Robbz: This is the business tech. Playbook your source for it, help for your business. Hello, welcome again, episode two already. I'm your host, Rob Zolson.
BJ: And I'm your trusty psychic, William Poet.
Robbz: Nana Nana superhero. I'm the Robin to your Batman sir.
BJ: So hour. As you wish.
Robbz: Well, let's go ahead and fight some it mythological crime. Today we're going to switch up episodes. You got first episode. I'm pressured with the second episode. I wanted to do a topic on line of business software. I'm pretty pumped. Again, if you haven't listened to this podcast before, you don't have to listen in order. Although episode one is right behind us. Give that a listen. Tension of the entire podcast is that we would go through and talk to business owners, managers, sea level executives and try to demystify technology. We don't want to have technology soup and we want to explain it terms in plain English so you can make better business decisions.
BJ: So hopefully, Robbie, I'm going to have to ask you a question.
Robbz: Yes.
BJ: You threw some jargon in there already. Line of business line of business app. What does that even mean?
Robbz: Line of business software? You can use generic software like for instance, everybody's heard of Microsoft Word to write a document. Everybody's heard of Microsoft Excel to do a PowerPoint Everybody uses email. Those are general pieces of software that people use in everyday in business. Line of business software is specific software to your business that probably won't be used in other businesses. For instance, McDonald's is using different softwares to manage all of their cookware orders coming in completely different than an accountant would using different softwares to manage the bookkeeping. Line of business software is probably the bread and butter to your business, the core cog in the machine to keep it going.
BJ: I appreciate you kind of explaining that out a little bit more.
Robbz: So when we're talking about line of business software, we like to give some tools not just to pick it, but understanding how to expand in it, when to move away from certain line of business software and find new ones and just do a deep dive on what to look for. When having the conversation of what should I do with my line of business software, I have a few different examples to go over with them as we go along the way. The first thing we got to go over is what meets your needs. If you're picking out a line of business software or you already have one, you have to ask yourself one, what do I need it to do? I don't care what it has done in the past, what people think it should do. I'm the business executive, so to speak. What in the world, why am I paying money for this? Why are we putting time and effort into this software and what do I expect out of it?
BJ: I completely agree. The biggest thing that has to matter is do you understand your own business process? Do you understand the requirements you're trying to fulfill? And are you able to adapt your processes well enough to fit the software you're potentially interviewing? Can it be customized to work effectively for your business? At the end of the day, the more you know your internal kind of process and procedure, the easier it is to go and pick and set requirements for choosing your ERP or your practice management software. There's tons of jargon in the space around it and lots of different ways to deliver a package effectively.
Robbz: So as a non technical representative, again, we keep putting everything we'll put it in. We'll call it Bob. Bob's the sea level, the business owner, the decision maker. Bob isn't technical. So Bob at the end of the day has to make sure that this line of business software, this purchased product, this maintained database has to put out what he expects for his company. So I like to use the Ford analogy. Right before you made vehicles, then you made a factory to do vehicles faster. And the bottom line was you got a better, more consistent product. You got more of them faster. That was what they were looking for out of their objectives. Software is no different, just different than a factory. If you put data in, what do you expect and what are the more than conveniences? What are you expecting to get out of it versus doing it a manual method?
BJ: Well, I'm kind of thinking through those points. Like you said, you start with a car and then you work your way into a factory. And then as you build out the process and the procedure around building a great Model T as the case might be, as you start mass producing, you actually, in that case are able to build a better vehicle. I know that the more you know your own internal process, the easier it is to switch software and or choose the right one.
Robbz: The wheel has been invented forever ago. Why recreate it? So if you're in a certain line of business, do your homework. We've made cars for hundreds of years now. There's no reason that we need to.
BJ: Years?
Robbz: Yeah. What was the first car was done in 18 something. It wasn't an actual manufactured automobile.
BJ: I'm just giving you a hard time.
Robbz: Oh, for sure. Yeah. We've had cars for a long time, but since the we've had mass manufacturing and now we're into electric vehicles. Times change. Line of business softwares have been done by someone else. So I'm going to pick on another business that's easy for everyone to wrap their head around. As a flower shop, this was one of the first customers that I did at a very young age, is to help with the flower shop in my local area. And to this day I still have a family friend that owns the local flower shop in my hometown and I still am responsible for picking up the phone when they say stuff doesn't work because that's just what you're obligated in when they're at your wedding.
BJ: Understood? For sure, yeah.
Robbz: The flower shop is an easy business model. You purchase cut flowers from wholesalers from the actual greenhouses. They bring them in and you have X amount of days to arrange them in such a manner and provide and deliver them to customers. It's not a terribly complex system, but without technology it isn't done well. So the business owner expects that their software can help maintain ticket orders so it can capture that information, whether it be from a website, whether someone's calling it in and they type in the order, however, but they need to capture the orders. They need to be able to make the orders and then deliver them or get them ready for pickup. It's not that terribly complex of a system, but you can't just use a generic word doc to do this. You expect a system to handle and.
BJ: Package those orders for you in that type of situation. Are you also expecting the flower shop platform or piece of software to capture inventory and manage that as well so you know what you need to buy for future orders?
Robbz: That's a great question. If you're a business owner, do you want to manage everything on a separate piece of paper and then you'll figure out the dead flowers or shrink as they call it in the business, which ones that you have been selling?
