How to Scale Your Business Faster and Accelerate Success

Sadly, 75% of digital transformation initiatives fail. Still, organizations feel the pressure to become more efficient. They know that wasting time and resources on manual processes and workflows filled with bottlenecks will cost them their business.

Still, the high price tag that comes with digital transformation doesn’t make the process easier. And with the odds stacked against them, most growing organizations feel like they have to leave their success up to chance.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Rather than get lost in the maelstrom of buzzwords and opaque promises digital transformation provides, there’s a simpler, better alternative that can yield a high ROI. That alternative is Business Transformation as a Service (BTaaS).

Read on to learn more.

Why Digital Transformations Fail

Digital transformations fail because the term itself is poorly defined and understood by the people involved. The name itself leaves people to believe that an organization will transform with the help of technology.

As a result, most business leaders think the process is more or less buying new technology that will transform their business.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Digital transformation can be a painful, confusing process that burns through budgets and leaves companies worse off. That alone is frustrating enough for leaders to hesitate on investing in any kind of organizational change.

Digital transformation can also be overwhelming.

Employees and customers have certain expectations with workflows. Changing these up can cause disruptions that can derail an organization, leading to massive profit loss. Worse, it can result in deploying new technologies that no one wants to use.

Why does this happen?

Because the focus for digital transformation is wrong. Whether a business chooses to work with a vendor or put forth initiatives on their own, more often than not, they focus too intensely on technology, not the results.

Technology shouldn’t be celebrated. Nor should it be the main drive for transforming your business. It’s simply a tool. The end result is what matters. Unfortunately, digital transformation tends to focus more on the tools rather than the results.

Luckily, there’s a much better approach.

What Is Business Transformation?

Business transformation is the process of revolutionizing the way a business functions. It’s a holistic approach to better understanding what changes need to happen in an organization to better meet goals.

It’s results-focused, not tools-focused. And as a result, it’s a more successful approach to improving an organization than digital transformation initiatives.

What Is The Business Transformation Process?

  1. Determine business goals: Every business transformation needs to have specific, realistic goals. This helps determine how effective the transformation is.
  2. Map out processes: Visual representations of workflows provide a clear illustration of how a business functions.
  3. Analyze processes: Process mapping helps identify slowdowns, redundancies, waste, and risk. These are the areas to target for business transformations.
  4. Establish a baseline for data: This provides a comparison point to help leaders and employees see how transformations impact business performance.
  5. Interview major players: Determine what is needed to get buy-in by speaking with the individuals who will be directly impacted by any process improvements.
  6. Select the right tools: Find the right solutions that improve (not limit) organizational performance. This could be a custom or out-of-the-box solution.
  7. Get buy-in: Establish a positive mindset toward organizational change to help ensure team members embrace new systems.
  8. Build, deploy, and test solutions: Build out the necessary solutions to integrate platforms, automate workflows, and improve processes.
  9. Optimize process improvements: Once new solutions go live, they need to be improved based on feedback and performance.
  10. Expand: Business transformation is continuous. Organizations should continue to look for additional workflows to improve.

The end goal with business transformation is to reduce labor, costs, bottlenecks, errors, risk, and customer dissatisfaction. This idea should be at the center.

Organizations starting out with business transformation should choose a relatively low-risk process with low risk and costs to optimize first. From there, they can move out and improve additional workflows and systems.

This approach ensures that companies don’t run into detrimental roadblocks that will eat through resources before failing to bring the expected return. It also helps everyone involved see results, increasing buy-in from major stakeholders and cultivating a culture of improvement in the organization.

Why Is Business Transformation Needed?

Businesses that fail to innovate become irrelevant. Customer expectations are constantly changing. And your customers use their experiences and expectations developed from working with one brand to judge their interaction with yours. That means if they’ve seen a feature or a benefit somewhere else, they may come to expect it when doing business with you.

