or it’s gonna decline.

And then you have to get through that. And then when you systemize and simplify, then you can grow again. And you basically help people through this no man’s land by designing, architecting, picking, integrating the systems. And then they can get to this growth path. And there will be different revenue sizes are having their own challenges. You have to go through this multiple times. You have to keep breaking through the technology ceiling to grow. Okay, did I get this right, Gupta?

I mean, the only thing I would like to say is technology is just one aspect. Technology is just the enabler. The main benefit that you are going to get at each of your inflection point is going to be, do you have the right people? Do they have the simplified processes to be able to understand where they should be spending their energy? And then comes the technology. OK, so technology is probably the last element that you should be worrying about. The first element always is going to be your people and processes. But without technology, obviously, you cannot grow.

Good process technology. Got it, we covered a lot of grounds. So I want to stop where we are because people won’t be able to absorb it. I’m kind of reaching my limits. So definitely this is a big topic. How do you systemize your business and how do you pick the right time when you start picking technology and how do you pick it, integrate it, keep it simple, document processes and keep breaking through the technology ceilings.

So that’s a fascinating topic, if you’d like to get to the listeners, if you’d like to get into this in more depth, then please contact Sam Gupta. He is the expert on this he will guide you through the, you know, which system to pick and how do you get there how do you integrate, how do you go through that journey. He’s also a podcast host. So check out the WBS podcast where you can learn a lot more details about companies going through that journey, right? Sam?

Yeah.

And for those of you who enjoyed this or you found that intriguing, please rate and review us, the Management Blueprint Podcast on Apple Podcasts and it helps the show to get to more listeners. So thank you for doing that. Thanks Sam for coming on the show. Really enjoyed talking to you and stay tuned. There will be a new episode coming out very soon with another exciting entrepreneur like Sam.

Thank you so much Steve for having me. Really enjoyed talking to you and your listeners.

 

 

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