BJ: Wouldn't flour business be called wilt rather than shrink?
Robbz: Oh, shrink is just any product. It's the generic term.
BJ: I know I'm messing around.
Robbz: Yeah, if you're in a meat locker and you cut off fat from the poundage that you've purchased that's quote unquote shrink in your business, that's what the everyday semi accountant term is. So if you bought flowers, you didn't use them, they died. Guess what? It's not profit, it's shrink against your business. So yeah, you could have inventory management. You can have orders taken care of. You have to ask yourself, what do you want this line of business software to do for you? In this particular situation, she's most concerned about taking care of orders. She does inventory on her own, which I don't recommend. We're human and we should have software do this stuff for us because I again want to be able to punch out at the end of day and leave. But that's me. I want to be able to have it take care of the transaction. So I don't just have direct deposit into my account. I don't want to have a separate person handling receipts and invoices and more paper trail. I just want it to be my point of sale and more things that the person didn't think about when they're first digitizing the business many years ago is where are those orders going to come from? So people call in with a telephone number, you type it into your computer, there's the order. But how can I ingest better? Maybe something that provides a website where people can order. More importantly, specifically with flower shops, they need the network. So the main juggernaut in the space right now is a product called Teleflora. Teleflora, if you go to like the 100 Flowers Telefloral.com, wherever you're looking for online sites to aggregate flowers orders on, that is the place. So if you order from Teleflora, it will find the closest flower shop to you that's able to do that arrangement. So that's a very common method of a line of business software that people go for.
BJ: And the other big piece about software in my mind is recognizing that you're having to make an imperfect decision with very imperfect information. But if you understand kind of the goal of what you're trying to do with that software, ultimately the flower shop's goal was to sell as many flowers as effectively possible. And using a tool to do that, some of that's having the right shears for cutting or clippers for cutting flowers and making sure they have the right vases and it's also having the right software package allows you to it's a tool much like that same vase or the clippers. And as you said, since you implemented that initial package probably more than ten years ago, a lot of stuff has changed. And so that kind of leads into some of the other thoughts around keeping your software under support, getting the updates from the software vendor. So that way 20 years ago when you were running a flower shop, everything was over the phone.
Robbz: Right?
BJ: And now the only reason I talk to the florist shop is because I placed an order and they wanted to verify that it was me. I don't call them. I look online, I find the flowers that I want, I press order and I might have a preferred local flowers that I'd start with, but even then it's probably going back through Teleflora or 1800 Flowers or something like that. What worked ten or 15 or 20 years ago won't work now. How do you make that progression?
Robbz: Giving Examples so Telefloral is the big conglomerate that connects you to all the different websites, aggregate places to get the orders in. Then there is we call the I like to put mom and pop solution for line of business. I'm only giving two. There's plenty of different flavors of every line of business software, however specific. So I'm only going to use two to compare today. Another one is called Flora Next. Flora Next is an exact competitor to what Telefloral offers. Telefloral again offers the database to put your orders in. It allows printing on tickets. So you can simply take the ticket, rip it off and put it into the floral arrangement and deliver it. It aggregates all of your website so you can have your own store. Then you just go directly to whatever flower shop your name is and order Direct and Flora next. The only thing it does not do is have that big network that Telefloral offers. Less cost, it's a more polished product. It's literally a couple of guys like you and me, BJ, that made this product, seeing how expensive and clunky and slow Telefloral was, and they made a nice hyper polished product with a lower price, top grade support. If they need anything, they have people to jump on the spot and take care of it for them. But they don't have a network. So instead, if you want to order flowers, you have to order Direct to the shop. You call them, you go on their website, you email in an order, and you cannot go through this Telefloral service. And if Telefloral is really desperate to get the order, they'll manually call you and get the order in. Their whole thought process was if you make it so efficient, so easy, the missed sales from the online aggregates would make up for it in the efficiencies that the software would be.
BJ: If you're part of one of the big networks, chances are they're taking a bigger percentage of your overall sales. You're not just paying for the platform, you're not just paying for the software cost, you're paying probably a fairly steep percentage of the overall purchase to the network. So you gain access to those sales, but you're not necessarily yeah, it's one of the things to consider.
Robbz: So let's just use these two as examples. Right? I think these are good enough line of business that we can try to have a discussion on what to look for. So you as a business owner can put yourself in this spot with your own line of business software. But number one, price, what is it going to cost you right up front for the value you're getting? So pricing structures nowadays, especially for what they call these SaaS apps, there's another keyword for soup there. It's a software as a service. You're essentially paying them monthly for the entire service that they're giving you. They maintain it, they're going to host it, they're going to take care of you and you just keep paying that monthly fee. That's how most of these line of business softwares are done. And immediately you're thinking, I just rather purchase it. Well, purchasing, they're going to just renew it. Where that license you purchase only lasts three years, x years. You're not getting the full on support, you're not getting the updates. If you're not paying them on the regular, whether it's quarterly, monthly, it's a portion of your sales that go directly to them. You're not most likely not getting the support and all that you need out of your business solution.
BJ: Right, well, and that's a good point. And you can still buy perpetual software and in some cases it makes a lot of sense because you do as you did, air quotes, own it, but at the same time you're likely required to buy some kind of software assurance or the yearly software maintenance. So that way you can stay up to date.
