Episode 33 – Part 2 – What factors should you consider when choosing a software supplier? With Gavin O’Neill

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

 Matt Nally: for part two, I’m joined again by Gavin, who’s the CEO of GoReport. And we’re discussing in this episode or this part of the episode choosing a software supplier and how to get that right. So we’ve already covered in the first part. What is digital transformation and then how to understand when’s the right time and so on.

I suppose if I kick off, I think there’s a few key things that are worth considering when you’re looking up a supply and you can correct me on this in a minute if you think I’ve gone wrong, taking the wrong points you’ve probably covered both sides of this sort of customer and supply side, but I think the key things that people might, may not always focus on is things like.

Cost is obviously something people look at when they’re looking at a supplier. So how much am I going to have to spend to use that solution? And then when you’re comparing two different suppliers or three different suppliers, it’s easy to sometimes focus on the cheapest. Arguably the problem there is the supplier not showing their value if you’re going for cheapest, but really should be focusing on return on investment.

What’s that product actually going to deliver for you? So yes, you could spend less. Arguably easier to get a return because you don’t have to recoup as much. But the likelihood is it’s not going to have the functionality and so on that you need for it to actually be of benefit. A higher price on hopefully should offer more than than a cheaper one.

And then I think. Often something that you see as well as people buying for now. So I suppose scalability is what I’m touching on here but often it’s easy to focus on right now. I need this level of functionality in order to be able to achieve what I want to do. And of course, if you then have future growth plans, whether that’s.

Going into other types of survey or scaling the number of people you service or, team size, can the product work with you for that? If not, suddenly you’re now having to look at a completely different digital transformation of like, how do I move supplier? Which is another time, another topic, I think.

And then if you some of the big topics are around like we’ve discussed it already, integration and, Interoperability is a word I can never say, but how do those products talk to each other? Because, I think there’s, it’s a nice idea to have one, one core product that does everything for you.

The reality is you’re always going to have to use some specialist systems to, to power yourself. So like accounting software, if you look at Xero Xero does loads of, invoicing and the accounting side, but it doesn’t process payments for you. Stripe goes and does that. But then Stripe doesn’t do the accounting software.

They each specialize, even though they’re effectively in payment processing of different forms. They specialize. So you have to then have, Those connections between the two. So I think there’s, there were a lot of factors like that. And then there’s the less glamorous side, like security, 

Gavin O’Neill: important.

Yeah. Yeah. How well your data is looked after. Yeah, I think, on those, cost versus the ROI scalability, both scalability in terms of kind of devolve with my needs and is it actually scalable if this product. Is successful and it has loads more customers. Does it still perform effectively or does it grind to a halt because that business can’t the software vendor can’t keep up with the success kind of thing.

I, and integration interoperability, all of those things. I think an answer to the question, is it. Is it important? How important is it when you choose your your software vendor? The answer is it’s incredibly important, but it’s also not something that should scare you.

And I think that’s for me, that’s the key point really, is that the vast majority of people who are in my experience, who I’ve engaged with even in the very larger implementations where I’ve sat on either side of the fence, you may have people who have done it before, but the vast majority of people making this decision have not implemented software before and have not You know, this is not their day to day world evaluating software companies.

And so if you look at all of our websites and all of our how we advertise ourselves, we’ll cover all of those things like cost versus ROI value scalability, flexibility why we’re different kind of thing, but, fundamentally, I think for the customer you, when you choose a software supplier, it’s a boy really understanding, are they going to help us meet the challenges that we’ve got?

And how are they going to do that for us? And I think when you. When you choose a software supplier, you should be thinking about, you want to deliver benefits and value consistently over a long time period. It’s not a, it’s not a sale and be done. And a business should always have that as a consideration.

But I think sometimes I see that what that leads to is a, almost a paralysis of analysis where you just don’t. Me a decision to move forward. And I’ve been there myself and choosing vendors and particularly on larger scale ones where all you end up doing is denying the business, the opportunity to resolve its challenges.

And you’re missing, I don’t know, however many years of benefit you would have got had you made a decision. And I think, what that really comes down to for anybody investing is how you manage in your risk. The last thing anyone wants is to be associated with an investment that doesn’t return value.

