It’s only a few years ago that businesses signed-up to multi-year contracts and invested 10s of thousands of pounds per employee to provide just the very basic business tools. To support these services, we then invested further 10s of thousands of pounds in server and communication infrastructure.
It was normal then. It’s nuts now.
We now use a handful of bought-in services, all based in the cloud, to provide every element of our sophisticated operational and finance needs. It’s lowered the barrier to entry into many markets (especially ours) and we regard that as a good thing. As new technologies and service offerings disrupt the entire status quo, the poor old agency world still clings on the old ideas of client lock-in, proprietary platforms.
The skill, I suppose, is picking the right platforms, frameworks and services at the right time. Move too late and you miss out on the opportunity – move in the wrong direction and you end up high and dry.
Here’s what we use, all glued together so well that the business administration overhead is less than 5% of our overhead – liberating folks to do what they do best and getting rid of drudgery.
