Efficiency

We hoped things would return to normal, or at least stabilize around a “new normal,” after the pandemic. What we got is anything but. Continued supply chain disruptions, war, tariffs, inflation, disruptive new technologies, and an unstable global order have marked the post-pandemic era. Who could have predicted some of the events of the past few years? Unpredictable events aren’t all bad, but even “good” unpredictability can disrupt your business all the same if you’re not ready for it. For example, what if one of your products takes off unexpectedly, but you don’t have the capacity to meet the demand? You never know what’s just around the corner. If you can’t predict the future, then you should do the next best thing: build resilience into your business so you can adapt to any change, no matter how unexpected.

Strategic Foundation

The success of any business begins with strategy. Your strategy lays out who you are, what you do, and what makes you unique, and translates that unique selling point into a plan to reach a particular set of customers through actionable, measurable goals.

A strategy of resilience includes a growth mindset baked in at the level of strategy. People and organizations with a growth mindset understand that we can learn new things, master new concepts, and constantly grow and develop throughout our lives. Those with a fixed mindset, on the other hand, believe that they know what they know, they are who they are, and they can never change or grow. A growth mindset is adaptable, curious, and confident. A fixed mindset holds you back by telling you, “I can’t do that. That’s not me. That’s not how I work. I can’t learn something new. I have to stick to what I already know.” When a growth mindset is a part of your strategy, you will be ready to shift gears at a moment’s notice knowing you can learn and do whatever you have to in order to overcome any challenge.

Operational Resilience

Operations encompasses the production process, product development, process documentation, customer service, and everything that keeps your business running on a day-to-day basis, along with the technology your operations run on.

Successful operations departments are built on consistent and repeatable processes so that no matter who is completing the task, it can be done the same way, to the same standard. Process documentation is not something you can do once and forget about. The rapid changes in technology, the economy, and the workforce mean that processes must be continually improved. There should be a process in place for improving processes, as well, in which employees can suggest and test changes and then implement the most successful ones.

It’s hard to achieve operational excellence without the support of the right technology. But what do you do when that technology fails? This is where system redundancy and diversity have to be built into your operations. Do you have backups of your website? If your cloud storage service (Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox) experiences an outage, how will you access your files? How will you process payments if PayPal goes down?

While these things don’t happen often, they do happen. In 2024, a bugged update to cybersecurity software CrowdStrike crashed over 8 million business and government computers running Windows, resulting in $10 billion in losses. 2025, meanwhile, saw web infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffer three major outages in a row in September, November, and December, outages that brought down services as diverse as LinkedIn, the graphic design platform Canva, and the multiplayer online video game Fortnite.

It's not just tech that needs redundancies. What will you do if a key piece of equipment breaks down or a key employee leaves? What if supply chain disruptions or changes to tariffs mean you no longer have access to a key supplier or manufacturer? Developing risk assessment and mitigation strategies lays the groundwork for a resilient business that is ready for these kinds of emergencies.

A growth mindset is key in operations. Sometimes, the only valid response to an unprecedented crisis is an unprecedented solution. A business built on a fixed mindset will say, “We can’t do that. It’s never been done before. I guess it’s over for us.” A business with a growth mindset will do what seems impossible while constantly monitoring and improving their processes as they sail uncharted waters.

Supportive Culture

Building a growth mindset into your strategy involves encouraging and providing opportunities for growth and learning in your employees. Just as you are constantly reviewing and improving your processes, your employees should be empowered to constantly improve their skills, becoming more knowledgeable, more confident, and more resilient along the way.

Culture goes beyond the office or shop floor. It encompasses all of your stakeholders and networks, from suppliers to customers. If you’ve built solid, mutually beneficial relationships with all of them, you’ll be able to help each other through times of stress and come out stronger on the other end.

