I often find myself swimming upstream against a seemingly endless philosophical current. One that I probably helped create. It’s inevitable in the lifecycle of a well-designed app. See, I’m usually brought in very early on in an organization’s life cycle. Given a clean slate. Having operated several small businesses for my own account before, I know – heck, I preach – how precious cash is to preserve. That’s a core value in my proposition to my clientele. I ‘get’ tech. But I also ‘get’ business ownership. I know what it takes to get a new business off the ground and to cruising altitude. And spending efficiency coupled with big ideas is what transforms a small business into a going concern.

When we are awarded an engagement, it’s because our client ‘gets’ that value proposition and trusts we can deliver some revolutionary business process support and impressive branding while being thrifty with expenses. More often than not a cornerstone of our proposition is constructing a force-multiplier through custom apps perfectly tailored to energize the founders’ big ideas and get them out there. All experience entrepreneurs know that nothing – nothing – drains cash like people costs. And apps that streamline tasks, reducing multi-step processes to a single gesture where possible saves tremendously on that precious human capital.

Now, there is no question you need people to handle customer inquiries, make pitches, process orders, and put a face on the business. The ‘automation calculus’ comes into play when determining how many people with what skillsets are required to pull all the big ideas off. Almost as important, what are the scaling characteristics of that workforce equation? Can the apps support logical growth and expansion? The right app can be a huge lever to tame both equations. Leverage is almost always a cornerstone of our pitch. How can we help you do more with fewer?

Big Ideas are Fresh Ideas

Almost always the impetus for starting a business sprouts from big, new ideas. Most often the founders have deep experience in the industry they will cater to, but are perhaps frustrated with the way their prior employer tackled the business. They have fresh ideas for business processes and techniques that diverge from those they have experienced to that point.

The Brinovation team partners with clients across diverse industries to resolve mission-critical strategic issues by envisioning, constructing and deploying custom full-stack technology solutions. Our clients recognize that proper investment in technology tailored to their unique vision is the critical keystone permitting them to stand out from competitors and offer unique, branded solutions to their constituent counterparties.

Oftentimes the drive to achieve maximum staff efficiency is perceived as a threat. I think this impulse is misplaced. At least among high-energy, high-creativity workers. Which are the characteristics in your staff you want, right? Automating busy work frees staff to focus on quality issues. That enhances the value of the enterprise. A rising tide floats all boats.

1. BUSINESS INERTIA – “It’s working fine, why change?” This is avoidance exemplified. Not only does the business ignore or minimize the risk associated with aging equipment, it completely fails to appreciate the economical and operational benefits presented by newer technology. Such attitudes are what led up to the Y2K ‘crisis’.
2. VALUE/COST INSENSITIVITY (or hypersensitivity) – Most often seen as “Cadillac ambitions but a Volkswagen budget”, this can also appear in the opposite form, i.e. fear of the required cost keeps the business from looking for or considering worthwhile innovations.
3. RISK INSENSITIVITY – Failure to appreciate the increasing risks associated with aging technology. Those risks might be physical, such as hardware failures, or they might be operational, such as slow performance or lacking newer but necessary features.
4. OBSOLESCENSE INSENSITIVITY – Failure to comprehend the ever increasing rate of technology changes, or conversely, the increasing rate of obsolescence of the IT infrastructure. This is actually a failure or reluctance to embrace or keep pace with new capabilities, security measures, or technologies. In many ways, this is another form of Business Inertia. The Y2K panic.
5. CAPABILITIES OVERESTIMATION – In more simple terms, this is an inflated sense of the available in-house IT capabilities. Increasing professional or casual familiarity with technology leads many otherwise very capable professionals to falsely believe that they (or sometimes an employee or relative) can handle their IT requirements on their own. They may grasp the basics, but the limit of their innovation is probably mastering the ‘Advanced’ tab on a canned software package. And the result, ultimately, is very likely to be basic, as well. The thing is that the aggressive pursuit of innovation – which means developing custom apps or, at least, heavily augmenting canned systems with custom extensions, probably offers the most powerful competitive lever for any SMB.

A few types of SMB’s embrace all of these rationalizations, but even the most enlightened embrace some of them. It goes with the territory, a part of being a small or medium-size business. There’s never enough cash for everything, so where do I cut corners? Sadly (albeit illogically), for one or more of the above reasons IT expense seems to be the go-to choice for SMB’s. Enterprise-level companies don’t commonly suffer from this lack of appreciation for their IT infrastructure – and it just may be that that is one of the key reasons they became Enterprise-level companies.

Is it wise to use a part-time pilot to fly the company plane?

A characteristic of automated infrastructure is that when it is working well, it is almost invisible. It is exceptionally easy to take for granted, or at least devalue, it infrastructure. The better the effort, the less attention they require. Conversely, the better the effort, the more critical the infrastructure is to the business.

We’ve seen many a client fall victim to this delusion. It does not happen in an instant, but is rather usually a slow erosion of the level of commitment the powers that be to the infrastructure. The more things continue to work fine, the more likely attention to the asset is to be eclipsed by other more fragile problems and issues. Not only does the business begin to ignore or minimize the risk associated with owning and operating infrastructure, it also completely forgets appreciate the economic and operational benefits that formed the decision to implement it in the first place.

In extreme cases, the business eventually fires all any internal staff dedicated to supporting the well-oiled machine, ceases all enhancement activity to one of their primary business drivers and attempts to backfill the effort with some combination of part-time, on-call resources. We call this the ‘part-time pilot’ scenario. Modern aircraft are so sophisticated that it is conceivable that you can fly hours and hours cross-country with a trained professional pilot only needing to take control for takeoff and landing. In an extreme business case, a business would be incented to employ the pilot just for the few minutes it takes to land and takeoff. How wise is that? See where I’m going with this? I’ve actually encountered antagonists who fervently rationalize such a tack with “…we still maintain three 9s of reliability.”. Really? So what happens when the fourth 9 kicks in? Because it will.

And when it does, your part-time pilot is going to get woken up from his/her nap straight into a dire situation. He/she is unaware of the steps that got him/her to into this mess. He/she was busy dreaming. Only to be thrown into a desperate situation.

Is this any way to run a business?