Episode 33 – Part 1 – When should you and shouldn’t you adopt digital solutions? With Gavin O’Neill

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally: I’m joined today by Gavin O’Neill, who’s the CEO of GoReport, which is a leading provider of digital data collection, reporting, and an analysis solution for the surveying sector. Gavin, I think if I’m or not wrong, you’re a chartered mechanical engineer by background. And if you’ve got client side and software side of your career.

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah, that’s right, man. I’ve been involved in all areas of the supply chain and the built environment. But also in other sectors and verticals such as manufacturing, professional services, retail, hospitality, and even public sector projects. And I’ve been I’ve been a client on the delivery side.

I’ve been a software seller and I’ve been a consultant acting in between as well. 

Matt Nally: Awesome. I think, yeah, I’ve got background as well in sort of retail hospitality side, which you learn a lot quickly, I think about processes and technology there. 

Gavin O’Neill: You absolutely do. And it’s always a, it’s always a good thing to look for in a CV of someone coming through that’s had to deal directly with the general public and those environments.

Yeah, for sure. You learn an awful lot about customer service very quickly. 

Matt Nally: Yeah, very true. Yeah, that and the processing side, you’ve also covered digital transformation in those roles, haven’t you? So it’s not just you focused within those industries. Generally, you have done digital to with that.

Gavin O’Neill: Yes. Yeah, very much. So really I’ve always been fascinated by why. Doing something well always feels so much better than being part of something that isn’t quite right. And I think my first kind of professional job in the built environment, I was 16 and I went straight into a place where something wasn’t right.

And so you rapidly understand the kind of the frustrations that kind of frontline people have versus what people think is happening in the business versus the people trying to help with that kind of thing. So it was a really early grinding and I guess being able to interact with everybody at all levels, as a junior going into a business you can ask very innocent questions and many great people give you their time to help.

So it just piqued my interest straight away and actually led me down the path of of engineering effectively as a career path. Really though, I think. I’ve never been an advocate of technology for technology’s sake, really. It’s more about getting that balance between people processing technology is the thing that I’m interested in.

Matt Nally: Yeah, I think that’s a very fair point. It’s easy. I suppose full disclosure, we’re both operating tech companies here, but there is a time and a place for it. And there’s a time and a place where it doesn’t work either. And I think we’ll discuss all of that today in terms of, What is digital transformation and when, but I suppose full disclosure, we’ve known each other for, three to four years now having developed an integration between our systems.

Yeah, it feels like longer, 

Gavin O’Neill: it 

Matt Nally: feels like a lot 

Gavin O’Neill: longer, really. Yeah. I think it’s a really good example. We didn’t know each other before before I came in to to go report. And before obviously when you were, Sort of bringing your product to market kind of thing.

And I think it’s a really good example of from way back then is having a meeting of minds of the right philosophy of how you want to approach these things customer front and center was, has always been both our belief points really. And I think then going from that to working with each other on trying to understand what would make a client’s life better everything else fell from that.

I think it’s been a, it’s been a, it’s been hard work to get to the point where it’s not easy. And that’s that the hard work happens before a client sees it effectively. And now it’s a very straightforward implementation that we’ve got that we, that we believe in our clients believe adds tremendous value to them.

Matt Nally: The key thing you said there actually is we didn’t rush into it either straight away. There was a lot of time in getting it right. And I suppose the flip side effect of that is this isn’t meant to be starting to sell us obviously, but we’ll move on to other things in a minute. But it, what it proved is when you do put the time in and think things through properly, then you don’t have to then do ongoing updates and get things changed all the time and stuff.

It’s just, it’s seamless from day one. 

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah, I think the concept of in software terms, the minimum viable product or minimum viable product was really well thought out. And we were we socialized it as they as might be said around Both, both our existing clients, some people who would be potentially our clients to understand not just what we thought was a good idea, but how they saw themselves with that solution in mind, that’s a big aspect of all software businesses is really our job is not for our clients to tell us You know what to do for us to make money.

