In today’s episode, we interview Nick Foy, an ERP expert, to share with us some ideas and best practices on building systems and managing an effective ERP.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
No ERP is going to fix a bad business process.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Nick Foy is the Founder, CEO, and Chief Evangelist of Silverdale Technology, which provides access to world-class processes, systems, and change management methods regardless of their size or budget. Going against the grain of the ERP industry, Nick and his team are ‘democratizing ERP’ with their unique perspectives, such as their standard business process library, fixed price implementation and money-back guarantees.
Nick is well placed to do so, with over 30 years of experience in business and technology consulting and leadership positions, particularly in logistics and supply chain, at Amazon, Capgemini Consulting, ModusLink Corporation, 3663 First for Food service, and The Glenmorangie Distillery Company.
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TRANSCRIPTION:
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I’m wondering if you use an ERP system at your organization. And if you do, how’s it working for you? And if not, this episode is still a great session for you to tune into as why an ERP might be a great tool for you to consider.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:30):
In today’s episode, we interview Nick Foy, an ERP expert to share with us some ideas and best practices on building systems and managing an effective ERP. Nick is the founder and CEO and chief evangelist of Silverdale Technology, which provides access to world-class processes, systems, and change management methods, regardless of their company’s size, or budget. Nick is well-placed to do so with over 30 years of experience in business and technology consulting and leadership positions, particularly in logistics and supply chain at Amazon, Capgemini Consulting, ModusLink Corporation, and many others. So, let’s go ahead and jump right into my interview with Nick Foy.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (01:12):
My name is Nick Foy, I’m the founder, CEO, and chief evangelist here at Silverdale.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:19):
Excellent. Well, one of the things that you talk about, not only with your service offering, but just in terms of reviewing some of the information you had shared prior to our interview here is really just talking about ERP. And I’d love for you to just start back from very, very basics. This was something that took me a long time to at least get a basic understanding of, and that’s probably about all of where I’m at on this. So, let’s talk about what ERP stands for and then what is it?
Nick Foy, Silverdale (01:48):
Yeah. I’m so glad you asked that question actually, because ERP stands for Enterprise resource planning. And then as soon as people ask what is ERP? And you say that people go, “Oh, well what is that then?” It doesn’t actually answer the damn question. And I think this is part of the mystery and the mystique that surrounds us entire ERP industry that we’re fighting against. So, an ERP system is just really just think about it as an integrated set of business tools that help you to make better, or faster decisions to get more done. It’s a way of getting to that ultimate panacea of single view of the customer, for example, across all the different interactions you might be having. That’s the way that I tend to explain what an ERP actually is.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (02:38):
Excellent. So, when I think of the ERP, very often my experience has always been with a large organization, you have thousands of employees, or it’s maybe a very high-growth tech company. That’s often when I hear about it or read stories about use of this. So I’d love for you to talk through why an organization might use or need ERP and how that might apply to a small growing business.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (03:06):
I’m surprised that your first feedback on doing research on ERP was on business size. Normally the first piece of feedback you say is don’t do it. And you’ll stumble across a great quote from Gartner from a few years back that talks about 75% of ERP projects that failed to make or meet their original objectives. And when you think about that sort of statistic, why would any, especially a small or medium-sized company with limited funds and limited cash flow, why would you spend money on something you’ve only got one in four chance of being successful at? And this is one of the things that I think, again frustrates us here at Silverdale about our entire industry, is that it’s so fraught with danger and mystique that most small or medium-sized companies think it’s not for them. And traditionally, they’re absolutely right. It isn’t for them. The big ERP systems of the world, the SAPs, the Oracles, all those big guys, they’re geared towards, “Well, I’m going to sell to IBM, I’m going to sell to British Airways, I’m going to sell to the big companies.” That’s what they’re interested in.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (04:11):
But what I would say is over the last five, six years, probably a little bit more than that, part of this democratization of ERP, which was kind of our mission really is making it accessible to small or medium-sized businesses. If you think you need an ERP, then you definitely do, and you should have done it last week, is the way I tend to talk to our clients about it. Because the reality is that when you finally make that realization, it’s probably already going to be pretty painful for you. You’ve already got maybe five employees, six employees, you’ve already got a couple of dozen customers, you’re already trying to run a website and you’re trying to do your financials and you’re trying to manage your inventory, maybe some production and purchasing. And suddenly now you’re finding yourself all tied up in knots, right? And that happens whether you’re a one-person company or a 500-person company, quite frankly, it happens just as quick.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (05:03):
I like that phrase, democratizing ERP. It was actually one of the things that stood out to me in my prep for interview. And so what does that mean? To me, it’s kind of taking these two phrases that can be kind of vague, right? The democratizing and ERP and combining them. So talk through what you’re doing with that.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (05:23):