There used to be a phrase no one ever got sacked for buying IBM, back in the, the mainframe computer days where, if you go with the industry leader, nobody could ever accuse you of, making the wrong decision kind of thing, great for IBM, probably not great for for innovation at that time on a wider basis.

But I think she, to your, what we’ve always talked about is, what’s the first thing somebody asks us is what’s it going to cost me, what’s it going to cost. And what we as vendors want to do is we’ll, we will be open and transparent on every aspect of costing, but we need to understand what your challenge is in the first instance, in order to say, are we right for you?

There is a, that, that sort of all of our marketing and our messaging should have led you to the point that we are right for you, but we want to validate that on your first interaction or are we the right type of business for you to help you meet those challenges.

So let’s talk about that first quickly and then get that on the table and then talk about the value. What is it that you get from it? And then you overlay. The full minutiae of the detail of the costs. And that’s how you get to an informed decision as quickly as conceivably possible. And that’s why you see a lot of software vendors will say, look, we don’t want to give you the cost right away because we don’t quite understand your problem.

And you want us to understand your problem. Okay. You want us to fully understand you want us to be working really hard to make sure that you don’t run the risk of failure. And that, that’s difficult to come across in normal interactions and the normal interactions with salespeople, but that’s what you should be striving for really.

And in soft, pure software terms about managing risk. I think given the nature. Of an industry where, there’s a lot of startups are common in software and a lot of startups feel there’s no denying that or they may be feel or they may be feel they feel to exist in the form that they started.

They may pivot into to something else. They may be consumed by other businesses. Or they may kick on and change their focus. Those are all risks that you have no control of when you invest in a product. And in my experience, it actually doesn’t matter whether that product is relatively new or has been around for 15 or 20 years.

I’ve seen, changes that are outside of your control. And that’s really where you want to be thinking in terms of managing your risk. You want to be thinking about your exit strategy. At the very start, you should be thinking about what happens to my data if either one of these either us or our vendor are no longer interested in an ongoing relationship.

How do we practically move forward with that? And that’s, that is one of the benefits, both of us are. Annual subscription based services. We know that if we don’t keep our customers happy, they don’t come back next year and the year after and the year after we’re only interested in keeping people for the longterm.

And we have to prove it every year. But, equally, if they decided to go somewhere else, it’s not because they’re locked in to us. It’s, it has to be a choice where they’re making, because they’re. We’re delivering for them. And I think that in any digital transformation, you need to consider that.

And that’s why people talk about stickiness. You want stickiness to be from a vendor perspective. You want stickiness to be because you’re really delighting your customers. You don’t want stickiness to be because it’s too hard to move away. Cause that’s generally not a great, in any walk of life, any walk of life or any part of personal life.

It’s not a great situation to be in. It doesn’t feel particularly good. So I think all of those things that you say are very important. But it still comes back to, does, have you got enough confidence that this vendor can help me meet my challenges, does it deliver a lot of systems will make claims about what they offer, but does it really add benefit or or just more process for you is the business progressive, are they continuing to evolve?

Are they interested in your sector that you work in? Are they working with lots of other people in that sector? And, particularly no with the way software has evolved into do they play nice with the other vendors in your workflow? Really? And that’s the thing, we all have competitors, but if there are other software companies that are serving a different part of your workflow, like survey booker and go report, do they play nice?

And not to say they play nice, but do they actually do those extra hard yards to really try and solve those problems for you and then bring you a solution as a client. And that’s, those are the things that you need to think about. 

Matt Nally: Yeah, I think it, I completely agree with the point of you, you want to find a supplier who makes it easy for you to leave.

ways of getting your data out and moving it elsewhere and in the right formats. But you don’t want to leave because they’re performing, they’re doing what they said. And, mantra has always been to be progressive and to play nice. So what what would I mean by that is exactly what you said.

It’s we’re continually adding in more features based on what we think will be helpful based on what we’ve been told will be helpful. But we’re also building an ecosystem that allows you to. To plug and play. Whether that’s, report writing, whether it’s pushing stuff into accounting software, whether it’s analytics, whatever it might be that, that is key.

