April Connections video: What attics and businesses have in common

Spring has sprung here in the Pacific Northwest — and right on time, I’m getting the itch to declutter.

For me, decluttering and spring cleaning in general feel expansive. This activity opens the door to new opportunities and even new growth.

Where I get hung up, though, is when the spring-cleaning task in front of me is unusually large — like tackling the years of accumulated “stuff” in my attic.

Interestingly, I see this same challenge showing up for our clients, too, when it comes time to look at implementing a new enterprise solution or upgrading an outdated one.

In today’s 5-minute video, I talk about the most important part of any big project — whether it’s cleaning your attic or choosing an ERP:

Hi there, Erin Koss, CEO at Syte Consulting Group.  Spring is sprung here in the Pacific Northwest and I don’t know about you, but when that happens, it motivates and energizes me to start to looking for ways to make room for new growth and new opportunities. I think about that as I look at the the last couple of months and companies will call us, as they usually do more often in the first couple of months of the year. These are people looking at the new year and telling us that they need new solutions, need new tools, things that will help them truly grow and scale their business after many, many, many years of accumulation of old technology and solutions and add ons and workarounds. These are the things that sort of continue to kind of bog down an organization over time and slows down the ability to growth

When they get to about this point in the year, not only has spring sprung outside, but we find organizations getting overwhelmed and saying to themselves where do I start? How do I approach looking at making improvements to these types of solutions that I’ve had for a long, long time. So is this both things have happened, right? Personally and professionally for me, I’ve been looking at kind of what the analogy was that showed up for me recently.

I realize that what I tell companies when they call us and say we need a new enterprise solution, my first comment is always, I hear you and are you ready? These are really big projects. They’re meant to transform organizations and there are a lot of heavy lifting. There’s a process that you want to go through to be successful when you’re taking these projects on. They always start with assessing where you’re at as a business in terms of your people, your processes and, of course, your solutions in technology.

If you do it all at once and it can just be so overwhelming. And so the question I get asked a lot is like, where do I start? I thought about that feeling I get in the spring this time of year when I want to de-clutter in a personal way. I think about my attic. We’ve lived in our house now for going on twenty five years and I can tell you that our attic is full of lots of stuff.

I thought about I never go in there to de-clutter much because it’s really overwhelming. As I went to do that here this last weekend, I went and realized that the one thing I could do, the one step I could take to just get momentum forward and progress was to take one box, just one box, open it up, figure out what to do with it and move forward. And that’s exactly what I did.

In order to start to unravel some of that and in order to think about what you might do to maybe choose something new and bring something new in-house, you’ve got to really look at where you’re at in these ways. What I tell folks is take one process like purchase to payables and unravel it a little bit, get a look under the hood, see where you’re at one process. And what’s interesting that I find is when we do this with clients, the thing we find is just getting through one process opens up so many doors

It’s so enlightening, not only about what’s going on with that one process, manual workarounds, lots of spreadsheets, maybe more people than you need planned on to wear multiple hats and not efficient use of people’s time. And then, oh, by the way, what’s the system doing or not doing on your behalf? That it could be, but, you know, choosing a system before you really understand what’s going on with, say, purchase to payables and the people in the process just doesn’t make sense.

I’ll tell you- it felt great. I actually got through about four boxes and it felt great to de-clutter and to feel like I was making room for the next opportunity to grow and scale. Well, for me in the attic, hopefully it’s not too much growing and scaling.  Or my my you know, that can get expensive for sure. But, on the system side and then the business side, I think about it the same way where, you know, you need to look at where you’re at from a process perspective before you can ever entertain the idea of a new enterprise solution or technology

You want to figure out where you’re at with people and process. And so what I tend to tell folks is, you know, if you look at the nine core processes that most companies grapple with, they have to have to perform every day to be successful, something like purchase to payables or order to cash. Let’s take some simple ones. The reality of it is, is they get bogged down as well and cumbersome as well in all the ways we’ve talked about.

And in order to start to unravel some of that, in order to think about what you might do to maybe choose something new and and bring something new in-house, you’ve got to really look at where you’re at in these ways. And so what I tell folks is take one process like purchase to payables and unravel it a little bit, get a look under the hood, see where you’re at one process. And what’s interesting the thing interesting thing that I find is when we do this with clients, the thing we find is just getting through one process opens up so many doors.

It’s basically set up to fail unless you look at these things under the hood first. We recommend take a look at one process. The act of doing that not only will open your eyes to that one process, but it’ll give you really great forward momentum into looking at the other processes. And so as you do that, you will start to realize, hey, there’s some patterns here, there’s some things going on in all of our processes that are just not working for us anymore.

When you start to see how you might provide solutions or gather the information that you will need to ultimately select the right solution for you in the future, my encouragement to you is think about taking on new transformational change initiatives in your business. You need to think about taking them on at home one box at a time, one process at a time. And frankly, when I was doing the attic, I called my husband for help as well.

If we can help you in any way in your journey to kind of what we call crawl, walk, run to a new enterprise solution, we would love to be a partner with you. Let us know and we would love to help. Take care.