Business Owners - Are You Choosing the Right Apps? Your Mindset

This is the 2nd article in a series called “Business Owners - Are You Choosing the Right Apps?”

I posted an article last month touching upon the foundation for your company’s digital success.  The first point I want to extrapolate on is your mindset. From last month's article:

““A mindset is usually understood to be seen as incident of a person’s philosophy on life. A fixed mindset is where one believes their intelligence, etc are fixed. A growth mindset is where a person believes their talent and abilities can be developed. The latter is important when approaching your software stack.

This is important because you will learn new skills and be surprised at advancements in technology. If you’re open to this, you can surf the anxiety of the unknown to smooth waters.””

Your mindset dictates your ability to learn new skills and plan for that.

I joke with clients that the landscape of API apps are like the wild, wild west.  That is because each one of them is made without much consideration of another app. Most have overlapping functions of each other. It can be difficult to know why you’d use one over the other.

For example, Xero has fantastic invoicing abilities.  But so does another great app, Bill.com. So why would you use one or both?

This is where your risk tolerance will be tested.  You could pour through their help articles yourself, create a pro and con spreadsheet, spend hours double-checking with their sales/support teams and then take a leap of faith integrating the apps and setting up your internal processes yourself.  Then you can iron everything out at the expense of your employees and clients. Instead, I highly recommend getting the help of an expert advisor (ahem) who can help suss this out for you in a matter of conversational hours.

Another reason why an expert can help you is that when you are putting together a combination of apps, the most important information is your metadata and making sure its transferring correctly between the apps.  It can be daunting to risk it getting corrupted while you’re trying to actually create efficiency.

Back to your mindset - if you’re mindset is that this risk is not worth the effort, or on the other extreme - you jump into this head first - you might end up with a disaster.

My recommendation is to be open to change and the benefits (efficiency, accuracy, turnkey with growth) but also do your due diligence.

Now that you got that sorted, look for my article next week on your team’s skill set.