It’s our job for our clients to tell us what their challenges are and for us to come up with the right solution. We are there to set their aspirations basically, or help them with their aspirations and meet their problems. We’re not we’re not reliant on them to design the solution.

That’s on us. That’s our, that’s what we get paid for basically. 

Matt Nally: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think that’s a nice sort of intro to. I suppose the background of who we are and what we’re going to be talking about. But so across this episode, we’re going to discuss digital transformation. I suppose the good, the bad, how to get it right where it goes wrong.

For our first topic, should we take a look at, what is digital transformation and we’ll come into the jargon in a second, but when should you adopt tech and why? So as a starting point, what’s your. Thoughts around what digital transformation is or means. 

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah. I think if you did an internet search on it you’d you wouldn’t be short of definitions or people who’ve maybe written books or made their careers off talking about it.

I think it’s a, it’s useful to have a, an overview word that sits over the top of it really. But I think It really does matter about the context of your own business, what size you are, what shape you are where you’re starting from, where you’re going to, and that is, is what really it defines what a project is for you in your context, in your business.

I think from the highest level and certainly in the much larger projects that I’ve been involved in, I think it’s often thought about maybe from board level down or investor level down in terms of pure efficiency. Let’s see. At times and that’s, it’s not really surprising when you consider, that should be a key factor in any business investment, is it making you do more with less, et cetera, et cetera.

However the best projects that I’ve been involved in began with with more of a challenge to the business on how it thinks of itself in terms of its current and potential customers, its competitors how it impacts the profession or sector or vertical that it. That it works in. And I think when you start with those considerations in mind, it makes it a lot easier to divine the value of a transformation project and to make better decisions as you go.

For example, there’ve been many expensive digital transformations that have failed because the focus was on efficiency for the company and not how easy that company made it for customers to buy from them. And, guess what happens? Customers go and buy from someone that makes it easier for them, so that’s. I think if you start from, if you took the digital out from it and focus on, on, how are we as a business impacting on our stakeholders effectively and then digital comes in later. 

Matt Nally: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I think actually digital transformation. Has potentially a negative connotation now, because there’s enough large corporations, I’m talking about any industry where they’ve put in so many tech driven processes, maybe you can argue this with the banks.

Now you can’t go into a high street bank anymore. Cause it’s shifted all the digital. So it’s all about finding the right balance and mix of things that works for you, your customers and everything else. I suppose we start with timing. How do you decide when to start looking into a transformation process of, I suppose digital in this particular example, but when do you start with that?

Gavin O’Neill: It’s a great question. It’s the question really. I think to your to, to the comment you just made there around it has negative connotations. I think we are now in an era where, if we, If we look at mid businesses that have been around for at least, eight to 10 years kind of thing, they will have had in some aspect of their business, some form of of digital implementation.

And, for businesses, then how do you separate yourselves when everybody is the same? And the reality is when you’ve worked around a lot of businesses, they’re not the same and they’re far from The same and I think some of the negative connotations come from failures effectively where the right balance of people processing technology wasn’t employed the right consideration of what you were doing it for.

And therefore it has become in some instances synonymous with reducing head count, reducing staff numbers, that kind of thing, that kind of efficiency drive. And really that’s not where you or I are in the business of. We’re in the business of. I always believe if you remove the things that you don’t need to do because there’s a better solution, it makes you a better business.

And therefore you were a better business for your customers. So we should never shy away from that. But the objective is not to, replace people as the start point effectively, it’s to give them better tools to do their job and better processes to do their job. So when you. Again, come back to that start point.

What’s the perfect time? And the reality is there, there, there’s never been, there’s never will be a perfect time. You have to take the time to consider and invest in improving your businesses. That time is only afforded to those who have work to do and deliver. It’s, you don’t often have the luxury of investing in your business or thinking about your business when there’s no work to do, you’re too busy trying to survive.

