Many small business owners start with using QuickBooks to manage their business. Fortunately QuickBooks remains relatively easy to use and inexpensive. A lot of bookkeepers and accountants seem comfortable with it. Unfortunately, you can quickly outgrow QuickBooks. And this will happen when your company needs to integrate their financial system. But you find over time you have installed too many different systems. And they don’t talk to each other.
When You Outgrow QuickBooks
On this week’s Small Business Radio Show, I interview Evan Goldberg. Goldberg serves as the co-founder and EVP of Oracle NetSuite. He says using multiple disparate systems happens to most companies. It happens when leaders personally grow beyond the phase of knowing every business process. At the same time, these systems become more required in order to maximize your growth.
Evan explains that when a company first starts, they can use a “vanilla software but as they grow, they develop more complex needs that are associated with the particular vertical they are in.” The small business begins utilizing different systems for finance, sales, marketing, manufacturing and distribution. Evan recounts that you know you have problem when “you have five different customer lists and you don’t know which one is right!” He started NetSuite because in his own businesses, he was running QuickBooks and Yahoo! stores. Evan explains that at that time in his company, none of the information was consistent or reliability.
How Your Customers Want to See Themselves
Consumers expect to see themselves as one customer not multiple ones as they may appear in different systems in your business. Evan reminds us that “from the moment they come on your website, buy something or serve their needs on an ongoing basis…keeping track of every touch-point they have had with you is the way to give the best customer service.”
With the cloud, systems are now available that can run your entire small business that were formerly only available to large companies. They provide a dashboard that gives visibility and control across all processes in your organization.
Evan also talks about how to grow rapidly without sacrificing culture. He explains the best way to maintain culture is to “communicate, communicate, communicate” and try to reach as many employees as possible. His advice for the next fast-growing company that is going to change the business world is to “stay true to your vision…even if you have to zig and zag.”
Listen to the entire interview on the Small Business Radio Show.
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