Really our vision of democratizing ERP really means providing access and availability of world-class ERP systems process and change management for businesses of any size. And what that means is we’ve kind of perfected, I would say the methodology of doing an implementation from start to finish. We have our own proprietary implementation method, we call it the Silverdale implementation method. And from end to end, it’s very predictable and unlike a lot of companies in this space, they come in and they start from a blank sheet of paper and start mapping your current business processes, and then we’re all going to do a bunch of customization and all that great stuff.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (06:05):
We don’t do any of that nonsense, right? I have an ERP system of choice, which is Odoo. I’ve already created about 200 business processes that work in standard Odoo, plus with some of our own customizations that we’ve done, that we do for every client. And I’m not coming to you asking, “How you do it today?” I’m going to come to you and say, “Why can’t you do it like this?” And it’s a very different question than you’re normally asked. And what it does is it really forces you to stay within standard Odoo as much as possible, right? And again, because you do that, then it makes my method of implementing Odoo much more repeatable, predictable, understandable, and scalable, and ultimately less risk and less cost, and less time for the client.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (06:52):
I think that’s excellent, and especially for the small to mid-size business market. When I think about it it’s much easier to implement something where you’re taking pieces from here and there that have already been established. It’s easier for those changes to be incorporated quickly and permanently in those small to mid-size businesses, and there’s less red tape, less bureaucracy. There’s maybe one primary decision maker, maybe two, or maybe a small group internally that’s collaborating on this and making that happen. I think that’s fantastic. We talked about democratizing it, the solution that you have, but how does an ERP help an organization? What’s the benefit of going through this exercise, whether it’s through your process, your proven process that you work with, or some other approach to doing this?
Nick Foy, Silverdale (07:42):
I guess I’m going to answer that by asking you a question. So, if you were to want to get a single view, if you were going to visit one of your customers and you want to know how many issues have they had in the last week and which ones are still open? How many invoices do they have outstanding that you need to update them on? How many opportunities are in your pipeline that you want to speak to them about? How many products have they bought over the last 12 months? What sort of products, how many, how much, and how much did they pay? How much margin did you make out of that client in the last 12 months? What inventory do you have on the dock ready to ship to that customer right now? What is the status of their project that they have with you? And how long would it take you to put together something like that before you walked in to see your client?
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (08:29):
We’d have to check several systems, pull it. I mean, it would take a little while. It’d take at least an hour of prep work from several people in coordinating calendars. And by the time that all took, it probably ends up being a few days.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (08:41):
Right. And how many systems would that be for you, typically?
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (08:45):
At least four or five that I can think of.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (08:47):
Therein lies the benefit of an ERP because when you’ve got all this information and all this data in multiple places is really impossible to get that single view of the customer. If you can’t get a single view of the customer when the customer calls you, before I even answer the phone to my customer, I’m already looking at their customer record. I’m already seeing, oh, look, they’ve got four help tickets outstanding. I better go quickly check on that and see what those are because that’s probably what they’re calling about. Or, maybe it’s the status of this project or this task that’s outstanding, or maybe it’s about this open opportunity. And I can see all of this in one place, and it means I can have a much more intelligent conversation with the client even to the fact that when the client calls in, that’s also integrated with my ERP system, so I already know who it is before they answer the phone.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (09:40):
And the thing is, the companies that do that and have that, the ones you call and know who you are and they’ve got all that information at their fingertips versus those companies that you interact with where you get the, “Oh, my computer is a bit slow today.” Or, “I need to log into my other system.” Or, “I need to put you through to someone.” “Oh, I need to get back to you on that.” You know the companies that have this done and the companies that don’t. My challenge to our clients is, which one are you, okay, which bucket do you currently fit in and which one do you want to be in.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (10:13):
Your experience and what you’ve seen as you’ve had clients go through this process and implementing this, how have you seen this benefit connecting the dots between the internal processes and the client experience and all of these things synchronizing together? I’d love for you to share that.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (10:30):
Yeah. And you’ve used a phrase that we use internally a lot, which is about connecting the dots. And again, this is something that we’re very big on internally and how that manifests itself with our customers and clients is really just around … This isn’t just a technical project and then we’re going to do a little bit of training and then we’re going to do a little bit of change management, and then we’ve got a help desk set up for you at the end, right? That’s completely disconnected and that’s the way most people think of these kind of projects. Whereas for us, we really think about it in terms of work streams and business processes, and those business processes span departments and different areas of the system. And what we do is we work with clients every day on improving those business processes and improving the technology and the change management that goes alongside that.
