Passion, People, Process: What drives your business?

by Nate Richards on February 03, 2012

Growing your business is challenging. What used to work yesterday to solve what seems to be the same problem all of a sudden doesn’t work today. Understanding what drives your productivity is the most challenging and rewarding part of being a business owner.

At the start, you’re powered by Passion. Your group works all night toward a common goal to get the job done. But you can’t continue to hire people and hold everything together with passion alone. So you move to the People phase. Your people specialize; accounting, sales, marketing, operations, etc. You organize yourselves by making spreadsheets, having meetings and sending emails. But as you grow, your spreadsheets get out of hand, you receive more email than you can track, you don’t have time for any more meetings, yet people still need you. You’ve outgrown People as a driver and need to become Process driven.

I’m currently in the throes of transitioning from People to Process myself. I see it as a sliding scale. We have had great successes but our people, because they are so ingenious, will not produce the same thing twice. I value my people more than anything else in my company, and want to make sure that I have them doing rewarding, analytical, creative work. By creating systems that produce the repeatable, scalable results we need to operate on, I let software do the heavy lifting and allow my brilliant minds to focus on their strengths.

Our clients are usually mid-sized and have these struggles departmentally. As our clients outgrow their old solutions and realize they are no longer effective, our custom software and SharePoint implementations bridge that gap. Where they worked with dozens of spreadsheets and reports built individually and spread cross-departmentally, we make tools that automatically collect, organize and flag that information, allowing our clients’ employees to do what they are best at. Ultimately, smart people do not want to be data processors. They want to get the information they need quickly and use it to make analytical decisions, interface with people, and be creative – all the things they were hired to do in the first place.

Software can empower your workforce, and I believe in it so strongly because I have seen the benefits as a business owner myself.