Smart Tech: Your Best Source of Operational Support

Whether you’re the type of person who naturally likes to plan ahead or not, leading a professional services business will make you appreciate the value of a solid plan. Great leadership skills alone aren’t enough to conquer day-to-day operations and align them with your business goals in the long term. Unfortunately, neither are high-quality service and excellent customer relationships.

To move in a profitable direction, you need to keep operations top of mind — especially if you aim to scale.

Let’s take a look at:

• How a lack of operational focus could set your client-based business back
• Why you should turn to smart technology to tighten your operations
• Some components of operations that tech can help support

What Happens Without Sound Operational Processes

In client-based industries, it’s common and tempting to be all about client interactions and deliverables. Strongly believing in what you’re providing is necessary, but putting all of your proverbial eggs in the passion basket can make you blind to the realities of running a profitable business.

Sure, a heavy focus on serving clients can help your business develop a great reputation, but it can come at a high cost.

Without sound operational processes, you could:

• Leak profits by working with the wrong type of client 
• Hold onto too many non-billable team members
• Lose countless hours to manual processes
• Miss out on revenue-building opportunities
• Stay in the dark about actual KPI performance
• Fail to hit targets and progress towards long-term goals

Smart Tech as a Partner in Professional Services

If you suspect your business might be weak in some of the above areas, it’s probably time to make streamlined operations more of a priority. Depending on the size and stage of your business, you’ll probably need some support. 

Colleagues can give you some, but expanding your team or piling on responsibilities won’t help if you don’t have collective access to reliable data and workflow expertise. 

This is why many businesses turn to process automation using a technology platform. It opens up the shortest path to operational efficiency with the lowest risk. You don’t have to pay a tech platform a salary, provide benefits or worry about how many hours it’s working. Instead, you control how much you use it and what it does for you.

Because of this adaptability and profit potential, smart technology can be one of your most valuable partners in leveling up operations. It’s a ubiquitous employee, working on your behalf 24/7 if you want it to.

Elements of Business Operations That Benefit From Tech

Even if you know your business is ready for an operational makeover, choosing a tech stack can feel like one of the most complicated things you’ll ever do as a leader. With the vast array of business cloud technology, you could feel overwhelmed trying to mesh various platform functions to fulfill your needs.

We’re here to help you overcome your fears about adopting new tech. We’ll start by breaking the decision into digestible elements.

Below, we cover some operations fundamentals that tech can help you improve or troubleshoot and what to look for in your search for a non-human business partner. 

How tech can help

Features you need

Features that are nice to have

Workflows

• Plug time leaks
• Maximize team efficiency

• Automated time tracking
• Automated task assignments and scheduling

• Useful integrations and app-building potential via an open API

Staffing

• Perfect and systemize onboarding and staff training
• Accurately record employee utilization

• Centralized, user-friendly interface
• Billable vs. non-billable time and actual vs. estimated time reports

• Platform training resources for new hires

Communication

• Minimize time spent on unnecessary internal and external communication
• Provide visibility into all client communication

• An up-to-date feed of all client emails and actions taken on a given account
• Easily accessible client portal

• Customizable email templates for sending quotes and invoices

Reporting

• Display reliable data about project budgets and time, client profitability and other operations essentials

• Dashboard-style reports that are easy to export
• Project progress reports with projected revenue

• Accurate sales funnel data and work planning tools

Culture

• Improve organization-wide transparency
• Increase the average duration of employment

• Collaborative tools for client work
• Clear task assignments and project alerts

• Time-tracking reports that can be used for merit raises or employee recognition

These represent only some of the vast ways specific features of smart tech can improve operations.

Your Next Move: Streamline With One Platform 

Instead of looking for each of the above features in separate tech platforms, you could save your team time — and your business money — by going with one that unifies them all. Accelo doesn’t just have the features you need; it also has the ones you and your operations-focused colleagues want.

Schedule a demo to discover the potential to streamline your business operations with an end-to-end client work management platform.