Robbz: Yeah, they're going to get you either way. So you have to find a price that fits for you.
BJ: Sorry, carry on.
Robbz: No, go ahead. And the other point that I wanted to point out was what type of percentage? So if it's just a monthly fee per user, great. If it's a monthly fee per user plus we're going to take 5% of your sales, 10% 30% of your sales, all of that immediately. Correlates, to what value does this bring to me that you're scraping this much away from my business?
BJ: Oh, absolutely. But again, it goes back to it's understanding the outcome that you're shooting for. And while you may not know all the steps to getting to that outcome, the more you can think about what you would like to do or the processes you're trying to automate, the better off you're going to be. For myself, as an example, we brought on something called an RPA. I know, more alphabet soup, but it's robotic process automation. Effectively, it's a process automation platform that a lot of the enterprise level players have had for ten plus years. But they're extremely complicated and typically very expensive. And so I saw this as an opportunity for us to automate a lot of what we were doing on the regular at our company. But then something I've begun to realize is you can't automate a process if you don't have a process. I've been talking to one of our engineers who's really well versed in that process automation. But if you don't know what you actually want it to do and can walk through a repeatable set of steps, you can't automate it. It's just not even an option.
Robbz: Yeah, so let's paint out that. And for the flower shop, they take a pen, right? They grab a notebook, they write down the order. They have to go in the back and see if they have the flowers. All of this takes time. They come back, they quote the customer, the customer goes for it. They have to call up the delivery guy to make sure the flowers get delivered. You have to go arrange it. How much of this process could the software do for you? Well, it could handle the whole order. It could make sure that you had the flowers on hand because you're doing proper inventory. It could have really saved that entire one order X hours, which is real money. If you're not sitting there doing ROI, an investment strategy on your time, how much time can it save? How many dollars does that mean? Then you really can't associate anything against cost. So for that flower shop, you're looking at a couple of hours saved on a handful of orders.
BJ: And that's exactly it. And they may not realize that's what's happening in the scheme of things when they make that decision to roll with the flower software. But at the same time, that's kind of the outcome. If the outcome goal is I want a smooth running process, I want my customers to be able to order from me online. I would like for it to know that I have these in order display out of order online. If it's not, if we don't have it in stock and we can't deliver it, we don't have slots. Hey, it's Mother's Day. You should have ordered this two weeks ago versus the day before. You probably have a basic vision in your head, but the more you can kind of flesh out what you're looking for and the fact that you kind of tweak your way there, again, it goes back to the more you can think of the outcome you're looking for, the easier it is to choose the software package that you're looking to use.
Robbz: So the next thing that you want to look at for line of business software is integrations. If you have other softwares, great. How does that mesh into the one that you're purchasing? So the one that's most common even for the smallest business is whatever I'm using, does that integrate with simple thing like QuickBooks? Is my accountant going to be able to accept the number reports out of the system? Simple integrations that you may not think is necessary, but if they have, it means every bit of monetary sense that you can make because then you're stopping the human interaction of taking one database, manually entering it to another that you're.
BJ: Going to have to do exactly that's. One of the big reasons why we use kind of like our main ticketing platform is because is it the best one out there? Maybe not. There's a couple that are coming out that are, I think, pretty amazing. But at the end of the day, it's still the 800 pound gorilla of integrations. And anyone that's anyone that builds a tool for our industry is going to start with a tool we use. And so it's kind of like the flower shop. They probably are using QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online, which is a very common accounting package, unless Teleflora or Flora Next happen to have an accounting package baked into them, which they probably don't.
Robbz: Or if I think Flora Next does and Telefloral doesn't, don't quote me on that, but that would be an example of even ask the question, how do you handle this? What does it look like?
BJ: And a lot of that comes down to what can your CPA or accounting person cope with? Just because it has a really robust accounting package doesn't mean it's something that your accountant bookkeeper CPA is going to be trained in. And so now you're having to build an entirely different process. Again, is the accounting part of a module that you don't need and you can have it flow that information into QuickBooks or insert your accounting package of choice in my head. Always talk to your accountant. Sometimes having pieces of software stay in their own lane is pretty important for sure. And then bringing in the best in class part of it.
Robbz: So the keywords you're going to look for when you're talking to some line of business rep or the experts on the other side is you're going to look up for the word native integration. Meaning they already have it all built. All they have to do is a simple how to to connect it and everything's hunky dory. Generally they even go talk to. Let's pretend QuickBooks is the example. They already have a native integration built with QuickBooks, meaning they've talked to QuickBooks, they know it works, they validates it. And anytime that QuickBooks updates, they also know the updates there. So they patch their software so it keeps working. It doesn't break on updates. That's what you're going to look for in integration. If they say we have things called API, application Programming Interface is what that stands for, it's essentially a think about it as you're trying to hook up a trailer on your truck. A native integration would be a ball hitch. Everybody knows that a ball can fit right on. The normal ball hitch can fit right on a certain size. And there's generally three sizes, two inch and inch and three quarters. Everybody's using normal ball hitches. It's very simple to hook up a trailer to your truck without that native integration. That ball hitch, you have an API, meaning probably just a hole on the back of your bumper. And you have to figure out a way to retrofit that trailer while still making sure it stays on. Going down the highway while it's safe. Going down the highway, it doesn't damage your truck or heaven forbid, stop you from even moving down the road. There's a lot of do it yourself pieces. So if you have something that they say, well, we have an API for that, that means they haven't done the work. And if you want to risk it, you have to talk to your It professional to see how they would not use a trailer hitch. Instead retrofit their own tools to build that.
