Owners of professional service businesses often find their company growing rapidly – sometimes without even meaning it to but simply because they deliver a good service their clients have always been looking for. But how to handle a tricky and time-intensive job like new business generation without impacting delivery, particularly when you invoice on billable hours. It can be difficult to balance and smaller practices with a desire to grow can be suddenly struck by overnight fame. With your business growing fast, adding new services, departments and offices, knowing where you are with all that business information can be hard to juggle without the right tech approach.
The Problem: Your Tech Tools No Longer Meet Your Needs
When you first start your company, you get comfortable with the right tools for your current setup. Perhaps you choose tools (like spreadsheets) that you are most experienced in because that’s quicker and more cost-effective at the time and there is a sense of security of having a system and everyone knows how to use them. But as you grow your company, adding new services, departments or even whole offices, it can all start to fall apart. Suddenly, the tools and systems you chose before are no longer meeting your needs. You can end up with too many apps and software that don’t talk to each other, multiple copies of the same information, data going missing, and staff who can’t keep up with what anyone else is doing.
The Consequences: Quality Begins to Suffer
You want and need expansion but many businesses can struggle with it. It can hit where it really hurts. The quality of the services are at risk of suffering because your processes are too time-consuming and you can’t see the stats of what works. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality to scale your business, but it’s a problem that’s all too common. A lack of coordination and communication lead to chaos. You then need to spend all of your time trying to fix things and stay on top of everything, while the delivery of your services suffers.
The Solution: Updated Tech That Fits Like a (Stretchy) Glove
If you are experiencing growing pains it’s likely that your original systems no longer work and you need to find something that does. But when you’re a growing small or medium-sized practice, finding what you need isn’t always so easy. A lot of customisable tools price out smaller businesses, but one-size-fits-all solutions are unlikely to give you what you need because they don’t grow with your business growth. Fortunately, having worked with a lot of professional services companies, Workhorse has the solution. Workhorse designs custom productivity tools are designed around your processes and adapt and develop with your business. By managing everything in one place practices save time and gain transparency and the flexibility of a cloud-based solution, anyone can access what they need, no matter which department or office they’re in.
How Workhorse Helped Accountancy Practice, Roffe Swayne
To find out one way we’ve helped service-orientated businesses, take a look at our case study of accountants, Roffe Swayne. We helped them streamline their systems with a secure, easy-to-use, pipeline tool made just for them. It helped them streamline their systems as they expanded service delivery, giving them a detailed overview of pipeline progress and reporting.