From fledgling startups to established enterprises, every business strives for growth and success. Setting goals and developing strategies are essential to achieve this, but it is even more crucial to get it right from the start and make sure everything is in place to build your business.
In our latest webinar, Nail the foundations: Consolidate, innovate and expand, Eloise Keating sat down with Brendan Hartmann, general manager of Budgy Smuggler swimwear, Denise McCormack, head of digital and data & tech at Hatched Media and Tom Beaumont, general manager of ONA Coffee to discuss how important it is get the foundations right so the business can grow and expand.
Here are their key takeaways to help your business thrive in a competitive financial landscape.
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Having full visibility over business operations is a priority for Hartmann and has helped build the company that started as ‘an expensive hobby for the founders’ in 2003 into one that now employs 22 people across the globe.
“It used to be at a size where all you had to do was be in the same room and you knew what was going on. Now with staff in different time zones across the world, it has changed a lot and new technology and communication channels have played a big part of that,” he says.
Beaumont says ONA Coffee, which has offices across Australia as well as two coffee farms in South America, has also benefited from technology that streamlines processes and provides transparency across all departments.
“I work remotely and one of the first things I did when I joined the business five years ago was to find some technology that would help me put some systems in and streamline processes to manage across the offices and pull everyone together,” he says.
“It also helps me avoid silo managing. If I start focusing on issues in one department, it’s easy to lose touch with the rest of the business quite easily, especially because I work remotely. So having visibility across all departments helps me be across the activity that’s happening in other departments,” he says.
Denise McCormack, head of digital, data & tech at Hatched Media says fostering an environment that encourages innovation and creativity can help any business grow. To do that, you need to involve every employee in the business.
But McCormack says introducing new digital tools and processes are only effective if people know how to use them correctly and can see how they make sense for the work that they’re doing. It’s also important to allay any fear of change people may have when systems and processes are changing.
“For some of the new initiatives that we’ve rolled out over the last 12 to 18 months, it’s really been around setting a clear vision to everybody in the business. Importantly for us, that’s not done in a boardroom — it’s actually our people who are leading the charge,” McCormack says.
“It sounds simple, but you’ve got to make sure that everybody is singing from the same hymn sheet. monday.com’s proved really successful for us in that respect because we’ve got multiple different business units within our agency and they are all connected,” she says.
“Technology can also help businesses set up in a way that means it can handle any kind of fluctuations in consumer spending or downturns,” says Beaumont. This could include evaluating what can be stopped, started, or continued within the business to enhance productivity.
“We had all the software ready, but the flow of things was still slow — so we changed the setup of the technology to get information faster. We can’t afford to sit down with quarterly reports and discuss strategy, it would be too late for us,” he says.
McCormack says setting out what you can expect to achieve over a certain time period is one way to avoid falling into the trap of adopting the wrong type of technology.
“People sometimes fall down by not having the right approach to experimentation. Creating the framework and the foundations to actually experiment effectively is going to prove invaluable long-term because it ensures that you’re casting a wide net across multiple different platforms and partners.
“Having the right conversations, getting the right level of support has been really helpful for us,” McCormack says.
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