And if you end up with a, choosing a provider that’s stagnant and isn’t investing in the product. Then you’re going to be falling behind competitors that are using other systems. 

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah, there’s there’s often a term used a business about sweating the asset effectively, you’ve reached the end of your development cycle.

I just wanted to shift more units of it effectively. And. In software terms, that can never be the case for a business to be successful in the longterm because our underlying platforms change the technology we all, you know the way BSR platforms on whether in our instance, the Apple environment, the Apple ecosystem or any other environment, they move forward.

And so you need to keep pace with those and also overlay on top of that, what value there is to a client. And I think, As from a, strategic leadership point of view in our business with my, my leadership team, we spend an enormous amount of time talking to other people in the industry and talking to other vendors in the industry, both competitors and and potential partners like, like yourself.

And we, we don’t do that for a chat. We do that. To consider how can we make our clients lives better. And I think, I don’t think people, from a user, I wouldn’t expect them to understand how much work goes into that in order to get to a point where we actually have a viable solution that they would use.

I think sometimes people think can I not just do X or Y, but we’ve done the detailed work that says, but actually there’s a step between X and Y that. That is not in either of our control, your control as a user, and therefore us producing a solution. It’s not going to be something you’re going to be able to use.

So it’s always about constantly trying to find those ways forward. And if you are with a vendor that either doesn’t have the resources to do that there. Therefore, for other reasons, they’re not focused on your sector or they’re not focused on that part of the business, then yes, that can become a problem.

But if it’s still meeting your challenges today and you have an exit plan, should you need to use it, then neither of those things should be a concern for you today in choosing the vendor effectively, you have to. You have to look at what today looks like. Does it meet my challenges today?

Do I have a way out? Have I managed my risk? Do I know what the trigger points would be? In which case I can now go forward with a really, like I say, informed decision, but with also a plan should it not go the way that we want in time. No, there’s, that’s very different from an implementation feeling and implementation shouldn’t fail.

And that’s, they can do for a variety of reasons, but the, that’s a different set of challenges that shouldn’t, no implementation should really fail. 

Matt Nally: I think there are really good points, but there’s a couple of other things I want to discuss actually around this and choosing a supplier in a second, but it sparked a thought in my head, which is the other option, which is not choosing a supplier at all.

I self build and I think that can sometimes be seen as a holy grail or an exciting proposition building or anything. But as we full well know and as you said, when you were reviewing those just integration aspects it’s very easy to look at software and go, it just needs to do this.

And there’s so much more that goes on behind it than just press button and something happens. There’s scenario planning and everything else. And I think, some, sometimes, and I think more so in rare cases, it can be a good idea to go and build your own thing. I think the reality is. It then takes you off from focusing on what you’re trying to do surveying.

And now you’re trying to spend a lot of time and effort and resource on building and testing and releasing and then realizing it doesn’t work and changing. And so I think on the whole, where you can choose a supplier, and then you can focus on. What you’re wanting to do, not software.

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah, you have to remember what your day job is. What are you paid for? A business is, ultimately the luxury of even having a conversation like this is because someone’s prepared to pay you for your value effectively. And whatever it is, there’s the service or solution that you offer.

I think the build your own debate is obviously I would say it probably happens to a lesser extent in the surveying industry, in my experience, than it does elsewhere. In that I think that’s maybe more of a reflection of the context and demographic, the surveying industry or surveying as a profession is, it lends itself to the sole to medium size enterprise style, shape of business with surveyors working in very large commercial environments, surveying is a, a specialism service within a very large company.

So it’s still, in that context, it happens less, but it does still happen and we do still come across it and My experience of other solutions is it happens an awful lot and it’s, it’s always a anywhere where you have somebody who is of that mind it’s a question that needs to be asked or answered.

And I think there are many instances where internal or bespoke development resources are tremendously valuable to a business’s competitive edge. Particularly where you have large businesses with multiple Divisions and stakeholders and around integrations and filling functional gaps.

There’s no, I don’t know, I’ve experienced that, but to internally develop and deliver a scalable product that is secure, can evolve with your needs over many years is a very costly venture and carry significant risk for a business. And actually it’s a much riskier, Proposition to build your own than it is what we were previously talking about, which is choosing a vendor that you then choose to move to another one.

