Collaboration, Optimization and Disruption

This week a few of us attended Autotask Community Live in Miami.  For those of you who don't know what Autotask is, Autotask is the Professional Service Automation platform that we (and other Managed Service Providers) use to run our business.  We were also fortunate enough to have a keynote speech by former President Clinton and listen to forward thinking presentations.

Before you stop reading this blog because you don't care about Autotask or are not in the IT service business, I would like to share three nuggets from this conference that may be useful to those who want to maximize their business value.

Collaborate with a Peer Group:

One of the high value items for our team is that we were invited to a peer business strategy forum to meet with other IT providers in other regions.  Spending time with business owners who are in the same industry, but not direct competitors allows us to share issues and solutions to business problems. Creating the best service, hiring the best employees and creating a great company can be amplified if you surround yourself with others who have solved that problem. Collaboration with other great and smart people will always yield better results than doing it by yourself, so look for opportunities to accelerate your business and career by interacting with peers.

Optimize Your Business Processes:

When I hear words like Unification in technology descriptions, I think it sounds like just a marketing term, however there is perhaps no better word to describe what Autotask has done with their products.   For the uninitiated, Autotask Products allows a Professional Service Organization to manage their customer from initial contact through billing. It gives a single interface to a CRM, projects, tickets, time entry, contracts, device monitoring, management and backup and provides communication and reporting with their customers. Over the last 9 years, we have spent considerable time making this all work and doing this well allows us to deliver better support, faster and give our customers better visibility to the value we bring to them. Imagine if your IT department could automatically fix issues and be so efficient that they spent a significant amount of their time helping you move forward instead of fighting fires.

Move Towards Disruption:

We spent some time listening to Peter Sheahan, CEO of the Karrikins Group who gave an excellent presentation on disruption. In the IT field, technology changes so quickly that you have to keep learning all the time or you will get left behind.  This is also true of any business.  Anyone who has used Uber, Netflix, or Amazon knows what happened to the company or industry that they disrupted. Although those are obvious choices, every business has an opportunity to do things radically different and in some cases disrupt itself to move to the next level.  It takes guts, planning, prioritization and constantly asking yourself how you can do things better than you do now. Equally important is to differentiate yourself from your competitors and always try to do something that provides better value to your customers.

Most of us spend our days "working in the business" and yet the biggest advances come when you "work on your business".  An intense few days at Autotask ACL allowed us to absorb, refocus and think deeply about our business and we will work hard to keep that momentum. This is a small sample of topics that I will continue to share as we continue on our journey.