BJ: Absolutely. APIs are amazing and they are really powerful. And if you have somebody that can integrate things via API and a lot of our tools have native integrations via API. So most of those integrations function off. Well, literally everything in the world functions off some form of API. Everything inside of windows. It's literally everything. That being said, if you have to build it yourself, count on having to repair it at some point.
Robbz: Yeah, if you're going to make your own. Just going back to the truck analogy. They just had a hole in the truck and you figured out some way to retrofit your trailer to that truck. Well, when the trailer updates and puts on a new hitch. You're not going to be ready for that. And now you're going to have to re retrofit your truck for the next trailer update. That's the best way I can explain it. There's just more work, more effort, and more ROI to be measured. So if there's native integration, perfect. Trust that and then go on their support. If there isn't and they start talking about APIs and they can do it, know that this is what they're asking. And you need to talk to your It people before moving forward.
BJ: Again, it goes back to It's understanding kind of the outcome that you're looking for. And we're changing out our main line of business app. So it's the heart that runs our business. When you're changing that out, you need to understand, is it going to have to integrate with other vendors? Is it going to need to integrate with clients? Do you need to integrate it with your financial package or accounting package? Do you need to integrate it with your warehouse platform, with your inventory? There's a lot of different pieces that kind of all tie together. And so the more you understand your existing integrations or your existing needs, the better you can scope your requirements and find the package that's going to work right for you.
Robbz: So, for instance, Florinex specific, do they have text messages? If someone's going to order flowers, I'd like to have that text message saying that it was delivered successfully. Well, if that's not native in your program, what can it integrate with? Can it integrate with Trello, which is a text messaging app for business so you can send the customer. The order has been delivered. Thank you again. Please shop with us. Something simple like that. Again, we're just trying to pick on the example given because line of business software is truly as unique as a snowflake. Every different type of business has their own, and there's Baskin Robbins flavors for every business.
BJ: Well, I mean, I didn't know last week until our last podcast that there was a Trash Platform or Trash Trash.
Robbz: Flow, and I have that as a future example that we'll talk about today.
BJ: It totally makes sense. I even thought about there being such a thing. And what you hope by going to an industry specific line of business software for us, we use a PSA professional service automation tool. What you hope by going to a specific line of business, industry specific line of business software is that it's built for you and that they understand the general types of workflows that your company will be needing to do. I helped participate in a big migration for a pet bottle manufacturer. They did an injection molding. I think they had 15 machines in their main warehouse or main manufacturing location and something like north of 15 or 20 more. And there are two others. It was a big transition. They went from a more generic ERP to a more industry specific product called BatchMaster. So it was a front end application running on top of SAP business, one that was aimed at something that was made in a batch, like plastic bottles. A lot of it is just understanding. Are your processes similar to others in your space? If so, running an industry specific tool probably will be helpful because they're already going to know and use your terminology and understand what you're trying to accomplish. Can you build it on top of some of the more generic platforms out there, like maybe salesforce? Absolutely. But it comes down to how much development time do you want to spend versus hopefully having something that's a little more out of the box. Could you make Salesforce work for an accounting office? Yeah, absolutely you could.
Robbz: You could also make a Word doc work for an accounting office. But do you really want to spend the 8 hours per data entry and then just keep a bunch of Word docs floating around for everybody's record? It's not going to be efficient, my guy.
BJ: Exactly.
Robbz: So I'm going to shotgun a few more of these just for the sake of time. Be a little bit faster here. Scalability is the next thing that you want to look at. If right now you're one shop, you're probably one or two people at the flower shop. How is that going to look like when you have eight people, ten people, three locations, how is that going to scale? And he's like, oh, I don't have to worry about that right now. It'll be tomorrow's problem. Well, if you have a database of 5678 years of customers and orders and you're stuck in that solution, moving that solution to someone that can handle three locations, 20 employees is going to cost you so much more because you didn't choose the correct program. Can scale with you can't even explain certain businesses actually can't scale just because of the cost of moving. The cost of moving over to a platform. That is a hurdle I don't want any business to have. The only thing that I want to hear a business owner, especially some Main Street entrepreneur, is that I don't have staff, I'm out of product. The last thing I want to hear is my software sucks.
BJ: And all of those things are valid reasons why you'd have struggles. But at the end of the day, I hate kind of harping on outcomes. You don't want to be limited by not having thought about it a little bit. I know five or six years ago when we switched to our current PSA, I wanted to be on like the big dog. I wanted to make sure it could scale and cope with organizations like ours. The one we were using before, I realized we were what seemed like a relatively average managed service provider with four or five, six people. And then I started meeting the people that were using our current setup and everyone. I talked to was like 2040, 5100 employees. And I was suddenly like, okay, those big shops are using this tool. I want to be like those guys.
Robbz: Be prepared. You never know when business is going to boom.
BJ: Find out. The other tool we were using also had a lot of large MSPs, just not at the conferences I was attending. But you live and you learn.
