Written By: Jonathan Parnaby
Director / Owner of The Transformation Office
Foreword
Website
So where do you start in scaling up your business? Well every business is unique and different so first I mapped my capabilities and identified the various Zoho applications that helped underpin them such as managing my website, managing my finances, tracking my leads and opportunities, you get the picture.
My first stepping stone was to move away from my website builder which was hosted with my domain provider and rebuild my website. I mean it did the job but it was a bit on the basic side and every form on there collected information manually to emails. My main source of leads tends to be through my network and referrals so it felt low risk and a great place to start. The main driver however was the cost of that product equated to 65% of the entire Zoho One subscription.
As a reminder Zoho One gives you access to 40+ apps of which 1 of them is the website builder called Zoho Sites. So with a little time investment my website now runs off Zoho Sites and I now have an integrated Zoho Bookings system which means prospective clients can schedule my time with me, I have forms which integrate leads directly into Zoho CRM (more on this later) and much more. Already I feel like I've unlocked real tangible value in my business just from this first step, now the next step as it's nearly a new business year is to focus on finances.
Finances
The next stepping stone on my scale up journey for The Transformation Office after launching the new website was to look at all things accounting and finance. Now being transparent, my business isn't hugely complex and it doesn't have 1000's of transactions per month, so I've been running on good old Excel and Word for the majority of my accounting needs and its been fine, very manual, but fine.
Because I'm now part of the Zoho family I've fully embraced Zoho Books to help scale the back bone of the business, as it's the beginning of my financial year there's no better and cleaner time to jump over. It's a real positive feeling feeling like the business is levelling up and using a proper accounting platform. This may seem strange as most companies will no doubt be running on QuickBooks, Xero etc but it's the first time I've jumped into that formal world.
Right from the off entering the opening balances, linking my bank accounts, linking transactions and tracking money in and out is straightforward. As I work with clients on various projects being able to log those hours, classify the work and bill from projects within Books just saves me having more and more spreadsheets that I have to maintain. I think in total I've now superseded the following sheets / documents and adding automation in the mix as well:
• Expenses Tracking
• Income Tracking
• Cash Flow Forecast
• Dividend Tracking
• Client Timesheet Tracking
• Client Account Statements
• Invoicing Documents
So just like my website overhaul, I now have all my business finances easily accessible in my pocket thanks to Zoho's mobile apps, i've also a connected Zoho Expense to help manage trips and capture receipts on the road so I can keep everything reconciled and updated without the pain of month end.
Now next time it's time to turn my attention to Sales & CRM related capabilities.
Leads, Opportunities & Sales
Continuing my scale up story for my business The Transformation Office todays focus is all about an important part of the business "Leads, Opportunities & Sales". For those who have been following over the past few weeks, i'm keen to share my own journey in scaling up my company through the enablement of Zoho. I really want to showcase that you're never "too small" to have access to enabling technology and get off those spreadsheets which are running your finances, sales or any other core processes. Through these posts I've already started to engage conversations with other small businesses about how they can start transforming themselves and this is why I've created services to help support small / medium businesses provide an operating system for all aspects of their company. If you think there is value to be unlocked i'd be more than happy to have a chat - https://zurl.co/9I2I
Now, lets chat about sales...In any organisation tracking sales related information is key in business, all those conversations, all those prospects and reminding yourself to help chase up on leads / companies. Now typically in my world my business comes either direct or via recruitment agencies and it's key to keep track of those individuals from both areas.
I already had a free account with Hubspot CRM but through my line of work I'm already extremely familiar with Zoho's cornerstone app Zoho CRM because of some project implementations in the past. I'm not going to wax lyrical about CRM, like any system its great when well maintained and really helps organise the front end of your business and Zoho CRM is full of features and easy to use. I already have my sales and finance worlds connected meaning I don't have to dual entry customers or vendors...time saver.
The real game changer here for me was that I now have some additional apps all helping with the sales funnel so I wanted to highlight a couple here:
Zoho Bookings - Already integrated within my website I can now link my calendars for availability and prospects can schedule calls / meetings directly with me discussing a variety of services. In fact the link above at the beginning of the post is using this platform.