Resilience is Foundational

In areas prone to earthquakes, old buildings have to undergo seismic retrofitting to make them more earthquake-resistant. One technique for making these buildings stronger is called “selective weakening,” a process that involves finding the most rigid parts of the building and making the building “weaker” by removing them. It seems counterintuitive, but when you’re facing something that can shake you to your foundations, rigidity and inflexibility is a weakness. To withstand earth-shaking economic and social changes, standing firm and fixed in place will only result in collapse. Being able to shift and wobble without toppling as the ground moves under you is how you not only survive but grow in an uncertain economy. 

As consumer confidence shrinks alongside household budgets, just about every sector of the consumer economy is becoming more competitive. In the past, a small business could sometimes afford to carry a little extra inventory, or buy ads without a marketing strategy, or default to pricing products in line with competitors. Today, you need every advantage you can get. When it comes to financial decision-making, data can provide valuable insights that you’d miss relying on intuition and experience alone.

In the past, data analytics was only for the big businesses that could afford both the software to collect data and the experts who knew how to analyze it. Now, customer relationship software (CRM) puts that power into the hands of small businesses. When you use these tools to help you collect and analyze financial data, you’ll make more confident decisions, gain an advantage over your competitors, and, most importantly, improve the customer experience.

What Is Financial Data?

Financial data covers all of the money coming into and going out of your business: expenses related to operations, marketing, inventory, and payroll, to name a few, as well as revenue. This data comes from various sources: your bank accounts, credit card accounts, invoices from vendors, data from your point-of-sale system, and so on.

A CRM system can connect to these various sources to provide your business with a single source of truth on all financial questions. Rather than bringing together information from a dozen different websites and apps while also digitizing a trail of paper invoices and receipts, CRM integrations keep it all in one place so it can be analyzed holistically.

Make Better Decisions

Data analytics is like a microscope for your business. You know there are inefficiencies somewhere, but you just can’t see them. Data analytics brings all of those small issues into focus so you can see exactly where your business is succeeding and where it can improve.

Analyzing this data across time can help you more accurately determine peaks and troughs in revenue throughout the year so you can better focus marketing and sales efforts while adjusting inventory seasonally. You can do this through common sense—if you run a garden center, you know it’s going to get busy in springtime, and you’d better stock up on your poinsettias for Christmas—but data analytics can spot subtler trends the naked eye might miss.

More Accurate Pricing

Pricing strategy is one of the trickiest aspects of business strategy. There are so many factors to consider: manufacturing and shipping costs, competitor pricing, consumer preferences (including what your customers would be willing to pay for your products), standard markups for your industry and sector, what particular value you bring to the sector that can affect the price of your products…the list goes on.

A data-informed approach to pricing helps to bring all of these factors under control and bring clarity to the ones that are the most important to your business. With a smart CRM, you can bring all of your enterprise resource planning data, social media analytics, website analytics, sales data, and business intelligence data into one place and create sophisticated statistical models that show you what you might have otherwise missed.

More Accurate Forecasting

In the past, we had to rely only on our experience, and maybe what we read in trade publications or the news, to make decisions that affect the future of our business. When we make decisions that way, there’s a whole lot that we don’t see. Using data for financial forecasting fills in our blind spots and mitigates our biases (we all have them). It also helps us better understand new situations, ones we don’t have much experience with. All of the hidden opportunities that data brings to the surface can give your business a vital competitive advantage.

Go Beyond Intuition

That’s the real value of data analytics: filling in your blind spots and giving you something more than intuition. You gain more confidence in your decision-making when you know which perspectives the data supports or does not support. Your years of experience in business and all of your hard-earned expertise then become valuable in interpreting the data and building a strategy around it.

When we think of ERP systems (and we think a lotabout ERP systems), we tend to imagine the complex systems that coordinate the operations of massive enterprises employing thousands of people across multiple divisions around the country or the world. It’s right there in the name: Enterprise Resource Planning. It’s time to rethink the ERP system. It’s not just for enterprise-sized businesses anymore. If you run a small business and your goals involve growth, you probably need an ERP.