It’s much, much riskier to build your own. I know I’ve led teams that have done it both successfully and less successfully. So I know what the cost is with that, but, my first rule has always been, why would you to redevelop something internally that already exists, ready exists.

is proven and is a fraction of the cost it would take to build it yourself. And I think if you ask those questions first, the decision becomes very clear. And what you have to make sure though, is that you don’t mask things like internal development resource cost as not a cost to the project. It’s a huge cost to the project.

And You and I both know what it’s taken to get our businesses to where we are and what it’s taken in terms of cost investment. And we know we know that’s not something can be replicated. And why would you, if you could take that and build on it, if you wished or just take it and use it for its value that’s always been a puzzlement.

It does happen but much, much less. I, when I started. In an engineering company, we had a development function within the business because at that time, the only way to make various pieces of software work was to develop functional tools within your business. That, that transformed in that particular business over my time there, there were that needed to be used less and less because we were able to plug in.

Tools that, from other vendors that could do it and shift that expertise into people who do it every day rather than as a distraction from our day job. 

Matt Nally: I think there’s a couple of points you’ve touched on one just before this topic and the one just now, which is around the risk and security aspect.

Where I say you touched on it isn’t on the startup aspect. So you could choose a startup or you might even choose an established firm that just hasn’t put a focus on it. But obviously security is a huge risk in. The cyberspace day to day, there’s, unfortunately, if you sign up to certain newsletters you’re constantly hearing about, another hack here and there and ticket master recently, what, half a billion records of data lost.

It happens to the best, but I suppose the risk is when you’re choosing a supply, you need to focus on, are they doing anything around security or are they just focusing resource on marketing and some feature development? 

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah. I think, yeah, hugely important. We both have ISO 27, 001 certification for our for information security management.

And I think going through that exercise is a tremendous eye opener for even, ourselves who consider ourselves experienced practitioners. And it doesn’t mean that you what it really means is that you’re doing everything within your power to prevent something happening, but you’re also putting in place a mechanism where your response, rapid response to situations arising.

That’s from a, protect your own business point of view, but very important for us to protect our our client data effectively that we hold. And I think that when you’ve been through those sorts of exercises and you’ve invested in that it maybe draws your eye a little bit to other people who claim.

To do it but are, focused in, in other areas of growing their business. Now, the first thing is every business has to start somewhere. I, you and I both know some great solutions that are coming through, even in the surveying profession, doing slightly different things than what we’re doing that we, we consider as part of our our ecosystem and they’re doing great stuff.

And they, although they haven’t invested the time in their certification processes and whatnot, they are very experienced or they are utilizing extremely experienced resource from elsewhere to support them on that journey. But that comes with a higher risk than working with a company that’s more established.

I think the, the focus of your business you have to consider all aspects, even the unglamorous stuff that people take for granted. There should be, somebody buying us should take for granted that we look after their data, but they should also ask, hi, what, how can you demonstrate that you don’t have to understand every single process that we have, but you should ask us the question, how, what do we do to make sure that their data is protected.

Appreciate it. And that we’re doing everything that we can. And we’re also helping them and advise them. Those things take investments. They take consideration at all aspects of development. So security is baked in to everything we develop. And again, we utilize experts in the field.

We practice what we preach. We don’t try and do that all internally. We bring in people who are experts in this, who do it every day. And they challenge our guys To be better and to do better. 

Matt Nally: Yeah. So it’s definitely, I agree. It’s an opening experience. As you go through it, you learn a lot as a company and but it puts you in a much stronger position to deal with things better.

I think I suppose as part of that is there’s, we’ve touched on ISO 27, 001, so that’s a type of accreditation to look for. It’s a good one. I’d argue it’s not self certified. You have to go through external audits with various different different people throughout the year.

Yeah, you are marked on your homework not self marking. But yeah, there are other accreditations, which Potentially aren’t as strong. So it’s like understanding what they mean rather than when they’re good or bad, but, cyber essentials and cyber essentials plus have very different levels of what’s reviewed.

And it’s why I said seven, I said 27, 001 and so on. Yeah, they’re all good things to look for, but just understanding what they actually have behind them. 