Robbz: Next category. I'm going to group up. Customizations user experience and training. Most of these, except for training, there's a little more detail. Most of these, I don't want you to ask them questions like how's your user experience? Some sales dude is just going to sit there and be like, it's the best. No hands down, there's no one better. What is the dude supposed to say? Instead? You don't ask the Mercedes guy how good is his car? You say, Give me the keys. That's what I want you to do. If you're at a sea level, if you're a business owner and you're looking for a line of business software, you want to see it in action. Ask them for a demo. Ask them for a login to a demonstration environment. If not, and they don't provide that, ask them point blank, do you have a friendly customer that I could travel another state to contact over the phone and see how they're using it and look at it? You won't know how the software works for you unless you put yourself in the driver's seat. You don't know how you're going to fit in that camry unless you have the keys in your hand. So customizations and user experience, drive it, try before you buy. And if they don't skip that company, they don't want your money enough and they're hiding something on purpose. I've seen that time and time again.
BJ: And to me that also depends a bit on scale and what the platform is based on. Absolutely cloud based. Is it premise based? Premise means on site, hosted on a server that you manage software as a service. SaaS typically means it's hosted in somebody else's data center and they are giving you something you can access via a browser.
Robbz: But if they have an excuse where, I'm sorry, it's only locally hosted. We don't have a demo to give you. I don't care you locally host something, we'll figure it out. Bring a demo, bring it in my office if you have to. If you want my money, come get it, earn it. Don't let those hurdles try to overcomplicate you so they can hide something.
BJ: And in these demos, it really helps if you send over your demo, your processes that you're trying to replicate ahead of time. So that way the sales agent or the sales engineers know what you're actually trying to do and then make them show you how your process works.
Robbz: And don't be afraid to ask for the sales engineer. There's a different title. A salesperson introduces you and builds the relationship and they're your point of contact. The sales engineer is an expert in the product and can answer technical questions. So when you're sitting there and you're test driving, you want that sales engineer there. You don't want a sales guy telling you, I'm sorry, I don't really know how to answer this. I'll get back to you. No, I want the sales engineer there to be like, no, just click here, here, here, and then boom, there it is. That's what you're looking for.
BJ: And something else, especially with SaaS software as a service applications, one thing that is if there's something critical that's missing, unless it's in the platform and they can show to you, don't believe it will ever exist.
Robbz: Yes, if it's not there now, we're going to do that in three months. It could be three years. Don't believe those.
BJ: It'll likely be three years. I've spent way too much time on the other side of feature request forums or feature request sites. So feature request is where there's a feature or a function that you would like inside the application for somebody to create. Unfortunately, what you often see is that a lot of these feature requests go and just kind of die in a feature request. Feature request, I can't speak today. It goes to a graveyard, effectively, where.
Robbz: It goes to a list.
BJ: It goes to a list and people might get to it. But too often people aren't rapidly developing the software because it's working well enough. And so if it's not something it can do today, don't believe that it will ever exist. In my personal opinion.
Robbz: Let's do something hyper simplistic and more tangible so you can think about it. Flower shop owner wants to put in a normally she sells vases arrangements, all that. She wants to put chocolates in. It's a completely separate category. There's no chocolate add on in the system. Is there a way that she could manually on her own add chocolate? Or is that something on the back end that suddenly they have to have an entire chocolate module for? We're going to put in a request. We'll get that for you four weeks after you buy the product, we promise. Then it goes in a list, they ignore it. They already have your pen on paper and there's no motivation for them.
BJ: So the only I'll say real caveat to not if you do sign with that promise, get it in writing. Because then if there is a contract with teeth in it, you're able to walk your way back out of it.
Robbz: And if this is going to be like the end all, be all of how your company runs, have your business lawyer take a peek at it, make sure that he's looking at it. I've seen so many people just blankly sign contracts for six digits deep with not a clue what they actually signed and then literally have lost their business over having this financial hurdle that never actually fixed their problem. Again, back to it. Customization and user experience. Try before you buy and training. People say that, oh, we have this great training module. Insert name academy or universities behind it. Like what, we're going to pretend we'll pick telefloor? Teleflow University does have all these modules and you'll be certified in our product. You'll be an expert in it. That's all fine, well and good, but to make sure that it's most efficient and usable for your product is if it just makes sense when you're trying it and you have a user and you understand it quickly. Your employees shouldn't be far behind. Don't expect them to be you, but they should be five, six steps behind you and it shouldn't be terrible. So when you have a product, making sure it's self intuitive and self explanatory to a point is probably the most important training aspect available. If not, just make sure that you have people that the company you're purchasing the software from has people there to provide training and answer questions when you need it.
BJ: So the other aspect of that that often gets overlooked is oftentimes they will have some kind of training package you can purchase. And now, I'll be perfectly honest, they're not always good. Sometimes the training packages really fall down. But with that being said, how painful is it going to be to learn it? How painful is it going to be to take your time to get up to speed? And so the more time and energy you can put into it up front with that trainer pro tip record the meetings.
Robbz: Yeah.
BJ: Then you have something to give to your employees later.
Robbz: Hit that record button on those zoom.
BJ: Calls, man, every single time. If you happen to use teams, you can do the meeting in teams and record it and then you can download it for posterity. Create your processes this way. Pay for the trainer. Oftentimes it's a relatively small extra amount, even if it's tens of thousands of dollars. Oftentimes in my mind it's worth it simply because you're getting ramped up faster.