Microbusinesses with one or just a few employees might get by for a while without clearly mapped processes. For these businesses, scattered recordkeeping, disorganized folders, and working from spreadsheets with inconsistent formatting might be not much more than a nuisance and a source of minor frustration. But if you want to grow beyond “just getting by” and become a fully fledged small business or a mid-sized business employing 100 people or more, you’ll need to centralize your data and operations as soon as possible.

If you want to scale, you need systems that are scalable. An ERP is that scalable system every small or medium-sized business needs to reduce errors, improve efficiency, automate all of those little administrative tasks that take up a lot of your time, and most importantly, align your strategy with your goals and the operations of every department, now and into the future.

Alignment Is Not Just for Cars

Small businesses often have to overcome two distinct hurdles as they grow. The first is that the founder is used to doing a little bit of everything. They know how everything works, and everything funnels through them. The second is that as the company grows and employees are more left to their own devices, each department starts to develop its own processes if clear processes weren’t already laid down. This could lead to information silos and departments working toward their own goals in isolation. A business whose employees are working at cross purposes because they have no single source of truth is a business that is out of alignment.

When your car is out of alignment, you’ll find yourself tugging the steering wheel to the left just to keep the car going straight. The car wants to go to the right, you want it to go straight, and you end up wearing out your tires, using more gas, and causing damage to your tie rods, ball joints, and other parts you swear your mechanic is just making up on the spot so he can charge you more for repairs.

When parts of your business are out of alignment, they are pulling in different directions. You want your business to run straight in the direction of growth. Without an ERP system, marketing might have their own ideas of how to get there, and each member of the sales team might be using their own messaging that has nothing to do with the messages being pushed by marketing, and product development teams might not be listening to feedback from sales or customer support. Everyone has their own idea of how to do things.

Implemented correctly, an ERP system brings all of the parts of your business into alignment. It centralizes data and integrates all of these individual systems and processes into a single platform, where each department and team can communicate, collaborate, access the most up-to-date information, and work from the same playbook. This level of integration gets operations, sales, and marketing all working toward the same goal and putting out a unified message to customers.

The ERP Mindset

ERP systems don’t just do this on their own. ERP isn’t just a piece of software; it’s a mindset. It’s a commitment to a better way of running your business, and the shift to an ERP mindset has to occur before you install an ERP system. The first step is to set yourself up for a successful implementation. That means developing a growth strategy, setting goals, and developing the frameworks across all departments to help you meet those goals. Once your strategy is in place, an ERP system becomes the “brain” that keeps the many-limbed creature that is your business moving in the same direction.

After peaking in 2023, employee engagement has declined for two years in a row, and looks set to fall again in 2026. The reasons for this malaise are…well, just look around. We’re not exactly living in the most joyous and carefree of times. The rising cost of everything, a stagnant job market, and a worrying future have a lot of American workers feeling trapped and hopeless. These aren’t the conditions that enable people to do their best.

Normally, when people start to disengage emotionally from their job, they go looking for a new one: a new challenge, a fresh start. But that’s not an option for many workers. The way to get employees engaged again is to bring that same feeling to their current job. The answer to fixing these engagement issues may lie in your CRM.

Why Employees Disengage

There are a number of factors that influence employee engagement. Some of them, like family or social life, are largely beyond an employer’s ability to influence, though creating a welcoming, safe environment can help employees feel a little more relaxed and secure at work.

Other factors that influence engagement arise, intentionally or unintentionally, from workplaces processes (or the absence of clear processes). Lack of support from superiors is a leading factor. The cliché “people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers” is a cliché because it’s true. Similarly, employees disengage when their contributions to company success go unrecognized or their suggestions for improving the workplace fall on deaf ears. Other employees lose interest in their jobs when they are not given the opportunity to grow. Personal growth at work might take the form of promotions, but not always. Expanded knowledge and expanded responsibility through professional development programs keep employees engaged. When we’re not learning and growing—when we’re stagnating—we become disenchanted and just go through the motions.

