Change is Hard and Change is Easy

Recently I heard a comment, life is about managing our expectations. 

We have awoken from a slumber. For some of us, we are inspired, refreshed, we remember our passion of when or why we started our own business. We are open to listening to our advisor. They’ve changed. They along with the various emails from software providers keep telling us there is a new way of processing transactions, irrespective of costs or the sale of our goods.

Those setting up business in the current environment, are asking new questions. Exciting questions for advisors. What’s the cost-effective way to process creditors? How to I keep administration to a minimum? How do I get away with actually not doing paperwork? My best discussion has been, with this software it takes 6 clicks, but creates this problem, an alternative software is 8 clicks but raises my invoices.

A phrase I have heard used in the last six months; we must get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s really hard to hear. Where once we may have used one or two software applications, we are now using many many more. We are learning to not be afraid of technology.

Applications such as Hubdoc, Ezzybills, Receiptbank, ApprovalMax help us to automate our creditors process. No more time lost to manually entering information. We can create a creditor batch payment from Xero and MYOB to create an electronic file to so don’t have to re-enter the same information into our bank.

What, did I hear you say you aren’t using any of these applications? May I ask why? Do you enjoy admin, or entering inconsequential but highly important information repetitively? Not really, oh you’ve got a really helpful member of your team who hates change, and you’d rather not rock the boat. Umm so remind me how they are solving problems for you. No, it’s not that, they’re doing exactly what you told to do them, oh you trained them to not be inquiring or innovative, cause when you were starting out you just needed someone in which you could have trust and loyalty. And now you’ve realised it’s not serving you.

It is ok to let you team know you value them, and that you’d like them to explore with your advisor what the options are for processing creditors, payments through to the bank using software (artificial intelligence). Once you’ve given them ownership to make this happen, you can then focus on reviewing your customer engagement experience. 

So, is the softly softly approach cost effective? Let us think about what effective means for us. What is the outcome we are looking for? A quicker, more time effective processing of our creditors and bank payments, a less stressed administrator, but more importantly an administrator who doesn’t see this change as a threat to their job. The business case says using AI technology pays for itself within two to three months. That’s right, we’re valuing our team, we’re empowering them, we might spend a little more with the advisor, but the biggest win we get is that our administrator feels like they are valued. That’s right, we are creating change, and we’re helping our team be comfortable with that change. 

If you aren’t looking at your business in terms of the number of clicks, you may not be getting the most out of your team. They look to you for the inspiration. At the moment many of our team are feeling stressed, for no other reason than they realise the enormity of the change before us. Empowering your team by giving them personal responsibility (with your influence) for a project may give them a distraction they can feel proud of when they reflect in six month’s time.

I challenge you to look at your business in terms of the clicks you expect from your team.