Robbz: And if you're large enough and if you have enough employees I'd say if you have eight employees or more, have one of them get trained in measure how long it takes for him to get it and be proactive in the software. And then you can measure your return on investment of that. You know how many days you have to pay for to get a dude on Boarded, especially if you're in a high churn environment. I've seen even people that even in fast food, if something's too complicated, even on small mom and pop change and they'll have six locations, they'll throw it out just because training took too long, because they have new employees every three months.
BJ: It's a good point. How intuitive is it? Can they walk up to that point of sale or can they walk up to let's say, maybe a high turnover space where it'd be able to take orders. You need to be able to push things along. How fast can you get somebody onboarded that might only be with you for three, six months? The most intuitive thing is training somebody who's going to be there for 90 days, right?
Robbz: The most intuitive thing is like if you walk up to a Taco Bell and someone can just walk up and order a Taco. Why can't your software be somewhere in the vicinity of that? Easy, unless you're a super complex business, aim high and you might get lucky. The other ones are, of course, security and support. So security is a really big Asterisk and you should have your It expert review that with them. The easy ones, like we picked on in the prior podcast, does it have multifactor authentication? Is there something called SSO, meaning single sign on? If you are having a Microsoft tool or you're in a Google environment, it is much more secure, but more efficient to have your Google login or your Microsoft login log into the tool. But honestly, don't skip this out. Don't pretend that you're an expert and you listen to two dudes on a podcast and pretend that it's secure. Have a real It guy or a third party, analyze the product. They will tell you right off the bat at going through it pretty quickly, hey, this is wide open. Hey, they don't have anything for this. They will go through it with a fine tooth comb because I have their responsibility, this one.
BJ: So we have a client who does doors, of all things, right? And so, as a result, they've been using this package for a very long time. We've always been a little bit hit and miss with our vendor support, but at the end of the day, it's worked well enough for them and we've been able to keep them secure in the functions that we have. Where their vendor came along, like, hey, look at our new SaaS application. We host it for you in Azure. And we're like, yeah, we want to know. Let's talk. And we finally started digging in and we were asking their requirements around Azure, how they were hosting it. They were thinking that two separate logins was multifactor. Yeah, you had to log in.
Robbz: Just seems complicated.
BJ: And then you had to log into the second layer. And I'm sitting here, I had to run this past my cybersecurity expert and our cyber insurance team and going, based on this reply, I can't believe that that's actually what they said. They had two single factor logins. They were at just as big a risk as not having that second login effectively. Do they have any processes and controls? Honestly, if you just ask what their security controls are internally, that's going to scare them a little bit and there will hopefully give you an actual answer.
Robbz: Yeah, put yourself in the spot of the guy making this line of business software. This guy probably isn't a technical expert. He probably thought of it because he worked in the business. He thought, I could pay some guy to do something better. And now he supports a team with his vision. It's essentially Steve Jobs creating the ipod. He has no idea how to make the ipod. He's technical enough to understand it and have the good vision, but he didn't have enough people to support him to say, hey, is this secure? Is this a liability to our company and theirs? It's not necessarily. They're checking off all the boxes. Like you may or may not have either. They're just as human as you are.
BJ: Well, and this is, in my mind, one of the areas that you really have to be careful of, especially in very niche. Niche, whatever, however you want to say it, line of business packages. So like trash flow. I don't know anything about their security or support, but typically the more focused you are, the more likely it's going to be, as you said, the person who owned a company doing trash and was like, I'm going to hire a developer. So they built their own software. And then one of their buddies who owns a trash company was like, can I use that? And then it just started kind of replicating from there. And so people are blowing up and they're trying to support it as best that they can, and nobody ever stops and goes, wow, this code is super flawed. Somebody wrote it 20 years ago. It's become a spaghetti mess. And in order to make it secure, it's going to be almost impossible. And it goes back to I mean, if it's an acceptable enough business risk, then that's one thing. But going to it with your eyes open, understanding how are you going to mitigate that business risk?
Robbz: So going from security and the next one is compliance. I'm going to give you a real world example from my past. I've dealt with a lot of eye clinics. For some reason, a lot of eye clinics. One of the line of business software for an eye clinic is called my Vision Express. It's used nationwide by all different types of eye clinics, mom and pop to big chain businesses. And it is the bane of my existence. If you're listening to My Vision Express, this is just from my opinion that's it not a fan of the software for all the teams that I've had to support it on myvide Express. They are one of the older tools out there, so they had it locally hosted. So if you had a dental office, you had a box in the back room in your closet that would host all of the company records. And the next topic, compliance. I'm a dentist's office. I have to be HIPAA compliant. HIPAA is a compliance that is affecting everybody in the United States that if you have any medical record with your name or any personal information that legally has to be protected. It has to be done through an entire HIPAA compliance certification. And there's a way of going about making sure that that doesn't get out to anybody. And certain standards it has to follow along with this particular company followed suit. But it's a very old program. It's an old SQL database. It's very buggy. Every patch that comes out breaks something or some other integration had, like Adobe, the downtime was ridiculous. The amount of time to put data into the program is really high, and it's extremely expensive. For the particular Iclinics that I worked with once upon a time, they moved and said, hey, we're going to go and turn this program that you pay us licensing yearly for, and we're going to turn it to a SaaS application, that's software as a service that we talked about, and move it to the cloud. No longer will you have to spend five digits deep on a box that sits in your closet. We will provide that for you and put it in the cloud. Well, some people got out their pens and said, yep, sounds good. Here's the money. Let's go do this. Without any security investigation talking to any of their It teams. And a good majority of the MyVision Express customers moved from that box in the closet to the cloud. And within, I think, a two year time frame, they got ransomed four times. We're talking some of them were 1011 days per location down. And the only reason I got this is not because they made out some public statement, is because they had a chain, a network of people, customers, these vision shops, optometry centers, excuse me, that I would literally pick up the phone and talk to and says, no, this is what's showing on my computer screen. And it all came from that direction. Nightmare. No one vetted it. There was simple processes that could have been seen. You just don't know.