Netflix, Amazon, Uber, Apple, AirBNB, these businesses reshaped marketplaces and customer expectations. Other enterprises have similar impacts as well. And as major companies with massive IT budgets continue to innovate, the impact of their business models will undoubtedly affect how your customers think your business should operate.

To stay relevant and competitive, you need to continue to think of new ways to innovate. If you can improve your time to market, reduce waste in the production process, and give your team the time they need to provide white-glove service to your customers, you’ll put your business ahead of the competition.

The key to making that happen is to transform your business into an agile entity that can keep up with the fast-changing environment of today’s business world.

5 Ways to Ensure Business Transformation Success

Successful business transformation requires a specific, tactical approach. At the heart of transformation, you need these 5 strategies to ensure your investment pays off.

  1. Establish Realistic Goals: Before committing to any change, there needs to be clearly established goals that can be realistically achieved with improvements.
  2. Think Strategically: Transformations need to have a clear strategy behind them that’s designed to maximize returns and buy-in from everyone involved.
  3. Understand Limitations: Work within your budget, current operational functionality, and workplace culture. And understand that change takes time.
  4. Change the Mindset: Employees and leadership need to be invested in change. They should constantly look for ways to improve processes and reach established goals.
  5. Invest in better systems: The right technology used properly can drastically increase efficiencies and provide a clear ROI that fuels additional transformations.

What Is Business Transformation as a Service?

Business transformation as a service is the process of outsourcing your organizational change to a third-party vendor with experience in helping organizations improve processes.

Vendors will work with you to discuss the challenges you face and your goals. Then, they’ll dive deep into your systems and find the root cause of your problems.

In short, it’s outsourcing your process improvement to professionals who have experience helping businesses transform their organizations. This gives you more time to focus on your business while working with a partner that can help you maximize the return on your investment in better systems.

Business transformation consultants will follow the established process listed above along with the steps to ensure success. And they’ll typically focus on one aspect of your business, first. Only when they have illustrated a clear, positive impact through process improvements do they move toward suggesting additional changes.

The goal of any effective business transformation consultant is to establish a long-term partnership with the organizations they work with. This way, they can constantly seek out new opportunities to save them time and money.

Best of all, they work hard to ensure their partners stay ahead of the competition because they know that they only succeed when the businesses they work with succeed.

BTaaS vs DTaaS

Digital transformation as a Service focuses on the tools needed to change processes and workflows. Business transformation, on the other hand, focuses on changing the foundation of how a business functions so it can remain agile and scale. As a result, BTaas differs from DTaaS in that business transformation consultants focus more on organizational change than technology.

DTaaS focuses on looking at what solutions exist that can help improve your organization. Digital transformation consultants will share new, exciting technologies with you and discuss the impact they can have on your business.

For example, a digital transformation consultant might discuss how adding robotics process automation (RPA) to your customer service can improve handle times. They’ll walk you through the benefits and if you agree, they’ll set up chatbots to help improve your customer interaction.

BTaaS focuses on what improvements will best benefit your business. They prioritize the challenges your organization faces. Then, they look to technology to see how it can be improved.

For example, a business transformation consultant will notice that your organization is wasting time and money processing manual invoices. So, they’ll suggest building an automated solution that streamlines the process. They’ll align the transformation with your organizational goals and build a solution that has a justifiable ROI.

The difference is in focus and approach. For the business transformation consultant, it’s less about using the latest, greatest technology and more about ensuring any transformation can help a business reach its goals.

Pricing Differences Between BTaaS and DTaaS

Both BTaaS and DTaaS pricing functions similarly to any “as a Service” model. Businesses pay for the services they use. And as their organizations grow, the cost scales with it at a rate that covers the additional support needed to optimize existing and new infrastructure.

Typically, you can expect a value-based, monthly subscription model with pricing that matches your business requirements. This makes budgeting much easier and keeps projects within scope. There are no surprises and you don’t have to place multiple bids. Nor do you have to worry about bill shock.