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah. And look, I would recommend that any having been through. Being through the process from instigation and utilizing, the expertise that we brought in.

One of the things I’m a engineer by background, quality management, quality control risk management, all of those things are baked into your engineering profession effectively. And, I’ve been around the times where going into businesses where Quality was deemed as a, almost like a desktop document exercise, follow the quality process, et cetera.

And it was one of my first jobs was to better align the quality process with what people actually did in a business which were often not the same thing. And so I think. One of the big learning points for me is a, an advocacy for making sure everybody pushes for their vendors to be to be certified is that, it’s been a tremendously valuable experience for us as a business because it is baked into the way we do work.

It’s not something that’s done. To report on our work. It is very much a consideration at each point of how we do our work. And therefore it’s much more aligned. And whenever it’s not aligned, it’s very easy to see where it’s not on to adjust. Accordingly, one of the. One of the main things is a no blame culture in our business.

And we’ve seen that our clients have fallen fall of fishing exercises in their own environments. And so we’ll, as soon as we’re aware of it by something coming to us, we’re immediately onto them to say, look, I think this could be a problem for you. And in our experience, this is a, a good next step action kind of thing.

And, in that way we can, at the end of the day, the whole point of our activity here is to avoid disruption of the service and to make sure that your data is protected. And those things take effort. They take investment, they take costs, and it’s not often something that is afforded to very small startup style businesses.

But should be a consideration in everything you do. 

Matt Nally: Definitely there’s one, one last point I’ve got and then I’ll see if there’s anything I’ve missed. But I think in terms of finding potential vendors in the surveying industry, there are resources out there like the Rick’s tech partner scheme that you can have a look at, and I think it’s a good place to start in terms of seeing what might be available to you to look at.

I think that just the only thing to. Be aware of, I think there are sometimes misconceptions that partners on there have been vetted in some way. But it’s more, as Rick’s of, say themselves, it’s a directory to be able to look up as a starting point and see what’s available to you, but from there you do need to then go and look at, what are those different points we’ve covered around interoperability or certain standards or security, et cetera for making a decision.

Gavin O’Neill: Yeah, I think the the, obviously if you in any walk of I was I was investing in a spin bike recently as a, as part of a recovery from a knee operation. And, when you go and you look for something that’s not necessarily readily available on the high street kind of thing.

And you have to think about something that you’re investing in and there are no shortage of reviews of, top 10 bikes of 2024, top 10 bikes, 20 or three, whatever. And there must be, 25, 30 that I found on the first hit of everybody’s alien on very few of the bikes actually matched from one vendor to the next.

So you have to, when you’re searching for something, you have to be careful to Ensure that your source is actually a validated thing. And obviously the Rix tech partner was not a validated I think it, it is a directory listing, which is good from the perspective of here are all of the people that are in the industry.

But not so in terms of ranking you as to, to what you do. So I think, how do we look at that? We obviously, we want to make sure that we make ourselves available to the profession, through, through Being a face to face at conferences and events and sponsoring and those sorts of things.

We want to make sure that the referral network is strong. There’s, I would always encourage anybody coming to us to ask. People who already use our software and also ask people who use other pieces of software or use who’ve chosen not to use us because I think you, you have to make your own decision when you’re choosing a vendor.

And you should have, balanced opinion. That’s what an informed decision is all about. And also, ask our guys, if what are the other options now, some might say we don’t have any natural competitors. I think that’s a standard phrase that every software vendor has, but the reality is there are We think we do things differently and we shouldn’t be, we shouldn’t be shy of saying other people do it and you might want to have a look at them, here’s how we do it.

Our job is not to comment on them. Our job is to tell you, how we do it and why we think that’s good to meet the challenge you’ve expressed to us. But I think the in terms of the sources. You should do that. You should look at our, our case studies.

You should get other people’s case studies. You should challenge your vendor to say, look, why why, what how do you find the vendor in the first place? That’s down to our marketing and lead generation and how much we put our name out there. And hopefully we appear at the top of the list or near the top of the list of a lot of things.