BJ: And so something to really consider is there's multiple ways to do things right. So what it sounds like is they just lifted and shifted their existing platforms to an infrastructure farm. So they had all the servers, all those five figure boxes in their data center, and they were letting you connect to those boxes, and they were maintaining it. So in some ways it centralized, it for their support, it made it easier for their support, probably made it more sluggish and laggy for the optometry offices.
Robbz: Absolutely.
BJ: There's a couple of different ways to achieve things. So you can take any line of business application, fat or otherwise. So when I say Fat application, I'm meeting an installed local application that connects likely back to some kind of installed local server. So you have a QuickBooks database running on a server in your office, and you have QuickBooks installed on your machine. That's a fat application. A SaaS application to me is something inside of Chrome or Edge where you can access it completely in the browser. So what happened a lot, especially ten or so years ago, was a lot of people are like, hey, the cloud, it's the thing. They took that Fat application, and instead of converting it to something you could access simply through the browser, they just took the entire thing and put it into their data center. And unfortunately, there was probably some pretty severe lacking of controls because they're software guys or developers, and you got to have developers. Like, they're great people. What happens is oftentimes they're not thinking through the infrastructure problems, they're not thinking through the security problems. They're not typically traditional It folks, but they're trying to make their life easier by moving all of their applications from your premise to theirs. So that way they can update things kind of at their leisure, if you will.
Robbz: Right.
BJ: And so, I don't know, there's nothing necessarily wrong with a legacy piece of software or a Fat application in the right circumstance.
Robbz: Don't be the first guy to try something if they're going to offer SaaS to you. Ask, hey, I want to talk to some customers that tried it, and I want to hear what they say. Is it faster? Is it going to do something for me? Is it just a cost savings? Which, don't get me wrong, that could be business case enough, but you want to make sure it's stable and it's working for someone else as well. If they're not willing to share a friendly customer, it's a sign they probably don't have a lot of them.
BJ: And just honestly go to your industry events and ask around. That makes a big difference too. I mean, do the shoulder tap. Hey, you're an optometrist. Are you using this and just start asking questions?
Robbz: You beat me to the punch.
BJ: Hey, I do my best. You're usually leading things really well. I mean, you're always leading things well.
Robbz: Oh, you stop it.
BJ: Oh, I know.
Robbz: No, that's literally what happened with this customer. They complained about my Vision Express. They didn't want to move the cloud based upon our recommendation and seeing other customers move to the cloud and have issues and downtime and sluggishness. They were just done with the 35% increases, whatever yearly bi yearly, whatever the contract was, and they wanted to go somewhere else. And I'm like, So what do you recommend? I'm like, I'm an It expert. That does not mean I am an expert in your line of business software. I am an it generalist. I've seen software. I know how software works. I don't know about your software. And he just so happened. I said, Are you going to a conference? Yes. Ask those people. Ask some of your peers. Go walk around, get a survey. Ask, hey, what are you using? Are you liking it? I guarantee that you'll have a little focus group in the corner of your conference and people will start smiling. They came back with a solution that I've never heard before. I think it was revolution, EHR? They had an integration to take my vision, express data, move it over. It was all HIPAA compliant, and that worked for that particular customer. But again, everybody's needs are different. I'm not saying that that's suddenly the magic product. I'm saying that they did the homework, they talked to their peers and they knew why they were happy and they were honest about the things that were wrong.
BJ: And honestly, that's how I source almost everything internally nowadays. Partly I stay really up to date in our space, but then I have a fairly connected group of peers online who I run a ton of things past because it's the best way to get an unbiased look at the software. And it always astonishes me how many different pieces of software out there you can use to run your business. You talk to the average MSP, what does that even look like? And you could have 50 different answers on what are they using to do ticketing, what are they using for security? There is no straight path. But again, it goes back to do you understand what you're trying to do? Kind of what the outcome that you're looking to have and what business reason are you doing this?
Robbz: Compliance. I just want to hit one more point on that. Even if you're not medical, there's compliance in your field. For instance, you're in the state of California. There's a ton of different compliances for everything that you can imagine. If you're anything from a shampooer guy, I'm assuming there's some sort of state compliance that you have to look at. So don't just categorize yourself because you're not medical. I don't have any compliances. If you're taking money from a customer in a digital form, even check, and you have to do a wire transfer, there's a compliance for you, I assure you. So take time, ask questions, consult an It expert and see what compliances match your business. And if you can bring those to the table. And the vendor is sitting there going like, well, I don't know what you're talking about. Don't go with that person. They're just a fly by night SaaS app that you don't want to be a part of. If you're a I don't know, pick something. A motor expert that builds motors for boats. I guarantee that you know your compliances that you have to have mention that to your line of business people.