Zoho SalesIQ - This one is an interesting one, Sales IQ allows you to visually see potential leads on your website, where they are visiting and how they are engaging with you. There is a native live chat so you can engage those visitors or vice versa and you can set-up low code chat bots to help capture and route potential sales into your CRM. I honestly never thought I would set-up a chat bot but again through Zoho One it's all there to be used, don't get me wrong the idea is to help route people to speak to humans as efficiently as possible, but it's a help.
I really feel my sales pipeline has levelled up in the past few weeks and i'm much more in the know which means I can be more proactive rather than reactive. Next time is how to wrangle and organise the world of contracts.
Contract Management
Right, back to talking about scale-ups and my journey with Zoho and my own business The Transformation Office
One important area of my own business once the sales and consultancy work has been defined and scoped with clients, is to ensure the contractual elements are all in place, stored and associated properly. Before I typically worked on my templates in Word and would PDF and send them around and usually managing signatures in a manual way by signing, re-scanning and re-issuing and usually storing them in my Office 365 folders.
Now being open I don't tend to run lots and lots of contracts at a time so this process isn't a real time sink for me but as the business grows it has the potential to be a thorn. Again having access to Zoho One I have these capabilities enabled by two very useful apps, Zoho Contracts and Zoho Sign
Zoho Contracts allows me to create my contract templates such as MSA (Master Services Agreements & Statement of Works and build them within the app very easily and it also helps me track the process of where the contract is from draft, issued, negotiation and active. Best of all it associates to Zoho CRM meaning my contracts are centrally managed and linked / visible where I need them. As you can appreciate Zoho Sign allows for virtual signing much like other contract signing applications but it's all pretty seamlessly integrated with each other.
It's the little things which can help small businesses just run a little easier and if you want to learn more about my scale-up journey and think your business can benefit then reach out for a chat.
Knowledge Management
We're starting to see the end of my scale up journey for The Transformation Office and you know what, I've enjoyed writing these posts because it's kept me accountable to actually spend time working on my business, improving it and levelling it up where I can.
So as I've mentioned I've been using Zoho to move my business away from unstructured data in Excel and into some proper tools provided by the Zoho Suite. As a consultant working in transformation you tend to collect a lot of templates and examples of your work on every project that you've been on. Whether it's a requirements catalogue for a CRM implementation or a change impact log for a large scale process re-design, these artefacts are like gold dust as they help accelerate you on future engagements rather than starting from scratch again. Now currently these documents and sheets were stored within my One Drive in unique order (organised chaos) and it worked to a point.
Now when I explored Zoho One one tool particularly caught my eye was Zoho Learn which is an online repository of knowledge, learning and spaces for you and your business to consume. I've used Zoho Learn to create spaces for the various disciplines such as Business Analysis, Project Management, Change Management and then organised all of my knowledge that i've acquired over the years into articles and also areas to download specific templates as well. Don't get me wrong I had to invest some time organising my knowledge and uploading everything into it's new home but now organised this is so much easier for me to navigate and find information whether searching or going through the library manually.
Zoho Learn also as the capability to create courses online as well for your teams to consume and test against. For me as my business is just me this isn't used but as I grow I can see this being useful to help onboard future consultants to my frameworks and ways of working, even onboarding packs as well, although a lot of those features also are supported within Zoho People which is their HRIS platform which will be useful for businesses with larger teams.
Also i'm supporting an upcoming Business Analyst (more on that later) and Zoho Learn has allowed me to create external facing portals to access specific articles / areas "Business Analysis" which I've found very useful rather as it's a secure and controlled area for him to consume the information.
Next time I want to lift the lid off Project Management and an app which has saved me at least over £140 per year...
