Many startups are secretly Frankenstein’s Monsters when it comes to the business software that keeps them running smoothly and efficiently.
How do you know you’re running a Franken-Startup? A Franken-Startup uses a different software solution for every part of its day-to-day business operations. If you use different software providers for email marketing, contact management, tasking, timecards, web content management, sales, and so on, you probably have a Franken-Startup.
A Franken-Startup has systemic inefficiencies that can slow down your business’s growth, increase your stress levels, and cause costly mistakes. Here’s how to know for sure if you have a Franken-Startup, and what you can do about it!
Innocent Beginnings
Just as Dr. Frankenstein didn’t mean to build a monster, it’s easy to build a Franken-Startup without even realizing you’re doing it. If you build your startup’s processes and systems reactively, rather than proactively, you can end up with a business made up of disjointed, partially connected pieces.
It tends to happen when founders buy one point solution (tool designed to solve one specific problem) at a time, to solve one pain point in their business. It’s a whack-a-mole approach to problem solving, rather than a systemic, big-picture solution.
While your business is small, you can manage all the different parts and pieces of your Franken-Startup simply by doing everything yourself. But when your business grows, the disjointed nature of a Franken-Startup is revealed.
Growing Pains
Growing a startup is hard work. It takes a considerable amount of time, resources, and energy, but it also takes scalable systems and processes.
Franken-Startups don’t tend to be scalable, because they’re built up of so many parts. You might find yourself with one solution that you’ve outgrown, but that sticks around because it would be so much work to shop for a new solution, learn it, transfer your information, and figure out how to integrate it into your existing processes — not to mention getting it to talk to your other tools!
The problem is, you won’t outgrow all your software solutions at once. Instead, your growth will be uneven. You’ll be pulled forward by some of your systems, and held back by others at the same time.
For example, if you expand your online business to a brick-and-mortar location, or if you build an ecommerce site to support your physical location, tracking and consolidating your sales quickly gets complicated. As you increase your marketing efforts, it’s hard to figure out which marketing activities are actually bringing in leads and sales.
Then you hire your first employees, and everything starts to get more complicated. Now you need systems, processes, and tools to track employee productivity and enable efficient communication.
Managerial Nightmare
Frankenstein’s monster was hard to manage, and so is a Franken-Startup. Disorganization makes it difficult to get a good feel for what’s working and what’s not. That extends to marketing campaigns, your sales process, employee productivity, and so much more.
You’re left guessing, and making decisions based on what you “think might be working” or “think might be a waste of time and money.” Unfortunately, our intuition is often wrong. If your systems aren’t organized enough to gather complete, accurate data, you run the risk of being blinded by your own bias.
Visit the original post to learn how to reclaim your marketing campaigns, sales process, and employee management!
My Creation Lives!
You founded a startup for the same reason Dr. Frankenstein built his monster: you wanted to push your limits and create something unique and amazing in the world. But don’t resign yourself to the fate of a Franken-Startup: a creation that defies management and spirals out of your control, never living up to the vision in your mind.
The systems, processes, and software you use to run your business should be organized, fully-integrated, and easy-to-use. An all-in-one small business toolkit, like AllProWebTools, ensures that your tools can easily talk to each other, generates complete reports on all aspects of your business, and helps you make more informed decisions.
Don’t let your creation get away from you! You have a vision for your business — you just need to right tools to take yourself there!
What software frustrations have you had while growing your startup? Let us know in the comments!
