This series started when we first started our monthly newsletter to our customers, I wanted our newsletter to showcase what we are up to, the builds we are most proud of, What our team is up to and anything we are looking for such as new staff members or someone to do a task for us, we typically post it on our newsletter first.

I wanted to create the series on our Digital journey as realistically I have spent more than 1500 hours on this over the last 18 months testing programs, building programs, apps and workflows to help us work better well into the future. Plenty of things did not work and some things we were over sold by software companies around the ability of their programs and I wished I had heard of some of the companies we settled with sooner. It would have saved me a lot of time. A lot of our newsletter readers are small business owners in the same boat so I figured if I could help some guys make some good decisions at the start and make their own journeys less painful. I know this blog has helped a couple of guys around the GV as they reached out to see what we do a little closer and if you want to see something yourself I am more than happy to set some time aside and share what I know.

Below you will find the series on our digital transformation from our monthly newsletter. Give it a read if you are thinking about new websites, an ERP or CRM program for your own business and how everything helped us in our family owned manufacturing business in Northern Victoria

Our ERP system - Workguru.

If you run a business yourself I am sure you have thought about what is in store in the future with the likes of AI etc. We have spent the last 12 months modernising our business to stay on top of all the changes in this new world. The amount of time, effort and money we have poured into our transformation I think deserves to be shared with other businesses in and around the GV as I am sure many of you are starting to think about these changes as well and don't know which direction to turn!

If this is you keep an eye out for our newsletter as I will be writing about a different part of our journey each month. If you have any questions feel free to give me a call always happy to talk about what we have done, what has worked and our mistakes.

Anyway in Today's blog I want to talk about our new ERP Program. This new program sits at the centre of what we do and every employee in our business interacts with it on a daily basis so we had to get it right. We have probably poured over 1000 hours into this over the last year and trialed more than 10 different programs and with one failed launch, we finally settled on a program called Workguru.

We liked this program for its flexibility with jobs in a production environment, the ability to quickly and easily quote customers and customisable PDF Quote proposals which look great! It has some AI workflow functionality and the ability to connect with quite a lot of other business applications. If we want we can see our job and labour costings down to the last bolt and last minute on each job. While we have not set it up to track every single bolt it is good to know we have the ability to do this down the track if we need to.

Like all programs you buy off the shelf it does have some shortcomings however its ability to quickly schedule, tell us when we need to order stock for upcoming jobs and be a reliable source of truth in our operations has really helped us know where we stand at a moments notice. Workguru was rolled out in house by one of our staff in conjunction with guidance from a Workguru IT employee, There was no expensive upfront rollout for this program.

We also finally settled on Workguru as it is a small Australian owned business with their entire back end operations onshore where as a lot of suitable alternatives to this were international companies with support based overseas.

We tried a couple of other programs like Aroflo and Simpro which were better suited to in field employees rather than a manufacturing business like ours and if anyone is looking to rollout a program in their business and are either manufacturers like us or have guys out on the road any of those 3 should be high up on your list to check out.

Check out WorkGuru

Why we went with Hubspot and a little about our Hubspot partner, King Henry.

I know my write up on our ERP program last month left you at the edge of your seat and wanting to hear more about our digital journey so buckle up and be prepared to learn a little about our CRM program, HubSpot.

In the beginning I felt the business didn't actually need this and was pushed (Quite harshly) into implementing it. There are plenty of CRM options out there and we went with one of the pricier options on the idea that well if we are going to do it...lets do it right.

8 Months on and I am a changed man on this. It is the first thing I log into in the morning when I get to work. Absolutely everything runs through this. Our emails, our website, phone system, social media accounts and it's connected to our ERP Program as well.

I can see who I need to be talking to and where our deals are up to at any given time, our online performance can be seen from our dashboards and is completely managed within this program. It is what makes our monthly newsletter possible as well. Long story short it handles our customers from their initial visit to our website, Socials, Phone or in person right up until the point they become a production order in our other system.

Our customer list is organised and always up to date. We haven't lost anyone's details from an enquiry since setting this up. We barely scratch the surface on what it can do, and in all honesty we are probably only using 10% of the features HubSpot offers. However it will be the backbone of a lot of new customer facing products we are planning to roll out in the coming months. So stay tuned for that!

How did we set it up? Well unlike the ERP I wrote about last month, we engaged a team of experts named King Henry to set up the system for us. Instead of going direct to HubSpot, the team at King Henry sorted our subscription for us and built the whole thing out for our business from scratch. Marcel and his team are a Melbourne-based HubSpot implementation studio and honestly saved us months of time building it right from the start. They know the platform inside out and made sure we weren't just paying for something we didn't understand. If you're a business owner who's still living in spreadsheets, you've got to speak to Marcel at King Henry.

Need help with your Hubspot Portal? Click here to have a chat with King Henry.