So there’s always a trade off for me for delivering. You have to trade off delivering for your clients with taking the necessary time to consider what could you do, what would it mean for your business, how to do it, what would it cost, how do you ensure that you realize the benefits and value, which is the most important thing.

In your business is better after you’ve made the changes after you’ve made the investment. And, that’s a very important part. And that’s why I think a lot of digital transformations in the past feel because that close loop of, are we now better from what we’ve done, hasn’t been properly rounded out.

Effectively, the project that starts the people involved disappear. You then somebody else picks it up, deems it a failure and then you cycle around again. For me, digital transformation starts with something that every business does or should do already to a greater or lesser extent.

It starts with asking the question, what are the challenges the business faces today? What are your aspirations? Is it that you want sales growth? Is it you want to reduce costs? Do you want to scale the size and shape of your business? Do you want to do more for your clients or with your clients?

Do you want to attract the best candidates? Are you trying to manage your risk better? These are all big questions. Business challenges and any transformation project, whether it includes an element of digital or not, starts with those questions that, you have to ask yourself. 

Matt Nally: Yeah, I think that’s very fair.

I completely agree with that. I’m going to probably touch more on this in topics two and three around how to get the process right and, measure success and. Yeah. I understand what you’re actually trying to get out of it and put that context into the sort of implementation phase.

So we’ll come on to that. But I, I completely agree with, you’ve got to understand what your problem is first. Otherwise, what are you implementing any process change for whether it’s tech or not? So without that, you’ve really got to understand what you’re trying to achieve, what you’re not happy with.

And then you can establish what the goals are that you want to measure against later on. 

Gavin O’Neill: If you don’t, if you don’t understand where you’re, you At least hypothesis of what you want to do. You don’t have a feedback loop, you don’t have a way of addressing whether, cause with any transformation project while you’re delivering it gets it can get difficult.

Your time is squeezed. You’re having to think about things. It’s easy to regress to what you already know. And more importantly, if you’ve got a bigger company and more People involved that are maybe two, three communication, direct communication steps away from the reason why you’re doing it in a business, then it’s it can be easy to, you can see why failure happens or where progress slows in the first instance.

And so you always have to keep banging that drum about what the reason is, what the aspiration is for the business and that and feedback to that. 

Matt Nally: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think I think the other point you touched on around perfect time. I think there’s issues I occasionally see with this that Where people get it wrong and there’s obviously therefore how to get it right.

But one of the, one of the key ones is I see in the industry is the sort of, I call it the make K while the sun shines fallacy. And we’ve talked about this before on, on different episodes, but it’s, there’s often this maybe it’s an excuse. I don’t know, but it’s really busy, the markets packed your books, three, four, five, six weeks in advance.

You don’t have time to deal with it. And so we’re not going to do it right now, but then conversely, when you get quiet, you also don’t put the time into it. Cause now we’re worrying about getting sales back up and getting the, the lead time back in. And so there’s constantly this not the right time to do it because either we’re too busy or we’re too quiet.

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah. And the I think it’s not about, I think the right time is where the challenge outweighs not doing anything. And as you say good performance masks that in a business, everything’s, everybody’s flying at masks that and if you’re, If you’re struggling, where it’s not so long ago that we had a pandemic situation where all the rules of business kind of maybe didn’t get thrown out the window, but could set aside for a period of time while we tried to work out what survival meant during that during that period of business survival, I’m talking about in that sense.

And with all the best plans in the world, something like that coming around as a curveball changes the dynamic, but from a normal business operation I think, it should be a standing item on your agenda. How can we be doing better? That’s what leadership in a business is about really, because you want everybody contributing to that, but that, the direction, the strategic direction is set by the leadership of the business, whatever level business unit level line manager level board level, investor level, whatever it happens to be.

