From March issue, NZ Manufacturer magazine

By  Mike Warmington, Platform 1

For many SME baby boomer business owners last year, the economy forced them to think more of productivity and how to do things smarter.

 Some made strong gains however these were generally the larger SME sized businesses and above. Smaller businesses with long term owners often struggled to pivot to using technology or Ai as an enabler to be more productive.

 Bringing in a consultant is perhaps an option and there are a multitude of companies running courses and programmes on Ai in social media promising to upskill people 15 min a day for 30 days.

But is it helpful to just be a generalist on all the productivity uses in your business ? You can’t do everything and it comes down to ensuring you execute on your critical biggest productivity  bottlenecks.

Many owners know where their bottlenecks are and it’s not the skills but the willingness to embrace emerging technologies to improve these bottlenecks that is the challenge. Learning something new and foreign later in life can be daunting, when what you want to do, and deserve to do is to slow down.

Another option is to find a technology and Ai savvy potential Business Partner to work in your business, using their experience and knowledge to help enable technology and Ai for productivity gains.

With planning skills honed in much larger organisations that have training budgets and resources they will work with you to identify bottlenecks and implement productivity solutions. They acquire skin in the game over time to a structured managed plan and you exit with more wealth, as your business becomes more productive and profitable.

• A business we worked with did over 4000 specialised scheduled preventative maintenance jobs a month managed on an Access database and a whiteboard. 20% of scheduled jobs were being missed which was a direct loss as the affected  clients normally just waited until the next scheduled visit. We secured a technology savvy Business Partner who came in and implemented a workflow management system. Productivity drastically improved and 96% plus got their job done as scheduled.

Without looking at productivity improvements a business can become less competitive, productive and profitable.

Bringing in a Business Partner with technology enablement and Ai skills may be an effective option to help your business, your exit strategy and your legacy.

www.platform1.co.nz