Project Management
This post is focused on a capability I use a lot for my clients which is Project Management. As always if any of these posts resonate with small businesses working on Excel and other unstructured data applications feel free to reach out for a chat https://zurl.co/Yqgc
Earlier in my career I've managed a lot of projects and typically I used Microsoft Project to power them. This is mainly because the companies I worked with as a permanent employee would have this as an application that I can use, so why not right. It's a great tool in fairness and linking up to Portfolio Management it can run and serve a lot of PMO's out there, but since I started my business I didn't want to pay around £24 per month (£288 per year) just on this toolset, it was quite overkill for what I needed to use so this is why I quickly adopted SmartSheets for a fraction of that price (£140 per year). This gave me the capability quickly when I became independent consultant to spin up project plans and add value to my clients.
Now going back to the beginning of this series one of the main reasons for adopting Zoho in my business was that their Zoho One license gives me access to 40+ applications under one license and this includes Zoho Projects thus saving another annual license from my bottom line.
Now, I've been fortunate to use Zoho Projects with one of my clients for nearly 2 years now as it's a toolset they use to run their company through hourly billing, so I'm already quite versed with it so adopting this was a no brainer for my business. Now a little more about Zoho Projects...
Just like the other PM tools out there you can create projects, a series of tasks and subtasks all arranged in the way that you want to manage your projects and you can easily link dependencies, show the critical path and progress. The information can be displayed in a Gantt chart format or even in a Kanban view if you prefer to manage tasks and work in that way. If you have teams of people you can assign work and responsibility to those people with reminders and the ability for them to log their time on the items (possibly for billing other clients). For the agile practitioners out there Zoho does offer Zoho Sprints but I've not dabbled in that application yet, but I have the option as it's part of my suite.
Speaking about project time sheeting, whilst this is a capability in Zoho Books it is more advanced and with the out of the box integration it means you can manage a large number of complex projects, account for the time and billing on each of them and easily push that into your finance system to process invoices, reimbursed expenses etc.
It's great to have a powerful PM tool at the heart of The Transformation Office and next week i'll finish this series around scale-ups with a marketing focus.
Event Management
Now as The Transformation Office we don't really run events or conferences, however, there has been a need for me personally to look into event management. Not strictly related to my work and my organisation I'm a host of a podcast called Whose Turn Is It Anyway? which is a podcast all about my hobby of tabletop board gaming which I'm passionate about. Through podcasting and being involved in the tabletop industry there has been a need to set-up gaming events / weekends and we've had our very first opportunity.
Enter Zoho Backstage which is an all encompassing application which allows you to create an event and tailor it to your needs. You can:
- Detail the number of days from when the event starts to when it can finish
- Breakdown the detailed agenda and even build multiple tracks that people can choose between. E.g. Track 1 can be about Sales & Marketing and Track 2 can be about Finance and Billing with keynote speakers focusing on each areas
- You can manage your speakers at your event and help promote them for your potential audience to learn more
- If you have sponsors you can attract those who can contribute to the event financially and again promote them
- Manage various different ticket classes and link this up to a payment gateway like Stripe or Paypal to take payments
Marketing
It's my final post in the series of scaling up my business The Transformation Office and I wanted to finish off with the topic of Marketing.
Now marketing wise my business truly operates on a word of mouth / referral basis and networking is a key component of this, especially through this platform. I'm not in the business of creating lots of email marketing campaigns because it doesn't quite suit what my business is however I know in other businesses it's absolutely vital.
So when I was exploring Zoho I was intrigued to see what marketing tools could support me in the future if I did decide to branch out more in those areas. One of the key ones is Zoho Social which is what I'm using to post this on LinkedIn, if you have many social media accounts like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram etc and are finding it a bit of a chore to post, copy and paste and in the end you just don't do it, then this app totally helps with that. You can schedule your posts across the right channels meaning you write it once and distribute in many places and manage all of the engagement / interactions in one place.
If you do have more of a marketing arm in your business then depending on your needs there's Zoho Campaigns for your email marketing and automation so not only does it send your templated and personalised email / SMS communications it can handle your complex marketing automations as well. If you need more range and a full end to end marketing solution where you have goals, tracking return on investments in your campaigns and also managing more channels than email / SMS then Zoho Marketing Automation is the next step up from Campaigns.
If you would like to know more about my journey in scaling up my business and you want to see how Zoho One can scale up your organisation then feel free to contact us for a no obligation conversation. We'd be happy to talk more about our experiences