That’s. That’s the driving force and, what do we know about business? The growth curve isn’t always upwards there will always be fluctuations, there will be plateaus, there will be step backs those sorts of things. So you almost have to ignore all of that and just think every day, how can I do better for my customer?

Matt Nally: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And I think yeah, the sooner you. How planning those meetings, you say those to review where you are and where you’re going to be, it means that when everything does drop, you’re not in a panic situation or you’re being as effective as you can be from that point already.

So there’s 

Gavin O’Neill: yeah, I think, in terms of, practical advice for any business or anybody, listening to this and thinking about it really is in terms of moving forward, it’s to remember really important to remember the decision to make change, whether it’s in software process, people, skill sets, whatever it happens to be.

It’s not actually the first thing you do. It’s something you decide to do once you’ve evaluated your options and you’ve thought about your challenges. In my experience, a lot of businesses delay consideration of what they might do for fear that they don’t have time to make the changes.

They’re bringing the problem forward effectively. They’re borrowing problems from tomorrow to stop them doing today. And I think if every business has built in that regular dialogue and a normal review on areas of opportunity for improvement, it opens the door for the dialogue.

They’re, both upwards and downwards to have it as a standing item and therefore the right time starts to come sharply into focus. And, I think you and I both talked about in the past where you have maybe people who are resistant to change in a business either.

Just generally resistant to change or perhaps there are, oftentimes there are valid reasons. And maybe, I dunno, what are your thoughts on how you deal with that? 

Matt Nally: I suppose before I come to that, I think interestingly, it ties into what, one of the things I wanted to discuss was misconceptions which then causes this resistance to change.

And I suppose that varies for all fans as we, but yeah, one of the ones we. We see I think it’s such as an exactly what you said, which is stuff potentially worrying about, is that their job on the line? What why are we going through this process? Is it because actually maybe we’re not performing very well and we don’t know, and we need to cut costs and that’s why technology is coming in.

Or it’s. Potentially a different issue, which is they were excited initially, but they weren’t provided the support and training to get used to it. And therefore that’s not confident with the product. Just because they’ve just been thrown at it and they’ve got to crack on. I don’t know. But what do you think about misconceptions?

Do you think they vary quite differently between businesses? Is that a driving factor behind? 

Gavin O’Neill: I think that, the definition of calling it a misconception is what the problem is. The truth lies somewhere between what you’ve said and what you’ve been told, basically. And it’s finding that out.

I’ve worked in some very large multi million pound transformations, both, externally providing support to businesses and internally bringing bringing systems in. And one of the, one of the, Things that I always think is a first rule is when you hear the dissenting voice there’s often a I guess you can start to see how people try to manage the dissenting voice, either avoiding it.

Excluding from a project, keeping on the sideline, that kind of thing. They would always be the person I would go straight to the dissenting voice, because you may what you generally find is yes, there are definitely people who are resistant to change. So out of fear, pure fear. And they, they wouldn’t be able to tell you what that fear is.

They might be fear of the job. They might be fear of you making their life difficult. They might be fearful of a change that takes them into an uncomfortable area with their own skillsets and, or they just not May not be used to it, but you need to find out, you need to find out what is the issue.

And I’ve always found that when you do that, you’ll find some little nuggets of information that perhaps they were, maybe they’ve lived through it before. Maybe they were somewhere else in another business that had happened on the field. And that’s, that’s great. Gold dust really at that point, because you wanna really bring that out and go, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Let’s understand what it felt like for you in your position so that we don’t make the same mistakes. And, we don’t intend to make those mistakes, but let’s be extra careful. Let’s be extra careful with our communication. And you can find when you do that, you can get the people that are most vocal about not wanting to do it.

Becoming the biggest champions for what you want to do, not in all cases. Sometimes you, that’s what leadership is for. Sometimes you have to keep pushing ahead and bring people with you. One of the things I always find is interesting. It’s, It takes people an awful lot longer to ask for digital solutions than it does for them to ask for them back when they are taken away.

