In this series, entrepreneur and serial business founder Ron Efron shares his ex

2021-02-23
In this series, entrepreneur and serial business founder Ron Efron shares his experiences and insights from using an all-in-one cloud ERP system to grow a business in China from a small startup in Beijing to a global business serving the Fortune 500 across APAC.
 
THINK ABOUT WHAT YOUR BUSINESS WILL LOOK LIKE IN 5 YEARS TIME, AND PREPARE FOR THIS IN ADVANCE
 
One huge mistake a lot of small companies make is to enact initiatives that solve this year’s problems but create major inefficiencies later on. One example is to invest in a CRM solution that makes life easier for sales people but creates headaches for the finance department because the processes on the CRM were set up with just the sales team in mind, rather than the whole company.
 
Another example is investing in an accounting system that might be cheap and easy for your Chinese accounting team to use, but is unusable if you want to set up offices in other countries. When you are setting up standard operating processes for your business, it is vital to think about scalability. Business practices that work when you have 20 employees may not work when you have hundreds of employees in multiple global locations.
 
What is more, the earlier you implement business practices that anticipate your future business, the easier it will be, because it is much less challenging to change your processes and work culture when you employ a smaller number of people. The longer you wait to roll out a new system and new business processes, the harder it gets to onboard all your employees. Again, enterprise management systems are good case in point. We deployed NetSuite, a Cloud ERP  + CRM system when we had 50 employees.
 
The platform probably gave us more functionality than we needed at the time, but it would have been so much harder and more time consuming to deploy the system when we doubled our headcount and business volume, which would have magnified risk for our business exponentially. I can’t imagine deploying this system any later than we did.