When you’re looking to solve your problem, but yeah, fundamentally, I think Your journey starts with asking the questions in the first instance and you’re going to ask a lot of questions and our job is to be well prepared for the questions that you ask. 

Matt Nally: Definitely. I think we’ve I think we’ve covered quite a lot there in terms of things to consider from, yeah, finding the right person to how’d you leave?

Is there anything we’ve missed on that topic do you think? 

Gavin O’Neill: I think it is important to talk about ownership of a business. I think in terms of it is back in the day you would have your main source of information of a business would have been the sales rep coming to visit you dropping brochures off.

That kind of thing. Obviously there’s a lot of research you can do on your own. And I would always advocate that you consider ownership as part of that. And that’s. Particularly in my experience in the software industry, because I think it’s important in two ways. The first way is you should consider who owns the software you use in terms of your data.

This is, that’s particularly relevant, I think, in terms of whether the owner might be a competing or conflicting organization to your operations. And And indeed if the, if I think a big part of that is if the software is a primary focus of the owning business or a sideline to the business.

Cause I think that gives you, I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I’m saying it’s another data point that you should be considering in terms of whether it enters a long term solution for you. And where do you start with that? The privacy policy on a website is always a good place to to start on that and to just, and do a quick.

Quick, quick search, quick company size search, just to understand what sits behind that flashy website that’s in front of you. And I think by the way that’s valid in any purchase you make anywhere really is important. And with regards to wider ownership it is a unique thing, maybe not a unique thing, but certainly it feels very prevalent in the software industry where many shareholding over their lifetime.

Go report included, that’s happened three, four or five times in go reports lifetime without any matter of difference to our customers as all now it may or may not be important depending on whether it does affect the core strategy of the business and it’s.

ability to evolve. I’ve experienced that were, working for four or five years with the business was perfect. They changed ownership and changed focus and therefore the relationship wasn’t the same over time. That’s where your exit plan. Comes in, a controlled, managed transition from one vendor to another is important.

We’ve go report have been providing solutions for 13 years at this point. And there’ve been many great people that have contributed to that journey over time that aren’t in the business today. They’ve come and gone often without overlapping with each other. But what remains constant is the company mission and the focus on serving our clients, the focus on our solution.

I’m obviously here, on this podcast as a face and voice of go report. But my team are all on board with the same desire to serve our customers that I have as a CEO and as a CEO, I’m probably the least important person. To our customers, it’s the focus of who they deal with every day, the product and solution we provide, the resources we have to support them is the most important, regardless of whether I was the CEO or anybody else was, or regardless of who, theoretically owns our company or who owns our company or doesn’t, the, to a vendor choosing none of that.

We, it’s a point of interest to them, but as long as we’re delivering, that’s the most important thing, but the ownership. Like I said, the ownership from from a, who owns from their focus point of view should be should, it should always be a consideration. 

Matt Nally: Yeah, that’s a very good point.

It ties back actually to the first point we made, I think we’re around is it progressive, does it deliver and what it’s doing right now and where it’s going to be, we’ll be affected by stuff like that. Yeah. And also it’s interesting to see data considerations always. Yeah.

Gavin O’Neill: It’s interesting. I’ve been at go report for five years now, coming up in five years. And obviously we, we talked about before the industry conversations that we have and who’s around and whatnot, there, there’ve actually been three businesses that. Ostensibly provided the same solution as us that were, that existed when I came into go report that don’t exist at all anymore.

And I think you, that can create a fear that’s much bigger than the reality for for, our clients choosing a solution, like I said, you don’t, it’s not about whether that is a risk because it’s always going to be a potential risk. It’s about how you manage that risk and how confident you are that it’s not going to be a problem for you.

And that’s where you put the, we put the time and effort and you put, our vendors give us their challenges so that we can openly talk about it just so that they understand what we are and who, what we’re about kind of thing. 

Matt Nally: Awesome. I think I think that covers it all nicely.

There’s yeah, there’s obviously a lot to consider in terms of choosing. The right person or the right company, I should say. But I think that gives a nice framework in terms of something to work from. Yeah, join us for part three and we’re going to be looking at how to achieve a successful transformation process.

So we’ve covered what’s digital transformation, how to choose someone, but then how to make it successful coming next.