So when somebody is in a business, they’ve been through a transformation or they’re using a tool, they then go somewhere else that doesn’t have the same tool sets that make their life easier. They’re the first people to ask for them. 

Matt Nally: Yeah. So I 

Gavin O’Neill: think context matters a lot, but definitely Both talking and listening more, I think is the way to get past misconceptions.

Matt Nally: Yeah. I think that covers personal or employee misconceptions really nicely. I think, I suppose the other size side, sorry, to the story is thinking that tech is for like enterprise firms, big firms only, and actually as an individual perhaps, cause we’ve got an industry that’s very small SME, driven rather than all being big firms, like the banking sector, for example, I keep picking up on that one. I may be able to look at others.

My banking is fine at the moment. But yeah, I think there can be a misconception that it’s not going to provide the ROI or the benefit to you as a smaller firm when actually it can be the complete opposite. It’s, as an individual, you’re more likely to, I think to drive benefits because you’re trying to spin all the plates.

Yourself. So anything that helps you is going to be better. 

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah. I think, the benefit of we, we have, I consider myself to still be very young. And it’s only whenever I look back at how many years or decades of experience I’ve got in business that you realize that actually you’ve, in this small amount of the last 20, 25 years, we’ve seen such tremendous change in What is possible for us as in businesses and as individuals in terms of the tools and the tool sets that we have, the smartphone in our pocket, the wealth of information and knowledge that can bring when used appropriately is quite remarkable, but I think business has changed dramatically.

When I started in in a very large American contractor at that point The consideration that your data wouldn’t be sitting on a box with blinking lights in a room somewhere within the building was a completely alien concept. And when I then moved into software sales, selling solutions like that the idea of it would be over my dead body would that the, our data ever leave.

This building effectively. And if you flash forward a very relatively short period of time, everything we do is in the cloud. And that, that is such a fundamental shift in, in that just happens, no one people had to be, individuals didn’t need to be convinced as such because the argument just changed the whole parameters of the argument changed and because of that shift and because of that move to cloud computing, it’s meant that so many of the tools that would have been The business and the investment of a business are in the hands of individuals effectively.

It used to be whenever I was, when I was very young the best tools were what my dad brought home from work effectively over a relatively short period of time. It flipped around and the best tools were the ones in the hands of the consumers and businesses were scrambling to catch up with what, what would an iPad do for the business?

What would accessibility to data at any point do for a business? I think that we are very today. We’re very lucky in that a lot of things are possible. A sole trader can have a completely online order processing through the payment collection through marketing solution like yourselves in a very short period of time with quite minimal investment.

So I think once you. Once you set that as the baseline, I think it just then puts it back on how well you run your business or how you think about your business. And I think running a business in the most efficient way, giving the best possible service and deliver value for your clients, it’s applicable, whether you’re a sole trader or an enterprise with thousands of employees, the only difference is the the differences are the, the context of your priorities and the resources you have available to to support you.

When it comes to the. Software in particular. I think the first question there, is this software tool that I’m considering for me, I’m in my context. So there are software tools, particularly in other verticals or industries that are designed With an expectation of different types of use, a manufacturing ERP system, enterprise resource planning system is an example that wouldn’t have a context of a sole trader.

And so it would be, wouldn’t, it would be designed around an entry level where an organization is much larger with multiple stakeholders, et cetera, et cetera. In both go report and survey bookers case, our software has been designed for the surveying industry. We considered that everyone from sole traders to large enterprises should find it easy to adopt gain value from quickly.

And because that’s the landscape of the surveying industry, a sole trader can produce the same output on an individual basis as a much larger organization, both on the residential side is often the same product level three survey, for example. But when it comes to commercial, we have.

Specialist sole traders, but we have a much larger enterprise solutions where, it’s not the output that’s different per se. It’s the capability and capacity and ability to draw on other expertise effectively, which is why they are, they do it. That way kind of thing. So I think, focus on the business and then make sure, don’t try and shoehorn a tool that’s designed for a different context into your environment, make, challenge your vendor to make the case for your context, basically.