And that’s often one of the biggest reasons, in fact, for a program to fail is because of a lack of change management acknowledgment that everyone’s changing at their own pace is a very individual thing, and that often isn’t taken into account as part of these projects. These projects are very seldom a technology project, very seldom. It’s much more about business process and change management. And I’ll tell you right now, no ERP in the world is going to be able to compensate for a bad business process. It’s not going to fix your business processes. In fact, it’ll probably make it worse. You’re going to be constrained in an ERP to do it in a certain way, and if you don’t have that discipline as a team and as a company to work in that way, then it’s probably actually going to be more of a headache for you than it is going to solve stuff for you.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (12:14):
I love what you’ve described here, and one of the things that I think about is with an ERP implementation, and you made this point in the beginning of our interview here, but really oftentimes when a growing company starts exploring to implement a solution, it’s too late. They’re in the thick of the growth and now they’re trying to manage the growth while also now managing an implementation and trying to plan for systems and processes. They don’t even know what they’re going to need in the next 12 or 24 months because of the rate of growth they’re experiencing, or even 36 months.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (12:50):
Yeah. And that’s often the biggest challenge for us is that people talk to us too late. I kind of liking it to go to see the dentist. The longer you leave it, the more painful it’s going to be. You’ve got to do it, but it’s going to be painful. And we tell people that right off the bat that this is not going to be a piece of cake. This is tough stuff that you’re going to do here, some big decisions that need to be made, and there might be some tears along the way. It happens in most projects, unfortunately, because it’s stressful when you put people under that much change. And so when you think about now it’s time to think about how do I get rid of, I’ve got QuickBooks, I’ve got Salesforce, I’ve got SurveyMonkey, I’ve got this, I’ve got Constant Contact, I’ve got this, I’ve got this, I’ve got this.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (13:40):
Suddenly people have got 15, 20 different systems that working. It’s not unusual, but customer says they’ve got five, they’ve got three times that much, trust me, that they’re not thinking about. Go look at your bank statement and see how many subscriptions you’ve got to technology services. Trust me, it’s probably 15, 20 in most companies, if not more. And when you realize you’re in that position and you’re exporting data in SCSV file here, and you’ve got a Google Sheet over here and you’ve got this app that does this one great thing over there, and now nothing’s in sync and nothing’s all in the same place, and that’s what hampers growth, right? Now, you’re focused on technology and you’re not focused on products and customers. And that’s kind of the challenge for us is to get you off the technology and thinking about that and getting you back to thinking about running and growing your business.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (14:28):
Fantastic. Well, Nick, this is a great time in the show where we make a transition and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go, and the first question we ask is, have you had a miss or two in your career and something you learned from it?
Nick Foy, Silverdale (14:42):
Yeah, I think a miss in my career, I think probably early mid-career on my side, it’s probably moving on too quick because there’s a few places where I was learning a lot and doing a lot and felt like maybe I’d learned everything there and moved on too quick and then looked back and went, I could have done a lot more there. I wasn’t quite ready to move. The grass always felt greener on the other side, and that wasn’t always the case. So, I guess there’s probably a couple of those early moves that I look back on and think, “Man, that probably wasn’t the best thing to do.”
