From XU Magazine, 
Issue 19

Get primed for growth: harnessing tech to drive success

An interview with Ryan Kagan and Josh Licence of BlueRock Digital: business system consultants and WorkflowMax implementers…
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Business system consultants and WorkflowMax implementers BlueRock Digital exist to help entrepreneurs and business owners use digital solutions to live better lives.

BlueRock Digital’s Ryan Kagan (Director of Digital) and Josh Licence (Business Systems Specialist) shared with us how they’ve helped businesses (including their own) harness WorkflowMax as part of a suite of technology-driven solutions, to generate growth and streamline how they work.

“WorkflowMax has empowered us in our own growth, maturity and evolution. Without it, we’d just be stabbing in the dark and hoping for the best.”

Founded on the vision of helping businesses leverage technology to move faster, smarter and better, BlueRock Digital walks the walk and talks the talk. BlueRock Digital was established to help small business owners and entrepreneurs take advantage of cloud-based systems and digital technologies – empowering them to find efficiencies in their day-to-day operations and reach the big goals they’re striving for:

“It’s powerful to share our experience with clients, showing them what’s possible..how technology can help achieve something they’ve always dreamed of or aspired to, but not realised just how close it is with tools like WorkflowMax.”

Describing themselves as a ‘connected community’ of more than 180 entrepreneurially-minded specialists. BlueRock Digital works within the broader BlueRock advisory firm to support their clients in every aspect of business, tapping into the specialised knowledge and resources of a team of business advisors with expertise across different business functions – from law to accounting, finance and data intelligence. BlueRock is a ‘one-stop-shop’ spanning broad solutions across all aspects of owning and running a business and with BlueRock Digital at the table, it’s all focused through a digital lens.

BlueRock Digital’s approach takes a holistic ‘ecosystem’ view of a business, with services extending from back-of-house, or operational functions, to front-of-house or customer-facing solutions. Not only do they help their clients implement and leverage technology to systemise, automate and streamline their business processes, but they’ll also help drive revenue growth through digital marketing and web activities to better connect businesses with their customers. This approach is a boon for time-stretched business owners who want confidence that all the moving parts of their business are moving together, in the right direction.

From the start, one of BlueRock Digital’s biggest challenges was making the complex concepts of technology simple for business owners – tangibly defining a service and its outcomes is a challenge that many service-based businesses face.

“Leveraging our own experience, we help clients grasp the concepts, implement, personalise, and see results very quickly. That’s the reason we took WorkflowMax to market in the first place – we’ve been there, we’ve done it, we’ve tried and tested it.”

After validating their business model through their own startling growth during their first years in business, their methodology has now been proven time and again through client success stories. Early on, they implemented powerful project management solution WorkflowMax to help them manage and track projects and process with rigour. This helped them guide and manage their growth, and crucially, also demonstrate it to clients. As an outcome, they’ve now implemented WorkflowMax successfully for a range of SME clients across different industries, to help them achieve their goals.

“We chose WorkflowMax driven by the mechanics of what it takes to drive a proficient, operationally strong business”.

“From day one we had clearly identified functions and attributes we needed in our solution; for example, managing WIP, recording timesheets, the ability to manage a lifecycle of clients from lead through to invoicing. We needed something cloud-based, flexible, and driven by varying degrees of process and sophistication (that could stretch and adapt as a business grows), as well as the ability to link in with our preferred accounting platform – Xero. This all became part of our selection process.

“When we started out, we were collectively spending over 30 hours a month producing invoices…Now, using WorkflowMax our support person spends just 15 to 20 minutes a week on that function – freeing her to focus on higher value activities like sales and business development.

“The visibility and control the estimation tool gives us over job scoping and pricing is invaluable in empowering our teams to take more accountability for how we plan and deliver work, too.”

An example of success in action: they guided one client through a dramatic turnaround from a high degree of margin leakage and running at a loss, to a $60k profit the following year. And a year trading after that saw them well into six-figure profit. Simply by utilising WorkflowMax to enact “simple tweaks and changes in behaviour by way of better understanding the importance of time, and focusing on job and client performance”.

“It’s really all about information. When you have information, you have power. And when you have power you can make calls with authority and confidence. It allows you to really steer the ship in the right direction.”

BlueRock Digital and WorkflowMax are both in the business of using and organising information in a smarter way, to create insight and drive effectiveness. BlueRock Digital firmly believes that with the right tools and ambitious minds, they can truly take on anything. With tools like WorkflowMax, we think they might just be right.

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