The corona crisis may have once again confronted you with the facts, or perhaps it has been clear to you for some time: now is the time to digitize. Because if you don’t go along with digital development now, you are actually taking a step backwards. But the question is: how exactly do you do that? And most importantly, where do you start?
Start with your customer
Innovation is a mindset, dealing with the digital world and moving with the times is a mindset. It’s not something you can order. It’s something you have to believe and feel. Waking up and thinking: what can I optimize now? That is in the nature of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneurs who are now going to innovate, they are going to make it. So: make sure you have that mindset.
How do you handle that? Don’t look at competitors. When you start copying, you become like everyone else. You want to distinguish yourself in the market. For example, look at a brand like Tesla. All car brands did the same, but Tesla did something different. And that was successful.
Start with your customer. What needs do your customers have? Could you serve them better with a digital platform, or an online store? If you opt for a digital solution, keep that in mind: who are your users? What do they want? And what can you offer them? At Wise Minds we also think along about these kinds of strategic choices.
each his own system
Which digital solution is most suitable for you depends on what you want to achieve with your company. Suppose a customer comes to us with the wish for a website, I always first ask: what do you want with that website? If, in a manner of speaking, it concerns the baker around the corner whose main ambition is to sell tasty sandwiches to the people who pass by, then I say: don’t make it too difficult. Then a website must above all become a business card. We always keep asking the question: what suits your company?
We also know from our expertise that the digitization of internal systems is not necessarily necessary for small and medium-sized companies. That only becomes interesting when a company is ready to scale up. Then you want to optimize your internal processes. If you find yourself spending more and more time updating data, you should really start thinking about digitizing an internal database. Or actually you should think about that before, to prevent it from becoming your bottleneck. You have to be ahead of the chaos.
It is also important to realize what digitization works and what does not. It sometimes happens that people knock on the door with the request to develop a new system that should completely transform the way their company and their employees work. But that’s not the way. A system in itself does not create a new working method or a new corporate culture. You first have to make sure that your employees want to adopt that new way of working. A new system can then help to scale up and standardize processes. But that is an extra that comes with the culture change.
At Wise Minds we will always ask: what do you really want? What is the main goal? That should always be the basic idea when developing a system.