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (15:12):
Well, let’s talk about a make or two.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (15:15):
Yeah, I think certainly win the last four years here at Silverdale, some of our big wins really have been around what we call rescues. So this is where a company’s already tried to implement an ERP solution and either they haven’t managed to get it over the line or it’s failed and they’re doing it for a second or even third time. Some of our biggest wins really have been about rescuing some of those projects from literally people throwing out, in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment and being able to save face with either investors or directors or whoever it might be, right? And we’ve had some really great wins with that on making people go from a point of hating their ERP to really loving it and being excited about what’s going to be ahead of them. That for me is … I love seeing that. That’s one of the reasons why I call myself the chief evangelist, in fact, is because I just love getting people enthusiastic, in fact, about ERP, which is not an easy thing to do.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (16:12):
Absolutely. I totally understand that. Let’s talk about a multiplier you’ve used to grow yourself or your businesses.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (16:20):
That’s a great question. Really, the thing that helps us to multiply our business is really the four things I said earlier. I said them pretty quick in a Scottish accent, but I’ll say them a little bit slower, and that’s making sure that everything we do is repeatable, predictable, understandable, and scalable. If it doesn’t meet those four criteria, then it doesn’t work. And we’ve got to rethink it and coming up with how does this work at scale? How does this work when we have to do it 50 times, a hundred times? Our project templates, our documentation, our knowledge management really helps us to be really consistent and predictable in what we do, and that’s really allowing us to achieve our mission of democratizing ERP because it takes us less time, it’s less risk, and it costs less. It’s simple as that, because this is not our first rodeo, and that I think was a big revelation for us, every project is not unique. I’m sorry to all the people out there who think they’re really that unique, you’re really not. Trust me, 80% of what you do is the same as the business next door.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:21):
And as a professional services provider, it’s no different than a CPA for filing taxes well. Every business has its own uniqueness to it, and every industry has its own little variables to it, for the most part, it’s going to be a similar process and structure similar, I’m sure to what you see. And even in our business in helping companies franchise your business, every business has its own unique factors, but there is a proven methodology and a process you take people through.
Nick Foy, Silverdale (17:48):
We all buy stuff, we all sell stuff, we all pay vendors, we all create invoices. We want a P&L on a balance sheet. Guess what? So does everybody, right? And this is what we really focus people on and say, don’t focus on that stuff because that stuff doesn’t matter at the end of the day, right? Just do it the way the system does it, okay? Don’t worry about it, just do it that way, okay? What to get focused on is that 20% that makes you you, what is that stuff that makes you unique in your business and stands you out from your competition? That’s where you want to spend your money, not implementing an ERP, right? Trust me, that’s not a good investment.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (18:24):
Great advice there. Absolutely. Well, Nick, the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
Nick Foy, Silverdale (18:31):
The reason why I started Silverdale really was about creating a legacy. I could easily have done what I’m doing today as an independent consultant on my own and just going help one or two businesses and doing all that on a one-to-one basis. That could have been a path I took and quite frankly would have been an easier one than what we’ve done for the last four years. But actually, this is about legacy for me. And what’s great for me is actually seeing people grow within the company and really seeing them using the tools we have, and a lot of people coming into our company and new starters who say, “Wow, you guys are really doing it so different to everybody else in the industry.” That for me, tells me we’re on the right track.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (19:09):
Excellent. Well, Nick, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or maybe get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Nick Foy, Silverdale (19:16):
Yeah, so I just encourage people to explore our website, which is silverdaletech.com. And especially go and explore some of our blog sections on there, look at some of our customer success stories, but also look at some of the way that we work as well and how it’s very different. So, if you’re in the middle of an ERP project or you’re thinking about it or you need rescuing, come take a look and come see what makes us different from everybody else. Don’t judge us by the same yardstick as everybody else, but not the same.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (19:46):
Nick, thank you so much for a great interview and let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when he just described what ERP stands for, and that stands for Enterprise resource planning, which is just an integrated resource of business tools to help you accomplish your business goals and objectives. Takeaway number two is when Nick asked about which bucket you and your organization fall into, and the first category was that you have systems and processes in place where it’s very easy for you to access all of your client data, internal document, customer information, almost at the click of a button.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (20:26):
Or, bucket two, where it might take several hours, or several days, and several people to be involved and many different systems to pull data, gather it and sync it all up together. And if you are in bucket two, ERP very well may be a good next step or something for you to consider to make that more easily accessible. Takeaway number three is when Nick said that the four things that he likes to make sure that they do with all of their clients and everything that they do at their organization is, number one, make sure it’s repeatable. Number two, that it’s predictable. Three, understandable, and four scalable. So he likes his things to be repeatable, predictable, understandable, and scalable, working with their clients in internal processes.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (21:12):
And now it’s time for today’s win-win. So today’s win-win is when Nick said that no ERP is going to fix a bad business process. I thought that was just a great little nugget and takeaway, and I think that’s a great thing for you to leave this interview with is that sometimes it’s easy to get caught up as the leader of an organization. And I know it is easy for me to do so, and I’ve done this many times over where I think getting some new technology, or some new system or tool in place is going to magically solve all of these problems that I have. And very often it does not. There’s just an inherent issue with a process, or a system internally that actually needs to get resolved. And the new system, this new technology only complicates things. So, I think that’s a great win for your organization, staff, customers, and those that you interface with.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (22:14):
And so that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you, or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business, or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
