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As part of a session at last year’s Dreamforce, Amit Kulkarni, Co-Founder of Do.com (formerly Manymoon), spoke on the topic of productivity for the small business owner. While acknowledging the emergence of social media as exciting new channels for sales, and service, Kulkarni says that they’ve also created potentially greater demand for a small business team’s time. “Especially as a business owner, you’re working across multiple departments, and so it becomes really important, how you actually manage your time and how you work across all of this in a sane way.”
From his years working with tens of thousands of small businesses, Kulkarni offers up a list of three major factors for improving small business productivity and drive more sales.
Kulkarni makes note of three problems with some of the more analog approaches to organization and productivity which small business owners should watch out for.
1. They’re not social. “Small business owners are often working with contractors or people outside the organization, so if you want to work with an accountant in Florida or an engineer in Southern California, how do you share your information with them? It becomes incredibly difficult. It becomes doubly difficult if you consider that they’re using their own productivity systems as well.”
2. They’re not mobile. “As a small business owner, you are basically on the go all the time. If you work in a large enterprise, it’s a 9-5 job. As a small business owner, when you’re at home, you’re working. When you’re on vacation, you’re working. You really need productivity tools that are mobile that go with you, wherever you are.”
He uses an example of a construction team he worked with. They were about to install doors at a new home only to have the home buyers change their minds on design at the last minute. With mobile, the foreman was able to receive a notification on his phone before unpacking the unwanted doors, saving plenty of time and wasted effort.
3. They add more work than they solve. This is the cardinal sin of productivity. “Some of these tools require a fair amount of management work. Ideally, you really want a tool that will actually automate a lot of your learnings and your processes along the way.” To highlight this fault, he makes mention of a client who, before moving to more social/mobile tools, had hired an employee dedicated solely to managing a large set of whiteboards in their offices.
Kulkarni says it’s essential for small business owners to use the same tools at home that they use on the job. “As a small business owner you’re working all the time. You’re working at 9 AM, 1 PM, 5 PM, at 7 or 8 PM. If someone asks you for a file when you’re at home, the worst thing that can happen is if your file systems are in the office and you have no way of accessing them.”
“A lot of these tools, such as Dropbox, Skype, or task management apps like Do and others, you can access them anywhere. More importantly, all of them have a free component which is critical. As a small business owner, very often when you’re using contract accountants, or contract office admins, or contract insurance brokers that you want to loop in. If you have to pay every single time, it’s just not going to be feasible for your business. Having a free component and a cloud-based component is really important so you don’t have to spend too much time on IT as well.”
“Continuous learning and continuous involvement; that phrase is used a lot with large enterprise customers but it’s actually very applicable to small businesses.”
As an example, Amit refers to a client, the School of Rock, a Chicago-based company which teaches kids how to play music. As the school aims at launching more franchise locations, they’ve learned to reproduce their successes through templates.
“Every single school has a set of tasks that they need to go through. There are IT tasks, financial tasks, there is setting up a merchant account form, getting them a credit card reader or terminal, and so on. There’s a bunch of marketing referral programs that they like to have every franchise owner go through as well.”
“They started with a very rudimentary template of a set of tasks that go into opening up a school and over time, they‘ve improved that template. It’s gotten to the point that that template is solid. They actually know exactly how much time it takes to ship Chromebooks to the franchise owners, turn them on, and get everyone enabled on a Google Apps account. They’ve gotten to the point that next year as a small company, they’re actually planning on opening one school per week with a set of these productivity tools. That’s tremendous.”
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