BJ: A lot of that goes back to understanding and knowing your space and what applies to you being doing what we do. We don't actually have that many different governing we don't really have a governing body. Do I think we probably will in the next couple of years? Absolutely. Do I think we probably need one? Yeah, probably. But it's also why I'm trying really hard to think through the problems in our industry, the It space where there's no consistent, there's not a lot of consistency that we can hold ourselves up to and go, you're doing a good job and you're doing a bad job. A lot of industries are a lot more mature in the fact that, let's say legal, they have a bar association, they have these tests, they have standards to hold people up against to know if they're doing a good job or bad job. And there's a lot of different ways to interpret the law, but there are still some pretty black and white guidelines that they have to follow. Same for, like, PCI compliance. Almost everyone at some level takes credit cards. Well, now you have a pretty black and white compliance that you have to hold yourself up to. Who's helping you manage that? Do you understand what it actually means? Are you just checking? Yes. On all the boxes and moving along? What's driving your business?
Robbz: The last one we have is total cost of ownership. Now, we talked about price. We gave you a touch of our ROI. But if you're not able to sit down and figure out why that the software is not working for you, you should be able to sit down with an accountant, with your Chief Information Officer, and figure out what's your cost of ownership and what you're getting out of it. Tools to do that. Again, you can talk to more financial experts. We're the nerd people. But even nerd people have to know simple, IRI measurements of how much time does this save? How many times a day does this work? How does this go against per order? Is this making it easier for our customers to ingest our product or our services? Use those measurements. And even when I had to present like I'm somewhere middle in the company, if I have to present to even you BJ, hey, I believe that we need this. You're not just going to say, well, get it? No. You're going to ask why? And you're going to expect that I've taken time and diligence and said, we're going to save 45 minutes per order per person, x times a week. This is going to make us more secure and less vulnerable to this. And better yet, it serves our customers better in this way. That's what you're going to expect out of every request I've ever put. Why would anyone treat their business differently?
BJ: Absolutely. Well, if you come to me and say, hey, it's going to save me 25 minutes per ticket, every single ticket.
Robbz: You'Re probably going to take me out to dinner. If I bring enough of those to.
BJ: The table, we start having that conversation. The more efficient you can be helping service, delivery, running, the more effective we are going to be at being able to have add a couple more clients without having to hire any more staff again. Present the business case. And I think that's one area where it folks have traditionally been very poor at is having the business case conversation. They just look at the technical problem and start running. Rather than slowing down and saying, maybe we should have a business reason for doing this and or ask, what's the business outcome to keep coming back to that.
Robbz: Well, I think that's a good place to sum it up. There's definitely more we could dive into. I feel like people are going to have more questions of locally hosted versus in the cloud. And I feel like that's an entire subject we can go off of. I know Trash Flow would be a great example to pick on that since you like Trash Flow.
BJ: It's a funny name.
Robbz: Yeah, it's a great deal. I can't wait for Ice Cream Scoop being a software and Baskin Robbins takes it on. I'm going to actually check that after the meeting here, see if that domain is available.
BJ: I need to go find out about car towing software.
Robbz: Right toto there you go. Another example. Like if you want to pick on some software mechanics, who knew mechanics need software? Napa, the parts company, actually gives if you buy certain amount of parts from them, at least they used to do this program, buy a certain amount of parts from them, you get Napa tracks. That's where you can actually input the customer's order of what they wanted to fix, have repair notes, and basically have a history of their car's health. And everything you've done to it makes it convenient because then Napa gets the part orders when it comes in. But it's a very old program. It's slow. The backups don't work. It looks like it's made in the that's all it does is that one core core piece. And then I've seen mechanic agencies take that, abandon it, and then go to a big platform like Fleetio where they do contracts with businesses. They can GPS locate it'll, send the code back to the mechanic telling them, hey, it's time to service that vehicle. I mean, crazy details. It's just what is that money for Fleetio versus the free Nap attracts, which is going to be a better ROI?
BJ: And that's like you said, where's the ROI? What makes the most sense for your business? What's going to give you the best business outcome and sometimes free and a little bit janky is the right answer, but you need to know, sorry, janky is a technical term for not good. What are you willing to give up? Because there's always going to be things that you get and things you give when you look for that piece of software to run your company. So what process are you going to change? What are you willing to pay? What are you willing to do? And what benefits are you going to get and what things are you going to have to give up in that process to find the piece that's. Going to work the best for you.
Robbz: So these are some points to help you with these conversations you're going to have. Inevitably, in your business, talk to your It professional. If you don't have one internally, find an MSP. If not, contact us. We can have a conversation with you and those questions will help bring more to the podcast. If you are listening to the podcast, please like and subscribe. If you're on YouTube, if you're on the podcast, hit the like hit the hit the hit the follow button on whatever your platform and make sure you get push notifications to your phone so you don't miss out on new episodes.
BJ: Thank you for listening.
Robbz: Till next time. Our channel.
BJ: Our channel?