These factors (lack of support, lack of recognition, lack of growth opportunities) all lie within the remit of HR. The challenge is collecting data on employee engagement levels, diagnosing which of these reasons is behind disengagement, and successfully implementing the right solutions.

The Role of CRM

Though it’s called a customer relationship management system, CRM has evolved quite a bit since its introduction as a “digital rolodex.” If you’re just using it to store customer information, you’re missing out on some of its more powerful features. CRM is a way of doing business that brings sales and marketing into alignment in service of the customer. Modern smart CRM systems can do even more than that, giving your HR department insight into sales, marketing, and operations productivity, capacity, and engagement, helping you identify what’s working and what’s not in employee engagement. This holistic approach to human resources enables a customer-centric culture in which each department stays focused on serving the customer the best possible experience.

Here are some of the ways CRM can support an employee engagement initiative.

Time Tracking and Capacity: See who is overwhelmed and who is being underutilized. Employees with both too much and too little on their plate can become disengaged. A CRM shows you how employees are spending their time, where more help is needed, and where that help can come from.

Skills Management:Learning is an ongoing process. Onboarding helps new employees integrate into a new workplace. Training teaches them the day-to-day processes of their role. Professional development keeps those skills sharp and up-to-date. All three are typically managed through a learning management system (LMS).

When you integrate your LMS with your CRM, you put customer data and needs at the center of your onboarding, training, and professional development programs. Employees get the benefit of accessing everything through a single system. Administrators benefit by having the ability to design courses around customer needs based on marketing and sales data. This is how CRM can play an integral role in training and onboarding optimization.

In-App Messaging: Poor communication is a major contributor to disengagement. A smart CRM keeps all communication in one place, easily accessible to everyone who needs it. Customer interactions, conversations with leads, and discussions between team members all happen in one place, keeping lines of communication open and reducing the frustration of missing an important message.

Segmented and Automated Messaging:Missing an important message, whether from a lead or a coworker, is frustrating, but so is being bombarded with irrelevant messages. A CRM lets you segment employees by department, seniority, role, on-site or remote status, and more to ensure employees aren’t overwhelmed by irrelevant messages.

Data Analytics:Data is at its most powerful when it is comprehensive, pulling in insights from all departments, and from employees and customers alike.

Enabling People Through Technology

Technology has a role to play in making your workplace an engaging one, but the right tech alone is only one piece of the puzzle. The data you gather can help you identify which systems and processes are fostering engagement and which are not. The right platforms can also help you implement. Technology works best when it is implemented as part of a culture of continuous learning and development, in which all employees understand the goals of the business and are pulling in the same direction. Growing a business requires both a plan for success that everybody understands and the technological tools that empower employees to do their best in service of that goal.

Recently, Forbes reported that hackers discovered an exploit in the code of Windows 10 and 11 as well as older versions of Windows Server that allows them to force a machine to open a URL with the less-secure Internet Explorer browser, which Microsoft has retired in favor of the safer Edge browser. The URL then gives the hackers control of the computer. As a result, the US government has warned Windows users to update their computers or stop using them. Vulnerabilities like this one are exposed and then patched by developers almost every day. Most users will remain safe if they update their software regularly.

If you’re using a legacy system, however, the developer may no longer be releasing updates, and your computers—and your business—will remain at risk. This kind of security exploit is just one of the many dangers of relying on legacy systems.

Sometimes, outdated software or hardware is so deeply entwined with your workflow that you can’t imagine working without it. Game of Thrones writer George R. R. Martin, for instance, still writes on WordStar, an MS-DOS word processing program first released in 1978. But when it comes to business applications, especially those that are cloud-based or connected to the internet, hanging onto a 40-year-old legacy system would do little more than keep an organization from reaching its potential. Stepping into the unknown comes with some risks, but with a clear strategy guiding the process, you can make your business more secure, efficient, and scalable.

What Is a Legacy System?