Managing Data Chaos with BTaaS and DTaaS

Any effective transformation requires clean data to back decisions. As a result, transformation consultants will look to find ways to better collect, transfer, store, and clean data in your organization. That’s because they understand that the key to any successful transformation rests in clear data insights.

You can expect both business transformation and digital transformation consultants to prioritize data dashboarding and warehousing. They want you to have the clearest picture of your organization as possible.

This is underscored by the reality that improving business processes requires systems that move your customer into the digital space. That means you’ll have deeper insights into their wants, needs, actions, frustrations, and satisfactions.

However, to use that data, you need an optimal way to capture, store, and analyze it. And you need to keep it secure. Hence, the role of data warehousing and dashboarding in the transformation process.

With clear data, consultants can both suggest solutions that can enhance your business. They can confidently point to areas of improvement and illustrate a potential ROI. Plus, once their work is finished, they can clearly highlight how their work impacted your business.

Business Transformation and Low Code

When it comes to transformation, there’s a clear gap between what an enterprise company can afford and what smaller, growing businesses can afford. Custom application development (in the traditional sense) is very time-consuming and expensive.

In fact, it’s not uncommon for enterprise organizations to spend 6 or 7 figures and wait 9 months to a year for an app to be built. And given the failure rate for digital transformations, it’s not surprising that smaller companies stick with manual, inefficient processes and solutions longer.

But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Low code provides a great opportunity for growing organizations to get the custom solutions they need to scale their business. With low code platforms, you can rapidly design, deploy, and test unique applications and integrations that can help transform your business.

All without the enterprise price tag...

That means if your company has a limited IT budget, business transformation is still accessible to you. As a result, your business can prioritize affordable transformations that help it scale alongside enterprise organizations.

Modularization and BTaaS

Speed to market is critical with any transformation endeavor. That’s why leading transformation consultants will lean on modular units to keep your business agile while deploying solutions faster.

In short, BTaaS consultants can quickly build the new system or solution you need to provide a rapid solution to your problem. This works great if you don’t have the budget for an entire overhaul of a process like procurement, but you want to start making improvements to the process.

Your business transformation consultant can work with your team to build a roadmap for success. Then develop modular units they can deploy that will streamline aspects of your workflows.

As your business realizes the ROI on these initiatives, they’ll have greater trust and more budget to invest in building out additional modular units. This approach is great for smaller businesses struggling to handle growth and looking for ways to get out from under their systems.

Business Transformation and Change Management

Without team buy-in, any transformation initiative will fail. To get team buy-in, transformation consultants need to work with leaders and employees alike to ensure the solutions they design will be accepted.

This involves interviewing people whose roles will be directly impacted by any business process transformations. After all, who knows more about the problems of a process than those who work with them daily.

Consultants will find out where the slowdowns are and what solutions might be possible.

They’ll also learn what strategies have been tried before and why they failed. And they’ll learn what methods should be avoided due because of how the business or its teams function.

Transformation consultants understand that change involves risk. And they’ll work hard to reduce any risks to the key stakeholders in the processes they optimize.

Finally, they’ll work with employees to help them onboard new systems and they’ll train them on process improvements. This hands-on approach to change management ensures new processes stick and deliver the promised results.

The Need to Invest in Better Systems

Ultimately, business transformation sets itself apart from digital transformation in that it’s less about increasing the number of applications your business uses and more about investing in better systems. Remember, success is measured in business outcomes.

Process improvement alone will only get you so far unless you look for ways to leverage technology to break through bottlenecks and reclaim waste. Instead, you need to invest in better systems and look for the return they provide.

While cost reduction is a goal, it is not the goal. Rather, the goal is to build a more agile business that scales and gives your team time to innovate while exceeding expectations.

As a result, the best measure of performance is to look at how much more profitable your organization is after you invest in better systems.

See how we've helped our clients improve their businesses and get insane ROIs by checking out our case studies below.