Matt Nally: Yeah. And I think that comes down to what we’ll talk to probably topic two onwards, which is choosing the right vendor. And Yeah, you could look at something in another industry. It’s cheaper perhaps, but actually it’s completely wrong. And you’re not going to get the benefits from it.

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah. There’s the one that’s focused for another industry. And then there’s the generic, which is focused on all industries, which is, which can be quite as, quite as bad because it’s, it’s 60, 70 percent of the way there and cheaper because it’s. Targeted at the masses, but when it’s that little nuance of what you need for your profession, it falls short.

And that, that can be enough to move a project from value to failure very quickly. 

Matt Nally: And the amount of costs that goes into them, both bespoke development, just personalize and bits and pieces. I think the final misconception for me, and then we’ll move on to topic two is I think often automation people.

Misconstrued as being impersonal. And again, it just comes down to what are we automating and choosing the right processes to change. If you’re automating the production of I don’t know, an invoice or a terms document or whatever it might be, the customer doesn’t care how that’s produced and it’s no, no less personal once it gets to them.

But yes, if you automate every single part of the inquiry process and you cannot speak to someone to. To understand what product do I need or something like that? Then yes, then it is impersonal. So it’s it’s down to what you implement and how you implement it. Oh, 

Gavin O’Neill: completely. And I think that’s always been the case, before going back before.

Software and computer availability would have been the same. And, in any any business environment going back, centuries, basically, I think if you lose you should be looking for ways of doing a better, but it should be gauged against, does it improve the experience of the people that effectively give you money?

So you doing, and Efficiency gains internally, theoretically, that should be giving the client better value for money because you’re not having to load your costs into whatever you sell. But in terms of their experience, that’s, that’s a very important important thing to really understand.

What are you doing to focus back to what we were saying at the start, if you look at it in pure surveying terms what are we trying to do at Google report? We’re trying to create more time for the art of surveying, right? So we’re trying to remove the busy work.

We’re trying to remove the duplication. What we’re definitely not interested in is automating the survey production. We’re automating the publish. Of the valuable insight and guidance, because we don’t think surveyors should be spending all of their time wordsmithing or maybe not wordsmithing, but fiddling around with formats and branding on that on a regular basis kind of thing, what they should be doing is getting Their point across to what their clients actually be paying them for, a client, whether it be residential or commercial, the surveyor is not getting paid to collect the data in real terms.

They’re getting paid for the insight and guidance and actionable insight that, that the end user gets. If you’re spending all of your time on data collection I’m bringing it together and aggregating it, which gets exponentially worse, the larger up you, you go in terms of the size and scale of the projects that you work on.

Then, that’s not a good outcome. So you want to automate that and give more time for the surveyor to do it, to really show their value. 

Matt Nally: Yeah. Yeah. Likewise it for us, it’s automate all the admin that goes around the job and you can focus on surveying and speaking with customers, not being more personal, like ironically, not less personal.

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah that’s very true. They, the difference between the output being the product as opposed to the service that you’re offering we have like I said the, the residential on the commercial side, on a commercial residential side, there’s obviously you are you assisting with the buyer or seller of a property to make an informed decision?

That’s the purpose. It’s not a boy, tremendously have figured out all of these defects. It’s about, are they able to make the next step in their journey? And it’s the same on the commercial side when it comes down to it is oftentimes it is, we do not have on limited budget, whereas.

What are the things that we can invest in that makes the biggest difference to our business and to our customers? And that, the surveyor plays a hugely important job in that decision making process. 

Matt Nally: Yeah definitely. I think that nicely wraps up what digital transformation is.

Understanding the context, around reviewing what your problems are and then yeah. What misconceptions might come in. I suggest join us for part two, where we’re going to discuss how to choose the right supplier for your business. So tune in for that.