The term “legacy” denotes something with a long and storied history that has lost a bit of relevance. Legacy systems are those software applications or other technologies that have become obsolete, whether because the company has outgrown the tech’s usefulness or because newer tech can do what a legacy system does more efficiently. Legacy systems include outdated programs like Windows 7 or that Quickbooks program you’ve refused to update since 2014, the inventory management system you so proudly wrote in Filemaker Pro in 2011, websites still running on the long-since-abandoned Adobe Flash, and mainframe systems that nobody under the age of 73 knows how to support any longer.

The Dangers of Relying on Legacy Systems

Replacing legacy systems isn’t just about being on the cutting edge for the sake of it. Relying on outdated technology can pose a real threat to your business. First of all, old systems may no longer be supported by their developers, who prefer to put their resources into supporting their latest applications. If a piece of software is no longer supported, that means the developers are not releasing new updates to fix bugs or security workarounds known to hackers. This means that if you have a problem with the tech, you might not be able to get help for it. More importantly, company data and private customer information could be at risk.

Compatibility with newer technology is another issue you face with outdated programs. When you update to the newest version of your operating system, for example, you might find that the program designed for a twenty-year-old operating system no longer works correctly, if at all. If an unsupported program is the centerpiece of your tech stack, you might find that it does not support the ecommerce integrations or marketing automations so vital to the modern business.

Finally, old systems could simply be slowing you down. They might take forever to boot up, they might have unintuitive interfaces that take minutes rather than seconds to navigate, or they might be prone to crashing. All of these minor inconveniences add up over the course of months.

When Is It Time to Modernize?

If the above dangers seem all too familiar to you, it might be time to modernize your tech stack. It’s possible that you haven’t run into any issues relying on an ancient program, but with tech that is no longer supported, it’s less a question of “if” than “when” you will run into security or compliance issues.

An old system that you’ve been using for ages and know well is fine if you’re a one-person operation with just a handful of customers. But if you have any desire to grow, it’s better to start modernizing now. No matter the application, there is tech out there that can grow with you, especially today in this era of software as a service, where developers offer various tiers of service with features designed for businesses of different sizes.

Planning Your Modernization Strategy

Adopting a new technology is a major change for a business. Getting it right often requires working closely with vendors and experienced consultants who know what can go wrong and how to prevent it. Every company’s modernization strategy will look different, based as it is in each company’s industry, size, and growth goals, but there are a few broad steps most businesses will take when upgrading legacy systems.

If you want to know more about choosing the right technology solutions for your business, check out this article. 

Analyze Your Tech Stack

The first step is to evaluate your current systems according to the guidance above. Are you facing any of the dangers associated with legacy systems? If so, then it’s time to look for an upgrade.

When evaluating any new software, analyze it in terms of your current tech stack and your overall business strategy. You’ll want a system that can scale with you, that is affordable, and is within the capabilities of your staff. There are also regulatory and compliance issues to consider, depending on your industry. You can find a more in-depth guide to choosing the right technology here.

Evaluate Your Approach

You might find that you need to rebuild your tech stack from the ground up, or it may be the case that just a single part of it is outdated. However many systems need to be replaced, consider how the new tech will integrate with what you’ve decided to keep. If you are replacing several systems, there may be a single piece of software that can do what used to require multiple, separate applications.

Make an Implementation Plan

With your IT team, determine if it would be better to slowly phase out a legacy system piece by piece or all at once. Whether your plan is to modernize gradually or swiftly, you’ll need a data migration plan that will move your data securely and cleanly (that is, without errors) from the old system to the new one.

Provide Ongoing Training and Support

Your new system might not be running perfectly from day one. People need time to learn the software and acclimate to new workflows. Make this transitional period as smooth as possible by working with developers who provide all the documentation and support you’ll need.

Get the Right Help

Updating legacy systems is time-consuming but necessary for both keeping your systems secure and your business running efficiently. Avoid the common pitfalls and the often overwhelming decision-making process by working with people who have experience in implementation and expert knowledge in all manner of business software. ProsperWerx is here to help you get a handle on the tech that supports your business so you can get back to doing the work you love.